What makes a great pet toy? It turns out there’s a lot more to the squeakers, stuffing, and strange shapes than meets the eye. In this episode of Barking Mad, we explore how animal behavior, safety, sustainability, health, and even pop culture are influencing the next generation of pet toy design.

Recorded at Interzoo 2026 in Nuremberg, Germany, Jordan Tyler sits down with veteran toy designer Sandra Vartanian of Lelo Designs, Victor Carpio of Inventor Cat, and Brandon Lu of PAWTY Toys to explore three very different approaches to innovation. From designing toys that safely satisfy a dog’s natural instinct to destroy to turning feline dental care into play, these conversations reveal how thoughtful design can make play safer, more enriching, and a whole lot more fun.

Show Notes:

🐶Check out BarkBox here: https://bark.co/pages/join-barkbox-fext-ff

🎾 And listen to a previous episode where we sit down with Derek Rippe from BARK: https://bsmpartners.net/barking-mad-podcast/superzoo-2026-part-i-the-blood-sweat-and-treats-of-dog-toy-design-with-bark

🦴Take a look at what the team at Lelo Designs is cooking up: https://lelodesigns.com/

🐕Explore more from Outward Hound here: https://outwardhound.com/

🦷Learn more about Inventor Cat and their unique approach to cat dental hygiene: https://www.inventorcat.co.uk/

🎉Check out PAWTY Toys’ fun and trendy designs here: https://pawty.com/

Episode Chapters:

00:00 — The Surprising Science Behind Pet Toys

02:13 — How the Pet Toy Industry Got Started

05:39 — Are Dogs Supposed to Destroy Their Toys?

07:07 — Sustainability & the Future of Toy Design

09:41 — Turning Cat Dental Care Into Play

14:57 — When Pet Toys Meet Pop Culture

19:24 — Designing Toys with More Than One Life

22:37 — Thanks for Listening & See You Next Time!

Jacob Parker

You're listening to the Barking Mad podcast.

Stephanie Clark

Are we okay with that? Do we really know what we were asking for?

Jordan Tyler

Can't look at ingredient label and just assume.

Stephanie Clark

I'm going to ask you. Show me the data. I took a shower this month. I'm extra fresh. Like, why does it mean America?

Jordan Tyler

There's actually a lot to unpack here.

Stephanie Clark

I mean, insert Mean Girls clip.

Jordan Tyler

Let this be a lesson, you know.

Jacob Parker

Welcome in to the Barking Mad Podcast, a podcast for the pet obsessed with the real experts.

Jordan Tyler

Back in the early 70s, a mechanic in Colorado was underneath a car. Working. His dog simply wouldn't leave him alone, so he grabbed the nearest thing he could find, a rubber part from the vehicle he was fixing, and tossed it to the dog to keep him busy. Years later, this eventually became calm, one of the best selling dog toys of all time, and probably part of the reason the dog toy I'll is the way it is today.

Jordan Tyler

That's the thing about toy design. The best ideas rarely start in a boardroom. They start with an actual dog doing an actual dog thing, and someone just happened to be paying close enough attention. Today we're diving into the world of pet toy design and innovation, a corner of the industry we don't talk about nearly enough as a part of Total Pet Health and Wellness.

Jordan Tyler

So we sat down with three different voices from three very different corners of this category. A veteran toy designer who's watched this sector evolve from cardboard bins to a multibillion dollar aisle of options, and inventor using feline behavioral science to solve one of the most avoided problems in pet health today. And a co-founder who's built a business on making dog toys that are, frankly, totally uninjured but in the best possible way.

Jordan Tyler

You know how we always talk about how pets are the new children? Well, if you caught our most recent episode with Derek Grippy of Bark Box, you already know there's a slippery slope from infant product design to pet product design. Derek came from the baby product design world, just like Sandra Vartanian, founder of Los Angeles based toy design studio Lilo Designs.

Sandra Vartanian

So I started in the infant products for like 22. I was like Iain's ago, so I was designing infant bedding and toys for a lot of the juvenile product companies. When a friend of mine sort of yanked me into the pet industry. All of a sudden, and I didn't have a dog, I didn't know what I was doing.

