Ten Years of JettaJacks
Dogs, Ideas & ‘There Has to Be a Better Way’
CHAPTER ONE
2016: WHERE IT REALLY STARTED
Ten years ago this month, we packed up everything we had and headed to Toronto.
In September 2016, JettaJacks officially launched at the Fall Canadian Pet Expo at The International Centre. We arrived with a booth we had built ourselves, our patent-pending orthopaedic dog beds, some of our very early webbing products and, looking back now, probably considerably more confidence than experience.
Those pictures make me smile today. There was my mother helping build the booth with a drill in one hand, products spread everywhere, signs being put together and all of us trying to make this little company look like we knew exactly what we were doing.
We didn’t…We were learning.
The Jackson Bed Sleep System was really at the heart of JettaJacks in those early days. We wanted to build an orthopaedic dog bed differently, manufacture it here in Canada and use materials that would provide proper support and comfort for the dogs sleeping on it. We even had a patent pending on the design.
At the same time, something else was beginning to happen. Hanging around that original booth were some of our first collars, leashes, slip leads and early webbing products. They looked considerably different from what we make today, but the beginnings of another side of JettaJacks were already there.
One of my favourite memories from that first year came from a very special dog named Duke.
Duke was there for the unveiling of one of our beds, and thankfully someone had a camera nearby to document the entire inspection. He investigated the enormous box, watched everything coming out and eventually climbed onto the finished bed. Apparently it met with his approval.
But Duke’s story with JettaJacks didn’t end with that bed.
His owner was the owner of Rehab Fur Your Pet, a pet rehabilitation clinic in Ottawa. That first bed eventually led to the clinic purchasing flat beds that we manufactured for each of their rooms. AND, I saw a recent picture and there it was, still in use!
Looking back now, I think that relationship represented something we didn’t completely understand about JettaJacks yet. Here was a business working every day with dogs needing rehabilitation, support and care, trusting this very young company in St. Thomas to make something for the dogs coming through their doors.
It also reinforced something that would become increasingly important to us over the next ten years. Listen to the people living and working with these dogs, understand what they need and then see if we can make something that helps. Some of those early ideas worked. Others changed considerably, and a few eventually disappeared altogether. We were still figuring out what JettaJacks was going to become, and I certainly couldn’t have told you in 2016 what our product line would look like ten years later.
There is one thing, though, that apparently we already understood. Buried in our original 2016 catalogue was a sentence that said:
“If we can do a little better for our dogs (and your dogs), then why shouldn’t we?”
Ten years later, after all the products, prototypes, dogs, mistakes, changes and lessons along the way, I’m not sure I could explain JettaJacks much better than we did right there at the beginning.
We just didn’t know yet where that idea was going to take us.
CHAPTER TWO
2018: WE BROUGHT IT HOME
By 2018, JettaJacks had been around for a couple of years. We had products, customers and retailers, and we were learning more about manufacturing every day. There was just one fairly important part of the process that we didn’t control.
We weren’t actually making our own products.
Our manufacturing was being handled by an outside local source, and although that had allowed us to get JettaJacks started, I was beginning to realize that if we wanted to grow and continue developing our own products, something needed to change.
So in 2018, we brought manufacturing home.
We purchased our own equipment, hired employees and started manufacturing JettaJacks products ourselves. At the time, it was a pretty substantial commitment for a company that was only two years old, but looking back ten years later, I can say without hesitation that it was one of the best decisions I ever made for JettaJacks. Initially, there were some very obvious advantages. Bringing production in-house lowered our manufacturing costs and overhead, giving us the opportunity to pass some of those savings along to our retailers and customers.
But it didn’t take long to discover that the biggest advantage wasn’t necessarily the money…It was control.
For the first time, we could control the quality of a JettaJacks product at the exact moment it was being made. If something wasn’t quite right, we didn’t have to discover it after a production run was finished. We could stop, look at it, change it and then make it better.
It also completely changed the way we could develop products. An idea didn’t have to leave the building and come back as a finished sample before we could decide whether it worked. We could make something, put it on a dog, look at it, change a strap, move a piece of hardware and try it again.
Sometimes several times. Okay…sometimes considerably more than several times.
Something else happened that I don’t think I fully anticipated when we made the decision to manufacture ourselves. Local customers started bringing us problems that couldn’t always be solved by taking another size off the shelf. A dog might fall somewhere between sizes. Another might need a strap shortened or lengthened. Something might need repairing, replacing or changing because that particular dog simply wasn’t built like the dog on the sizing chart.
