Pet Product Design: How Scratch Square Was Designed and Made

Pet product design is industrial design under animal load: the product is used by an animal that chews, claws and drools on it, bought by a human who cares about looks and price, and sold at a retail price that leaves very little room in the bill of materials. The design work is mostly about surviving all three at once. The clearest way to show what that means is to walk through one product we designed and took to production.

De'Vora, a pet products company, came to us with Scratch Square - a multi-functional toy that combines a treat dispenser with abrasive surfaces, so a dog naturally files its own nails while playing with it. The concept was sound and the client had a clear picture of the product. What they needed was to get it made: a design that could be moulded and assembled at a price that worked, and tooling that a first-time brand could afford.

Scratch Square went on to become a bestseller, sold through Amazon, Chewy, QVC, Walmart and Tractor Supply, and the line has since expanded into different sizes, replacement pads and a cat version.

Scratch Square is made of several components - a rubber enclosure and internals. The rubber part had a complex shape of the kind that would normally be split into several separate pieces, or made in one piece with an expensive multi-action mould. Either route adds cost: more parts means more assembly, and a complicated tool means a bigger cheque before the first unit is sold.

The real obstacle was buried inside the geometry. The main cavity that forms the internal compartments needs an inner core, and that core has to come out after moulding. On Scratch Square, the side handles blocked access from the sides, so the obvious removal directions were unavailable. A part you cannot get out of the tool is not a manufacturable part, no matter how well it performs.

That last point is the one worth repeating. The saving did not come from re-quoting the supplier. It came from changing the part so that a simpler tool could make it. Unit cost and tooling cost are decided in CAD, not in negotiation.

Optimising the design for manufacturing and assembly and simplifying the moulds let De'Vora produce the first batch of Scratch Square with minimum upfront investment. That meant they could launch on a budget and test the market quickly, with the risk kept small - which is exactly what a new pet brand needs before it commits to volume. The market answered: the product is now stocked by the major pet retailers and has grown into a product line.

A pet product has two users with opposite interests. The animal chews, drags, claws and swallows; the owner buys, cleans, stores and replaces it. Almost every design failure we see in this category comes from optimising for the buyer and forgetting the animal, or from making something the animal loves that no owner would put in a living room.

Ranges below are what a moulded consumer pet product of this complexity usually takes, assuming one part family and no electronics. They are planning figures, not a quote - the honest driver of the total is how many times the geometry changes after tooling is cut.

The moulder you pick shapes the design as much as the designer does. Pet products sit awkwardly between toys and housewares, so a factory that has only made one of those will apply the wrong instincts - toy factories over-engineer safety features that add cost, housewares factories under-estimate chew loads. Ask for parts they have made in the same material and the same wall thickness, not a general catalogue.

Budget damage in this category is rarely one large mistake. It is a sequence of small deferrals, each of which looks reasonable at the time and each of which lands on the tooling invoice. The table sets out the ones we see most often and what each costs to fix at the point it is normally discovered.

Founders funding a first product themselves do not need to commit the whole programme at once. Phasing it into three fundable chunks keeps the option to stop cheaply, and each chunk produces something you can show to an investor or a retailer.

The design work does not end at the first production run. Pet products generate unusually honest feedback - the animal either uses it or ignores it - and the first six months of returns, reviews and replacement requests tell you exactly which decision to revisit in version two. Set up the measurement before launch, because retrospective data is guesswork.

Pet owners increasingly read the material claim, and most of the meaningful improvements in this category cost little if they are decided early. Recycled content in the packaging, a single-polymer product that can actually be recycled, and a replaceable wear part instead of a disposable product are all easier to design in than to retrofit. Claims must be evidenced by supplier documentation - unsupported wording is a legal risk, not a marketing benefit.

Most of the friction in a first tooling conversation is vocabulary. These are the words that come up in every DFM review of a moulded pet product, in plain language.

The sequence below is the shortest honest route from an idea to something you can sell, and it is the order we would run it in. Each step produces a decision, not a document.

If you would rather not run that alone, our discovery and prototype engagement covers the first four steps, and the prototype cost calculator gives a figure for your own specification in a couple of minutes.