Sandra Vartanian

I didn't know why there was these really weird looking black scenes around the snakes and stuff. So I had to get an education. But I got the privilege of redesigning a brand called Kaizen back then into what's now known as Outward Hound, which is one of the biggest brands, and the dog industry.

Jordan Tyler

From Ground Zero of a rebrand to one of the biggest names on pet store shelves. Not a bad way to fall into an industry, so pets have fully become family. And for Sandra, toys are one of the clearest expressions of the shift.

Sandra Vartanian

They're like our family now. The humanization of dogs now is sort of the in the forefront of all the marketing speeches, and every speech. I walk by two stages had the word humanization. And that and that all started during the mid 20s when social media hit hard. So we started to treat them like family members.

Jordan Tyler

But it wasn't always this way. Sandra walked us through just how far the toy category has come, and it's a much shorter history than you might think.

Sandra Vartanian

Back in the 90s, dog toys were kind of an afterthought to the food industry. A lot of feed stores were popping up in local areas. People were kind of just bringing in bags and bags of different food brands in the local area, say whatever town you were in, and these dog toys kind of popped up in the 90s or so or even before.

Sandra Vartanian

I mean, like congas 50 years old, these toys were just sort of in bins, you know, and then at some point, PetSmart and Petco and buyers in the main chains, they started to bring them out of the bins and start to do servants on the wall. The dog industry was kind of way behind. So for a lot of us in the infant products, it was kind of a new field to play.

Sandra Vartanian

And then it was exciting because we could bring our knowledge to them.

Jordan Tyler

Fast forward to today, and the toy aisle has done a complete 180 degree shift. It's now oversaturated, and according to Sandra, it's about to face a regulatory reckoning.

Jordan Tyler

And.

Sandra Vartanian

So these days there are two things. So one is that the market has a lot of SKUs right now. It's sort of saturated. And what's happening in the US we're getting guidelines for dog safety. There's about like, I don't know, 86 companies right now on a committee that are they're trying to bring in guidelines for choking hazards, for chemical testing, for all sorts of like pretty much what Europe tests for.

Sandra Vartanian

But what that's going to do, it's going to disrupt some of the white space, because a lot of toys will start to get filtered out because they're just not going to pass. So is a really great opportunity for people to really design either in a niche, say, like, you're going to be an expert in Chihuahua or and we have to kind of go back to the drawing board.

Jordan Tyler

New regulation aside, Sandra also gave us a completely different way to think about why dogs destroy their toys in the first place and why that's actually the whole point.

Sandra Vartanian

So it's their prey and chase and and prey predator instincts. They are descendants of apex animals. So so basically their instinct is to hunt, chase, to kill, dissect, disembowel. So our job as toys designers is to really simulate that fake kind of give up like a fake rat to play, because obviously you're not going to let them bring a rat home to dissect that.

Sandra Vartanian

So. So a toy should not actually be and thus indestructible. We need to start to control the destruction in a safe way. Yeah. So ultimately, as a pet parent, the buck stops at you. Still, no matter how many tests you do, no matter how many ASTM requirements you pass, it's still you're still the last sort of police.

Jordan Tyler

The barrier between your pet safety and their enjoyment, as Sandra put it. And here's the mindset shift she's pushing the industry toward.

Sandra Vartanian

But when you ask me, what do I see? I think as an industry, we need to go into figuring out how to allow the dog to destroy a toy because that's what they really want to do. Instead of really being so hyper focused on designing toys that don't get to be destroyed.

Jordan Tyler

In other words, stop fighting the dog's instinct instead designed for it. This mostly has to do with materials and construction, but sustainability is becoming a big factor as well.

Sandra Vartanian

There are a lot of new materials that are being played with. I think the future of dog toys is also sustainability. I mean, and looking for recycled materials, a lot of elastomers, new plastics, new like ETP is now a hot thing because it bounces funny. It's lighter. It comes from the shoe industry. You can get inspiration from any other industry and then bring it into the dog industry.

Sandra Vartanian

I saw these guys yesterday in the new product section. They were recycling airbags and seat belts, and the seat belts were being shredded into filler. And then the exterior of the toy was the old airbags. I thought that was so fascinating. I love that.

Jordan Tyler

The other big ship Sandra is watching closely is what she calls modular design. And as we'll see later in this episode, she's not the only one thinking about it.