Now we could do something about it. Instead of saying, “Sorry, that’s the closest size we have,” we could say something that became pretty common around JettaJacks:
“Bring the dog in. Let’s have a look.”
We started making adjustments, doing repairs and occasionally producing one-off pieces specifically for the dog standing in front of us. That became part of who JettaJacks was locally, and ten years later, it still is.
Looking back, I think bringing manufacturing in-house changed much more than where our products were made. It changed how we thought about them. We weren’t simply ordering products we’d designed anymore. We were making them, handling every component and seeing firsthand what worked, what didn’t and what we thought could be better.
And once you have the equipment sitting there and the ability to make almost anything you can dream up, something rather predictable happens.
You start experimenting. A lot. Some of those experiments would eventually become products that helped define JettaJacks.
Others…well…
We made dog jackets.
CHAPTER THREE
2019–2020: FIGURING OUT WHO WE WERE
Once we brought manufacturing in-house, something happened that probably should have been predictable. We now had the ability to manufacture our own ideas, and apparently nobody was around to tell us to stop.
By 2019, we had the equipment, the people and, perhaps most dangerously, the ability to take an idea and actually turn it into something. We were no longer limited to drawing something on paper and sending it somewhere else to be made. If we had an idea in the morning, there was a pretty good chance we could have some version of it sitting on the table later that day.
Somewhere in all of that experimenting, one of the most important products in JettaJacks’ future was beginning to take shape: the Fluid Motion Harness. Looking at photographs from the end of 2018, you can already recognize the beginnings of the Fluid we make today, although the materials, hardware and construction were still evolving considerably.
At the time, we were also using webbing made from recycled plastic water bottles. Sustainability was something we wanted to explore, and for a period it was feasible for us to incorporate that material into our products. Like so many things at JettaJacks, though, nothing was considered finished simply because we had figured out how to make it.
We kept experimenting, and we certainly didn’t limit ourselves to harnesses, collars and leashes. By the fall of 2020, apparently somebody at JettaJacks looked at our sewing machines, looked at a dog and decided that what we really needed to make next was dog jackets. P.S. That was me!
So…we made dog jackets.
We developed and produced our own line of fall and winter jackets, manufactured them here and added them to a product line that was still trying to figure out exactly what it wanted to be when it grew up. Looking back at those jackets today makes me smile, but I don’t consider them a mistake at all.
The jackets, and many of the other things we experimented with over the years, were part of learning what JettaJacks was going to become. Having our own manufacturing meant we could explore an idea, build it, put it into the real world and then decide whether it actually belonged in our future. That process taught us something important. Just because we could make something didn’t necessarily mean we should continue making it. Every new product required materials, inventory, manufacturing time and space, and every additional choice made JettaJacks a little more complicated.
Some ideas earned their place and others didn’t. Occasionally, one of the most valuable things a product taught us was that we didn’t need to make it anymore.
Through all of that experimenting, though, the Fluid kept evolving. The jackets eventually disappeared, materials changed, hardware changed and other ideas would come and go, but the basic idea behind that harness stayed with us.
We certainly weren’t finished messing with it.
In fact, a couple of years later we would build a version where we apparently decided that what the Fluid Motion Harness really needed was…more harness. Looking at the photographs today, I’m still not entirely sure what problem we thought that extra piece was going to solve, but that’s exactly what prototypes are for.
And then, in 2021, a certain Treeing Walker Coonhound arrived on the scene. Her name was Jackie, she was very much a people person, had absolutely no idea where personal boundaries were supposed to be, and she was about to give JettaJacks an entirely new list of things to think about.
CHAPTER FOUR
2021: THEN JACKIE ARRIVED
By 2021, the world had become a very different place. COVID was in full swing, businesses were trying to figure out how the hell to operate, people were spending considerably more time at home, and I think most of us were wondering what the hell had happened to normal life.
For JettaJacks, though, that strange period gave us something we hadn’t always had enough of: time. We had more opportunities to talk with customers, listen to the problems they were having with their dogs and really think about what they were telling us.
Until then, a lot of our product development had naturally revolved around our own dogs. If Jetta or Jackson needed something, we’d start playing around with ideas and see what we could come up with. But increasingly, it wasn’t just about our dogs anymore. Customers were telling us what wasn’t working for theirs, and we were beginning to understand that some of the best product ideas weren’t necessarily going to come from inside JettaJacks.
Then Jackie arrived. Oh Lord!
Jackie came into my life in April 2021, and it didn’t take particularly long to figure out that she was going to be…involved.
