Stitching together the story behind a new dog bed company
According to his family, David Prince, an avid outdoorsman, wasn’t crafty until recently. Sitting at a sewing machine was the last thing they expected him to do, but learning to sew was only one of many hurdles he overcame when starting his new dog bed company, Truman + Teddy.
David is known for his tenacity. When his wife, Jamie, asked what he wanted to do for his 40th birthday, she thought he’d wish for a party or a trip. Instead, David said he wanted to run the New York Marathon. He hadn’t run in 20 years.
“People would say they were doing the couch to 5K, and I’d say David was doing the couch to marathon,” Jamie recalls. “He just decided one day he was going to do it, and he did it.” Fifty thousand people descend on New York each year to run the largest marathon in the world, and David placed high enough to be listed in the New York Times, which includes the top 35,000 runners who cross the finish line.
David says he learned a lot about himself while training for the endurance race. “You learn from days that don’t go well to keep going and stay on track.” He applied that same mentality to Truman + Teddy.
“The guy who sold me a sewing machine said, ‘Maybe you need to hire someone to do this for you.’ I said, ‘No, I’m going to do this,’” David says. His first go with a sewing machine was intimidating, but he didn’t let that stop him. Through trial and error, he mastered the process and even traveled to St. Louis to learn about large-scale screen printing.
The idea for the dog beds came to David during the COVID shutdown. He made a ballet bar for his daughter and used the leftover materials to make a bed for his dog, Maggie, who had just turned 14. She needed a place to sit, look out the window, and bark at people who walked down their street. When his college buddy saw the handmade bed, he asked David to make another one.
“Truman + Teddy is an example of boredom becoming a business,” says Jamie. “The pace of our lives is so chaotic. You don’t realize at what a high gear you operate until we are forced to slow down,” she adds. “Creative energy comes out when you are bored.”
A new Breed of Dog Beds
David wanted to name the company after their dogs, Truman and Teddy. Truman was a hospice foster from South Eastern German Pointer Rescue who had cancer. “We had to explain to the kids that it was going to end sadly. We took him in and gave him the best summer of his life. He died a few days after Labor Day that year,” says David. Later, the company’s second namesake, a Brussels Griffon named Teddy, came along.
David recently left his job as chief operations officer at Jamie’s public relations company, Flourish, to give Truman + Teddy a real go. “There’s a Winston Churchill quote: ‘Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.’ There have been some hard days. I would just go to bed, get up, and get back at it again.”
The whole family helps with the business. The dogs even go to the workshop each day. The next step for the business is the Global Pet Expo in Florida. Buyers come from 80 different countries, and the Truman + Teddy team is aiming for global success. “I had a desire to have my own business, a vision to make something that brought people joy,” says David.
Truman + Teddy’s raised dog beds, made of PVC pipe and non-allergenic fabric, come in two sizes. The most popular bed is the palmetto flag print, but there are 40 color options. The beds provide a comfortable, cool spot for pets of all ages and are easy to clean, weather resistant, and portable. Visit trumanandteddy.com for more information.
