Making the doghouse pleasant, with canine climate control

Mike Hill, a veteran technical education teacher with a brain that oozes inventive ideas, took a light bulb affixed inside a coffee can and turned it into a $300,000-and-growing business aimed at making life a tad more comfortable for our canine friends.

Hill, 48, is founder of Akoma Dog Products LLC, a Big Lake, Minn., company that markets heating and cooling products designed to warm a kennel during cold winter months and keep a dog cool when summer temperatures soar.

Throw in a heatpad powered by a cigarette lighter to keep a dog warm in the truck box and you have a business on track to reach $400,000 in sales this year.

The inspirations leading to the Hound Heater, the Hound Cooler and the truckbox Hound Warmer were born in Hill's fertile imagination, but they were transformed into marketable products by Stillwater consultant Charlie Gifford, a retired 3M engineer.

Gifford, who collects a share of the sales of products he helps to develop, claims the work is "a lot of fun," mainly because of the storm of inventive ideas that spills out of Hill's imagination.

"Some of them are even worthwhile," joked Gifford, who Hill said has been known to hang up the phone with a shake of his head when Hill's brainstorms whiz beyond outrageous.

A few of them make sense, however. Take, for example, the battery-operated seat warmer designed for cold-weather use by outdoor sports fans.

Then there's the "Holee Molee" pump, now in the final development stage, designed to circulate water upward from warmer depths of a lake to keep an ice-fishing hole open.

The canine business grew out of Hill's work as a dog trainer, a sideline that often involved working with purebreds that cost an average of $800 and some that carried a price tag as high as $5,000.

"My biggest worry was having those expensive dogs outside during the winter," he said. So he rigged light bulbs inside coffee cans and hung them on the kennel walls to raise the temperature.

That led in 2002 to introduction of the Hound Heater, a simple black box about the size of a small toaster with a light bulb socket built in. Four years later he came up with the truckbox Hound Warmer. It's not a big seller, although it is being studied by an armed forces supplier as a potential heat source for soldiers fighting in mountain terrain.

The most important payoff of that product, however, was that it introduced him to Gifford, whom he met through a mutual friend and hired to design the Hound Warmer. That started a relationship that has lifted the business into a six-figure sales success.

The key development came in 2007 as the impending demise of the incandescent bulb threatened the Hound Heater, the company's primary sales generator.

So Gifford and Hill took that little black Hound Heater box and replaced the light bulb with a small heating element, a thermostat and a heat sensor to shut it down if temperatures exceed a prescribed level.

That launched the business. Sales jumped from $38,000 in 2006 to $80,000 in 2007 and nearly quadrupled in the ensuing two years to $306,000 last year.

With 2010 sales running better than 60 percent ahead of 2009, the company is on track to gross nearly $500,000 in 2010. As for next year, Hill is hoping the recent introduction of the Hound Cooler will keep the growth humming.

The Hound Cooler, inspired by the cooling pad Hill rigged to keep himself comfortable during a steamy day at an outdoor trade show, involves a small insulated chest loaded with ice and water and equipped with a small pump to push the coolant into the tubing running through a vinyl pad on the floor of the kennel.

"People find us," said Hill, who has done only one online promotion and places a handful of print ads in Minnesota Outdoor News every year. Nonetheless, he has managed to place his products in 20 retail stores in the United States and Canada and on 13 retail websites.

But it hasn't been easy. Initially, Hill took product samples to several outdoor retail chains and more than 30 websites. The response, he said, went something like, "Who the heck are you?" Only they didn't say "heck."

"I can't count the times I've had the door slammed in my face, been hung up on and even been told by an agent for a major outdoor retail chain, 'You're a [bleeping] idiot.'"

"I didn't mind," Hill said. "I knew they'd be back."

He has some recent history to support that notion. After introducing the new heater, he started getting calls from a number of websites and retail stores that had previously spurned him.

The initial order: 60 units, a tidy sale given the Hound Heater's $89.95 price tag.