She was an incredibly social dog and absolutely loved people. Personal boundaries, however, were apparently something she considered more of a suggestion than an actual rule. Our friend Scott discovered that fairly quickly, and her first visit to Dr. Mandy’s office went pretty much the same way. Jackie didn’t really meet people. She moved in.
She also brought with her a body shape that gave the guy (again, me.) who manufactures dog harnesses something new to stare at. Jackie was a Treeing Walker Coonhound, long through the body and built differently from the dogs I’d been accustomed to fitting. Naturally, rather than simply accepting this, I started messing around with the Fluid.
One of those experiments involved adding a detachable rear band that wrapped farther around her lower body. There was an additional strap, more hardware and another buckle, because apparently at that particular moment in my design career I had decided that what a harness really needed was more harness.
What exactly was that extra band supposed to accomplish? Ten years later…I haven’t got a clue. It seemed important at the time.
Thankfully, it remained a prototype, but that’s the point of making prototypes. Sometimes they show you exactly what a product needs, and other times you stand over them a couple of years later scratching your head and wondering what on earth you were thinking.
Around that same period, we also experimented with personalized engraved name plates for our collars. It was another one of those ideas that sounded fantastic until we actually had to make the whole thing work for customers.
Suddenly, buying a collar wasn’t just choosing a colour and size. We had engraving information to collect, personalized pieces to produce and another layer of complexity added to what should have been a simple shopping experience. After giving it a try, we decided it wasn’t making life easier for our customers, so out it went.
But there was another experiment happening in 2021 that was very different.
Walking Jackie could be a challenge. Before we started working on what would become the Ultimate Head Harness, there were times when I was essentially holding onto her leash with both hands. Anyone who has lived with a hound when their nose has decided where they’re going will probably understand the situation.
We began working on a different kind of head harness, and eventually we had our first working prototype. Jackie became one of the first dogs to wear it, with Jetta alongside her during those early walks.
The difference for me was immediate. I went from managing Jackie with both hands to being able to walk her on a loose leash, and when I needed to redirect her, sometimes the movement of my hand was only a few inches.
For me, it was a game changer. What happened next, though, was more important.
Other people started trying it.
We began hearing from customers who were struggling with their own dogs on walks, and some were experiencing the same kind of difference I had experienced with Jackie. Suddenly, this wasn’t just something I’d made because my own dog was driving me nuts on the end of a leash. We had developed something that was helping other people enjoy walking their dogs again.
I think that period changed the way I looked at product development.
JettaJacks had always been about our dogs, and it always will be. But somewhere around this time, it became much more about your dogs too. Instead of deciding what we thought people needed, we were listening to what they were actually telling us they needed.
That might sound like a small distinction. It wasn’t.
Somewhere in the middle of COVID, prototypes spread across the shop, customers telling us their stories and Jackie apparently assuming several unpaid management positions, JettaJacks was beginning to understand exactly what kind of company I wanted it to be.
Make things that solve real problems. Keep the things that work. Change the things that don’t.
And every once in a while, look at something you’ve made and have the good sense to say, “Todd…what the hell were you thinking?”
Jackie, meanwhile, had found another position within the company.
Health & Safety Officer.
Her qualifications were questionable, but her attendance was excellent.
CHAPTER FIVE
2022–2023: GROWING UP… SORT OF
By the time we reached 2022 and 2023, JettaJacks had changed considerably from that little company that showed up at the Canadian Pet Expo in 2016 with orthopaedic dog beds and a collection of early ideas.
We had been manufacturing in-house for several years, the Fluid Motion Harness had continued to evolve, and we had a much better understanding of the products we wanted to build. More importantly, we had years of customers, dogs, fittings, repairs and prototypes behind us telling us where things could still be improved.
I had also learned that sometimes a relatively small change to a product could make a surprisingly big difference.
Early in 2023, we made some of the most significant hardware and material changes we’d made to our webbing products in years. We looked at components we’d been using for a long time and started asking whether we were still using them because they were the best choice, or simply because that’s what we’d always used.
That question led to changes throughout the line.
The hardware on our harnesses evolved, including the triangle connectors that had been part of the Fluid for years. Leash hardware changed too, and our products began taking on a cleaner, more refined appearance. When I put photographs of the earlier Fluid beside the 2023 version today, I can still see the same harness underneath, but I can also see everything we’d learned along the way.
That’s one of the things I’ve always liked about making our products ourselves. We don’t have to decide that something is finished forever just because we’re selling it. If we find a better component, a better way of assembling something or a change that makes sense for the dog or the person using it, we can make that change.
