[Please Pardon Our Dust ;]
 
Today we moved into our new 2100 sq’ office that was custom built for us. We’re still in Pioneer Square at 555 De Haro St. but we’ve upgraded to a much bigger space, with two conference rooms and plenty of room to grow. Here’s a full photo set.

In hound site it’s a bit flabbergasting that within 9 months we outgrew our first office, but our sales and growth rates have been equally flabbergasting and we’re expanding as fast as we rationally can. Our landlord was happy to recognize this and gladly offered to slice us a perfect size space from within a larger unit.

Please feel free to stop by anytime and say hello (555 De Haro St Suite 350) and don’t doubt we’ll be having a big open doghouse party to celebrate Dogster Office 2.0

Please welcome Dogster Inc.’s official sixth full-time employee Randi Sachs, our new Community Manager who will champion and protect our ever-widening community. Randi chose us over nine years with Charles Schwab, where she served as Senior Project Manager for Bank Relations. We think the photo above perfectly exemplifies her serious interest in a passion-focused career.

At Dogster and Catster we’ve found that our single most important responsibilities are keeping the servers up and running and keeping the community happy and content. Currently John and I have been fulfilling a near 24-7 on-call role helping to resolve community issues and concerns almost as soon as they arise. We feel this level of commitment goes a long way to explain why we are already some of the most popular pet destination on the web and we knew the community deserved nothing more than a full-time champion and defender to be in their corner every day.

Randi is not only an avowed pet lover … of our 200,000 site members, only 21 people registered their account before Randi. In fact her dog Ripley has been on the site since November 23, 2003, almost 40 days before Dogster was unleashed on the public. I just learned a Yiddish word ‘beshert’ which means ‘meant to be’ which I think is a perfect word to describe Randi being our new community manager.

 

[Screen shot from Sasha's page. Part of the award winning Nintendog campaign on Dogster]

Nintendo’s Nintendogs campaign recently run on Dogster has won several media awards. Starcom IP, the nation’s largest online media agency, awarded the Dogster-Nintendogs campaign two prestigious in-house awards. The same campaign also picked up an Effie Award and is looking set to be presented for consideration at Cannes and Media Week Awards.

This campaign was highly effective and well embraced for many reasons. The most important factors were the brilliance of the creative team and their understanding of our community. Congratulations to everyone involved!