Our Story

Hello & Woofs!

elcome again to Ollie's Pet Boutique! We pride ourselves on being an Irish based pet business that believes in being fun, unique & quirky. We work alongside our pet services business, Ollie’s Petcare which provides dog walking, pet sitting & home boarding to all Dublin & Meath based pets! We aren't a big corporation or franchise, we are owned and operated daily by Jonathan and Thomas - both ‘a little bit crazy’ pet owners and the proud fur-parents of our business’ inspiration and namesake - Ollie the unique and individual miniature dachshund! We've also added two furry additions to the family over the years, in the form of two sisters for Ollie – Penny & Charlie – both cheeky little sausage dogs!

How did it all begin?

Our venture into the pet care world started back in 2010 when Jonathan was unexpectedly made redundant from a ten year career in the customer services industry. He took this opportunity to start a new chapter in his life. With free time abundant and the desire for a number of years, a new member joined our family - Ollie the black & tan miniature dachshund.

Both Jonathan & Thomas had many family furiends growing up over the years; from dogs, cats & guinea pigs to mice, birds and rabbits. So they knew what they were taking on but even with the best of plans, Ollie came into Jonathan & Thomas' lives like a whirlwind. But more importantly he also highlighted something to them - the lack of pet care services available for dog owners in the Dublin city centre area.

After struggling to find services for Ollie, Jonathan began talking to dog trainers & some existing Petcare businesses in the local area. After gathering up all the information needed, Jonathan set up his business - Ollie's Petcare. Providing the greater Dublin City area with dog walking, pet sitting, home boarding & pet taxi services with a fun professional outlook, backed up with 10 years of customer services expertise! It was a great success and both Ollie & Jonathan met many new pooch pals over the coming years!

Over the next number of years little Penny joined the gang. With two sausage dogs running around, Jonathan & Thomas found themselves very busy & discovering a lot of pet products, from dog toys to treats to accessories – all with varying success with the wieners! Some of the more successful products were recommended to our pet care clients by word of mouth. ctly It was not always easy for our clients to find these products, so to help with this we started to research how to sorce & supply them ourselves!

...the logical next step
was our own boutique!

Our Ollie’s Petcare clients loved the products we were discovering, testing and recommending to them – and we enjoyed finding them. We began discussing the idea of branching the business out to our own shop. Back then we wanted to be different to your local Irish pet shop. It was 2014 and we wanted to continue researching unique, new and exciting products for our customers that could not be found in Ireland. We also quickly realised that a typical brick & mortar high street store was just not in our grasp at this point and time. So we turned to Jonathan’s other love and self taught passion - website design. We decided to launch our shop online - to allow us to reach doggie customers further afield than Dublin.

With our Ollie’s Petcare website getting a lot of positive feedback from visitors and customers alike, Jonathan felt motivated to take on designing of our shop on the web. A new website – well kind of. At first we decided to keep the shop as part of our existing business ‘Ollie’s Petcare’ to help with visibility and brand recognition amongst our customer base. This meant adding a shop section to our existing Ollie’s Petcare website. It soon became very apparent as our brand base grew, that our new venture had a life of it’s own and would need a place to call its own (plus a new name too!). In short - Ollie’s Pet Boutique was born.

Unique & individual brands...

Over the next few years Ollie’s Petcare & Ollie’s Pet Boutique went from strength to strength and we even introduced our own brand, ‘Ollie & Penny’ producing lovingly handmade fleece bandanas for dogs. We believe that our strength & success has firmly been down to three things - the fantastic brands we offer, our customer services and our belief in paying a fair price.

We only bring products to our customers that we love ourselves and that our own dogs Ollie & Penny (…Charlie now too!) have tested and approved! We’ve been working with some of our brands from the very beginning of Ollie’s Pet Boutique in 2014. We were the very first stockist in Ireland of many well known brands, including ZippyPaws, Earth Rated PoopBags and Green & Wilds.

As well as working with international brands we are also love supporting our local Irish brands such as Soopa, Harry’s Dog Bakery, Norsh Pet Foods, Urban Pup & Atlas & Tail. Over the years Irish pet brands have blossomed and we look forward to working with many more in the future.

We continue to research new brands each and every day. Social media plays a big part in this as well as other exciting new online platforms such as Faire. We have a big presence on Instagram, Twitter as well as Facebook and just love finding great new products there to share with our customers.

Some of our recent additions to the boutique have been the rather nutritious & yummy (…well that’s what Ollie tells us!) Teddy’s Treats. Teddy’s Treats are a new brand of healthy dog treats that come in 5 varieties – Peanut Butter Bones, Cranberry Sticks & Sweet Potato – in rather striking packaging! We do love them and you can check them out here.

Another brand that we are excited to welcome to the boutique in 2022 is our Wild Olive natural Scruffy Dog Soap Bars! We were looking to bring these products to the boutique for a while. They are just a pawsome addition to any dog parent’s kit. Their soap bars are made from natural ingredients such as lavender, tea tree and French clay. They are handmade, vegan friendly and 100% natural; most importantly they lather well & small delicious. You can find them here!

Looking forward...

We do hope you’ve enjoyed reading about us, our story and how we got to where we are today with Ollie’s Pet Boutique. We love our boutique, the brands we stock and of course our fantastic customers & friends we’ve made along the way. A lot work goes into running a business behind the scenes, especially when you are a bit of a perfectionist and find it hard to give up control, relax and let other people do things. But we are very proud of our accomplishments so far and we do not plan on slowing down any time soon. We have a lot of ideas planned for the future and plan to continue researching new brands & products and finding those perfect ones for our customers.

Our website is also constantly being updated with new features and functionality that hopefully make it easy to browse, use and shop. We love our fresh, minimal (but) fun look - we hope is very pleasing on the eye as well as functional. Our emphasis is always on keeping that fun element; things that are functional don’t always have to be boring. Talking of fun, we’ve launched loads of new features on the website with our new reward points system ‘Pennies’ being an exciting one! She insisted on getting at least one thing named after her, which I think is fair.

In the not too distant future we’re also hoping to start taking our unique range of products and fun on the road to a festival or market near you. We’ll be going out and about with Ollie, Penny & Charlie to meet all our lovely doggie customers in person – and we can’t wait! We’ll be bringing all our brands & of course treats with us - so do look out for our pop-up shops near you soon!

Well that’s it. Thanks for staying with us to this point; it’s a bit of a read. =) You can stay up to date with all our latest news & happenings by signing up to our newsletter or following us on our social accounts which you can find them all linked below. Ollie & Penny also have their own website - www.ollieandpenny.com – where can read up on their latest antics and find out about all their new doggie bandana designs! Do pop by and say woof to them!