Sometimes the ideas come from much bigger problems. One of those involved travelling with dogs.
In 2023, we introduced our own vehicle restraint system. I had never particularly liked the idea of attaching a dog’s restraint directly into the regular seat-belt buckle, especially when the release button was sitting right there where a dog’s paw could step on it.
There was also the problem of having restraint straps down around the dog’s body and legs. The more I looked at it, the more I thought there had to be another way of doing it.
So we used something that was already built into the vehicle.
Our restraint connected to the anchorage system used for child car seats and came over the top of the vehicle seat. That moved the restraint away from the seat-belt release and kept the strap up and away from the dog’s legs rather than lying around underneath them.
There was one rule that came with it: the restraint is designed to be used with a body harness, never attached to a dog’s collar.
It was another one of those products that came from looking at something we were already doing with our own dogs and asking a question that has probably caused me more trouble over the last ten years than anything else:
“Why are we doing it this way?” Because once I start asking that question, there’s usually a prototype coming.
Of course, lest anyone think that by 2023 I had finally become completely focused and disciplined about product development, I should probably mention the soap.
Yes…soap.
Somewhere between redesigning hardware, making harnesses, filling retailer orders and apparently having too much time to think, I decided we should investigate charcoal soap for dogs.
And we didn’t just throw some soap into a JettaJacks box and call it a day. We actually worked with a local company that developed a charcoal soap formula for us. We had it produced, ordered more, tested it and genuinely explored whether it had a place in the JettaJacks product line.
After a couple of orders and some testing, we came to a fairly simple conclusion. It didn’t.
There wasn’t necessarily anything wrong with the soap. We simply couldn’t see it being part of where we wanted JettaJacks to go, so we stopped.
That might sound like another product that failed, but I don’t really look at it that way. By this point we’d learned that trying something doesn’t mean you’re obligated to keep doing it forever. Sometimes knowing what not to make is every bit as useful as knowing what to make.
Although somewhere out there, there may still be a bar of JettaJacks charcoal dog soap proving that, for at least a brief period in our history, nobody was supervising me.
Meanwhile, the actual business kept moving.
Retailer orders were leaving the shop, products were being manufactured and boxes were being packed for stores around Ontario. I have photographs from 2023 of us packing an order headed to one of our Toronto retailers. Naturally, Jackie is in almost every photograph.
She’s standing beside the products, inspecting boxes, wandering through the packing area and generally behaving as though none of this could possibly be accomplished without her direct involvement. By then, I think that was just JettaJacks.
Dogs weren’t something we added to photographs after the work was finished. They were wandering through the shop while we were doing it. They tested, interrupted photographs, supervised packing and occasionally became the reason a new product existed in the first place.
Seven years after we started, JettaJacks was becoming much clearer about what it wanted to be. We weren’t trying to make everything anymore. We’d tried that. We wanted to make products we understood, solve problems we actually encountered and keep improving the things that had earned their place.
We’d grown up a little. Not completely, obviously.
We made charcoal soap.
CHAPTER SIX
2026: TEN YEARS LATER
I don’t think I realized quite what I was getting myself into when we packed everything up and headed to Toronto in September 2016.
At the time, I was mostly concerned with getting the booth built, making sure the products arrived, getting the signs hung straight and somehow convincing people walking past us at the Canadian Pet Expo that they should stop and have a look at this little company called JettaJacks. I certainly wasn’t thinking about what it might look like ten years later.
Now, sitting here in 2026 and going through all of these old photographs, there are moments when I hardly recognize the company. The products are different, the hardware is different, the packaging has changed, the website has changed more times than I care to remember, and thankfully some of my early design decisions have quietly disappeared into history.
There are also products in these photographs that I’d completely forgotten we made. Yes, I’m looking at you, charcoal soap.
But underneath all of those changes, I can still see the same little company. We still manufacture our products here. We still make things ourselves, and we still have the ability to stop in the middle of making something and say, “Hang on…I think we can do this better.”
Customers still bring dogs through the door that don’t quite fit the sizing chart. We still shorten straps, lengthen things, repair gear and occasionally make something completely different because the dog standing in front of us didn’t read the instructions about what shape a dog is supposed to be.
I think that’s probably one of the things I’m proudest of. JettaJacks never became a company where the answer had to be, “That’s what we make, take it or leave it.” Having our own manufacturing gave us the ability to listen, change things and sometimes make one single piece of something for one single dog.
Financially, I’m fairly certain there are easier ways to run a business. But that’s never really been the point.
