White on White shampoo is still one of his top five sellers, but it has been displaced at the top by Thick N Thicker, um, texturizer. "It's a PVA—polyvinyl acetate—hair spray, and it caught on fire and has just flown," he told me, mixing some unfortunate metaphors. Chris Christensen Systems sells, in addition to shampoos and conditioners and sprays, a profusion of brushes. When the owner of his brushmaker, a small operation in Germany's Black Forest, showed him a brush with wood bristles three years ago, Christensen fell in love with the craftsmanship and put it in his line. Today, the Wood Pin Brush—available in three sizes and starting at $25—is his best-selling brush, the unrivaled top tool on the market for getting out tangles. It's so effective that he gave me one to take home to my wife. And I did. I gave my wife a dog brush and got exactly the reaction you would expect upon doing it. I then put it out of my mind until, three days later, she announced that it "was the best brush I've ever used, in my life."
There is no one method to how Christensen tackles a particular product. His comfort zone, owing to his background in the beauty business, would probably be the liquids. Sometimes, as in the case of hair spray, he need only source a good formula and repackage it. In other cases (White on White, for example), he works with a trusted chemist to tweak a human formula so that it works on dogs. Once his name had become a trusted brand, expansion was easier. At that point, dog-show people were ready to buy his products, and Christensen's challenge was to be rigorous about quality. His distributors told him he was nuts to enter brushes, and then shears, because those were deep and competitive categories. But Christensen knew that what worked with shampoo or hair spray—that a truly effective product sells itself—would work with any other category.
He determined what customers wanted by simply going to dog shows and making himself available. Handlers would bark out requests, and Christensen would scribble them down: "Make me a comb rake, put a handle right here, and make it 7.5 inches long. I'm going to use it on Great Pyrenees and other big dogs with a longer coat!" He would design a prototype and send it out for a test. In some cases, he would name the product after a person who had asked for it: For instance, the BB Tail Teaser Buttercomb, a $27 stainless-steel, double-toothed comb with a long handle, is named for a Westie breeder.
Christensen's line grew quickly, as he identified areas in need of improvement. "Shears is the most exciting category I've ever been in," he told me, though I suspect that on a different day he would probably have said the same thing about stripping knives or wood pin brushes. Shears were probably on his mind because he had recently unveiled a top-of-the-line model, installed above his previous top-of-the-line model, which cost $200. The new shears were handmade of Damascus steel, a Swedish variant consisting of 67 thin layers. He asked his factory in China to source the metal, sent specs, and then had the blades tweaked in Texas until they were perfect. At $500, the Damascus steel shears were not a volume play, but they further burnished Christensen's reputation as a maker of quality and also caused sales of the $200 shears to spike, given that they were now the middle price point in his line.
In 2010, he introduced a portable cool-air dryer, the Kool Pup, which used technology from the company's first-ever acquisition, and he was preparing to introduce an industry first on its back: an adapter that mounts to the hose, allowing for various products—which CCS will, of course, sell—to be sprayed into the coat via the powerful blasts of cool air.
Relentless expansion is obviously Christensen's primary mode of operation, and it has driven propulsive growth at CCS, even during the recession of 2008 and 2009. There was a very simple reason his company did well, Christensen said: "New products. We just kept adding stuff."
Only a small portion of Christensen's sales is direct to consumer over the Internet. The lion's share is driven by his distributors, who are given regions and exclusive rights. It's a model he learned in the beauty business, where Paul Mitchell, he told me, "has made millionaires out of all of his distributors."
Roy Loomis has owned the largest U.S. representative, the Phillipsburg, New Jersey–based Cherrybrook, for six years. In addition to controlling the most lucrative region for dog shows, the 11 states that make up the Northeast, Cherrybrook operates three retail stores. Last winter, I stopped by Loomis's booth at the sport's Super Bowl, the Westminster Kennel Club show at Madison Square Garden, and he pointed out Christensen's line, which occupied at least half of the footprint of his 400-square-foot booth. Loomis said one of the best business moves he had made was to tighten his relationship with Christensen, who at that very moment was demonstrating the "buttery" feel of a $55 fusion brush to a woman in a sweatshirt with a golden retriever head on it. "He's a great salesman," Loomis said. "So he moves tons of product. He's a good personality, too." (It has become common, in fact, for customers to ask Christensen for autographs.) Already, Christensen had sold a pair of $500 shears for Loomis.
Indeed, Christensen was selling like mad in my periphery, until there was a rare break in the traffic, at which point he slumped against the counter. He was, he said, "so sick I can barely think." Only the manic energy of the show was keeping him upright. I asked if selling at Westminster was difficult, and he rolled his eyes. "You just hand product and take money," he said.
Loomis beamed and put a hand on the shoulder of his star supplier.
"The dog-show world is one of the funnest things I've ever done, because when we develop a new product, we spend most of our time and energy trying to figure out how to make it work instead of spending most of our time and energy trying to keep it below a retail price level," Christensen told me later. In a lot of industries, in other words, you identify an attractive retail price point and then do what you must to bring the product to market at that price. In the dog-show world, Christensen explained, "you can spend your energy and creativity and research on how to make this product better, so that these folks going to the show ring have a better chance of coming out with a blue ribbon." He was very proud of this.
"You can market a product at a much higher price than in a grooming shop or retail pet store," he said. "We can spend our time and creativity and be at $50, and if the doggone product"—I'm almost certain no pun was intended—"does what it says it will do, it'll sell."