A printed and finished appearance prototype is usually $300 - $1,500 for a single part; a functional version in a representative material, made by casting or machining, runs $800 - $4,000. The variables are size, finish and how many iterations you build before you are satisfied - the material itself is rarely the expensive part.

Yes, and it is a sensible way to control cost if you have a clear form idea. What you are buying is the production-intent engineering: wall sections, draft, part breakdown, material specification and the drawing package a factory can quote. Bring your concept as sketches or a rough model plus the constraints you know, and expect the geometry to change once manufacturing reality is applied to it.

Design patents on the visual form, utility protection on any genuine mechanism, and a registered trademark on the brand are the three legal layers, and none of them stops a determined copyist alone. The practical defences are commercial: own your tool, hold the supplier relationship, keep improving the product, and build a brand customers ask for by name. Start with a prior art search so you know what is already claimed.

Direct first, in most cases. It gives you margin, customer contact and honest early feedback at a volume you can actually supply, and it produces the review count and sell-through data that retail buyers ask for anyway. Retail is the right second step once the product is proven, because it demands packaging, case packs, lead times and terms that are expensive to get wrong on a first version.

For a first few hundred units, yes. Cast urethane and silicone parts, CNC-machined components and sewn or extruded constructions all reach a small market without a steel tool. They cost more per unit and finish less consistently, but they let you sell, gather reviews and prove demand before spending on a mould - see low-volume manufacturing for how those runs work.

Pet products are not regulated as strictly as children's products in the US, which does not mean the risk is lower - it shifts liability onto you.

Retailers usually impose their own requirements, and the practical baseline is food-contact grade materials with supplier documentation, no small detachable parts, and a documented reason for every material choice.

Confirm the specific requirements with your intended retailer before tooling, because their list is the one that decides whether you can sell.

There is no single answer, but the shortlist is narrow: reinforced nylon and TPE for durability with some give, food-contact grade polypropylene for rigid low-cost parts, and platinum-cure silicone where softness matters.

What decides it is the failure mode you are designing against - abrasion, tearing or cracking each favour a different family. Confirm the grade with your moulder before the geometry is frozen, because wall thickness has to be tuned to the material.

Three rounds is typical: one to check size and form in the hand and the home, one for the animal to actually use, and one made in a material close to production so the failure mode is realistic. Printed parts flatter a design - they are stiffer and rougher than moulded ones - so the last round should be cast or machined in something representative.

Nine to fifteen months is realistic from first sketch to product on a retail shelf. Design and engineering take three to five months, tooling six to twelve weeks after the geometry is frozen, and the retail side - packaging, certifications, listings and purchase orders - usually adds another quarter that founders forget to plan for. See how long prototyping takes for the earlier part of that timeline.

You need to know the landscape before spending on tooling, which is not the same as holding a granted patent. A prior art search early tells you whether the mechanism is already owned. A design patent on the finished form is usually filed once the industrial design is settled, because the drawings have to match what you sell.

Design and engineering for a moulded pet product typically runs in the low tens of thousands of dollars, with tooling as a separate line item that depends heavily on how complex the mould has to be. Simplifying the part is usually the cheapest way to lower the tooling bill, because tool cost tracks the number of actions and the difficulty of releasing the part.

Tooling complexity. Undercuts, side actions and blocked cores add tool cost and cycle time, and they are usually avoidable if manufacturability is reviewed while the geometry is still editable. On Scratch Square the whole saving came from making the mould simpler rather than negotiating a lower quote.

Not before design, but search prior art early so you do not engineer around a feature you cannot own. Many pet products are protected by design patents covering the form rather than utility patents covering the function, so the shape you settle on has commercial consequences.

Often yes, if the part is designed for a simple tool. Scratch Square launched with minimum upfront investment because the mould was simplified before it was cut, which let the brand test the market first and buy capacity later once demand was proven.

See the full project write-up in the Scratch Square case study, or read how an automated interactive pet toy was developed. If you have a pet product at the sketch or prototype stage, our product design and prototyping teams can tell you what it will take to make it - and you can get a first number from the prototype cost calculator.