Over these ten years, thousands of pieces of JettaJacks gear have left this little company in St. Thomas. They’ve gone to retailers, customers and dogs we’ve never met, and others have gone home with dogs that stood right here while we adjusted something specifically for them.
Some of those dogs became part of our story, and of course, there were the dogs who were already part of mine. Jetta and Jackson were there at the beginning, right down to giving the company its name. Jackie arrived later and immediately made herself an employee without ever filling out an application. Along the way, they wore prototypes, tested ideas, appeared in photographs and, quite often, were the reason I started trying to solve a problem in the first place.
There have also been people behind all of this, and JettaJacks certainly didn’t get through ten years because of me alone.
My mother has been the biggest supporter of this entire adventure from the beginning. She’s been there through the ideas, the good decisions, the questionable ones and pretty much everything in between. The photograph from our very first show in 2016 of her standing in the booth with a cordless drill in her hand helping us build the whole thing, and I can’t think of a better picture to represent just how much she has been behind JettaJacks from the start.
Something else that has been incredibly important over the years has been the people I’ve been fortunate enough to know outside of JettaJacks. I have relationships with professionals working in different areas of pet health, wellness and care, and I’ve relied on their experience when we’ve considered changes to existing products or started playing around with something completely new.
Product development has never simply been me sitting at a workbench deciding what I think is best for a dog. Ideas get talked about, questioned, pulled apart and looked at from different perspectives. Sometimes that input confirms we’re headed in the right direction, and sometimes somebody points out something I hadn’t considered at all.
Tina has probably been one of the most influential people in that group.
She is about as close to a sister as you can get without actually being related. After years working as a veterinary technician and veterinary clinic manager, and now working with Gateway Pet Memorial as their training manager for North America, she has brought a completely different perspective to what we’ve developed at JettaJacks.
Over the years, pretty much every product we’ve developed has passed through Tina’s hands at some point. I’d show up with an idea, a prototype or some adjustment I was considering, and sometimes I’d get the nod of approval. Other times I’d get a very definite shake of the head. I took all of her advice under careful consideration. What I actually did with it afterwards is a different matter.
But that’s exactly why people like Tina have mattered. I don’t need somebody standing beside me telling me every idea is brilliant. I need people willing to question it, point out something I’ve missed and occasionally tell me that whatever I’ve just created needs to go straight back to the workbench.
JettaJacks products may be manufactured here, but the ideas behind them have been influenced by a much larger circle of people. Professionals in pet care and wellness have shared their knowledge, employees have sat behind our machines and found better ways of making things, retailers have told us what they’re hearing from customers, and customers themselves have brought us problems we never would have encountered with our own dogs.
All of those people have left a little something behind in JettaJacks.
Retailers took a chance on a small Canadian company, and customers trusted us enough to put something we made onto dogs they love. Friends and family have listened to ideas, helped when we needed it and, occasionally, had the good sense to tell me when one of those ideas was completely ridiculous.
That’s something I don’t ever want to take for granted.
Not everything over these ten years has gone according to plan. We’ve made products that disappeared, tried ideas that didn’t work, and remember the soap! Dealt with costs going up, materials becoming difficult to find and all the other things that come with keeping a small manufacturing business alive.
There have definitely been times when I’ve wondered what the hell I was doing. There have probably been considerably more times when everyone around me wondered what the hell I was doing.
But somehow, here we are. Ten years.
The funny thing is, after going through all of these photographs and remembering the things we made, the things we stopped making and the dogs and people who were part of it, I keep coming back to something we wrote before any of this had happened.
It was buried in our original 2016 catalogue: “If we can do a little better for our dogs (and your dogs), then why shouldn’t we?” At the time, it was simply a sentence that helped explain why we had started JettaJacks. Ten years later, I think it explains why we’re still here.
We’re still making things. We’re still changing things. We’re still listening to customers, looking at dogs and occasionally standing over a workbench thinking, “There has to be a better way to do this.”
And apparently, after ten years, nobody has figured out how to stop me. So I suppose we’ll keep going.
To everyone who has bought something, sold something, recommended us to a friend, brought a dog through our door, sent us a photograph, told us what wasn’t working, trusted one of our crazy ideas or simply followed along over the years, thank you.
You became part of this little company too.
Ten years ago, I had absolutely no idea where JettaJacks was going. I’m still not entirely sure I do. But maybe that’s part of the fun.
2016–2026
TEN YEARS OF JETTAJACKS Still figuring out better ways to do it.
And apparently still unsupervised.
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