Sandra Vartanian

The other thing we see is modular toys. It say like a part of the toy breaks off. You can replace that part. You don't have to replace the entire system. Yeah, kind of taking a little bit of an inspiration from actual children's toys. We call that hybridization. Cool. So that's that's basically where the future lies.

Jordan Tyler

Hold on to that word hybridization, because it's about to show up again in a very tangible way later in this episode. But first, Sandra left us with one more idea that reframed the whole category. Toys aren't just entertainment. They're systems built around real animal behavior.

Sandra Vartanian

We have the same five senses, but it serves us differently. So are sense of hearing, for example, is so much more amazing than ours. So. And their sight is terrible. Ours is so much better. So we're play connects with their enrichment is, I think, depending on the dog and how they like to play. And if my dog likes to play with us.

Sandra Vartanian

So I would be the perfect customer for like a toy or but some dogs maybe like to hang out in the corner and choose something for hours. So it just really depends on your dog. But ultimately those senses, those natural instincts still are the same. They they play predictably. Yeah. You can predict their behavior, basically.

Jordan Tyler

Yeah. If toy design starts with understanding an animal's instincts and senses, our next guest takes up about as far as it can go straight into one of the most avoided corners of pet health. Dennis WellCare. Victor Carpio is the CEO and founder of inventor Cat, a small team based in Germany. At the show, he brought along a dental wand, a cat friendly toy built to solve a problem.

Jordan Tyler

Almost every cat owner, he included, has quietly given up on brushing their cat's teeth.

Victor Carpio

Reassertion bridged the gap between veterinary guidelines and the reality of categories, right, which is most capitals well across the world 75 to 90% of cars over the age of three. They have dental PCs, right? And that's because we can't brush their teeth. Now, the most frustrating thing about it is most dental diseases are completely preventable through daily brushing.

Jordan Tyler

So why don't more of us brush our cats? Victor says it comes down to a flawed gold standard.

Victor Carpio

Which is the brush. For that to work requires technical ability from your name or motivation from the owner, and both on the cat. And it's incredibly hard. Develop technical ability and have, say motivated when you don't have cooperation.

Jordan Tyler

So instead of wrestling the cat, Victor's designed a toy that works with feline instinct, almost tricking the cat into brushing its own teeth through play.

Victor Carpio

So essentially what we do, we combine feline dentistry with feline behavior to almost do an inception on the cat, right? Let the cat think it's doing what it wants to do, but really we're doing what it wants it to do. And that's by using an interactive pick. So we've created a device which acts as prey, which is attached on to at the end of a one, Tori and all the cat Perry would do is open it up, fill it with our enzymatic toothpaste, or with the releasing our enzymatic and post biotic toothpaste, which doesn't exist in the market, and then they'll just begin to play from there.

Victor Carpio

The cats in 100% of control. That's what makes the cat free. And the cat will go for the approach sequence, which ends with them biting it once they bite in, the pressure from the bite releases the two placed inside and spreading it across the pool and legal surfaces of Latif. So inside and the outside of Latif whilst the bristles are bending and snapping, disrupting that daily bird up.

Jordan Tyler

And because it's framed as play instead of a chore, Victor says the relationship between cat and owner actually improves the more the dental wand is used.

Victor Carpio

Cats are making the positive associations, which means that after every use, brushing gets easier and they develop more trust with the don't want. Your bond also improves massively after every cuz.

Jordan Tyler

Like a lot of great inventions, this one started with a very specific, very personal failure.

Victor Carpio

In this business management and innovation. And as a kid I've always wanted to be an inventor. And so what brought me here today is because I had the cat before getting into this world, and I was in finance, basically. But yeah, it's actually right. So my vet told me I should probably know. Actually, I saw a leaflet at the best and I said, you should brush your teeth.

Victor Carpio

And every parent thinks of themselves like the best cat parallel. I'm the best parent for my dog, right? And that title will absolutely destroyed by a lousy leaflet. And I was like, I can't let this happen. So I immediately bore katsu brush cartouche based apology instructions on the leaflet. And it was help. My cat was allegedly. I was like shouting and crying to my car like it's for your own good.

Victor Carpio

But I let me do this. Yeah, like I was like giving me the finger. And I just thought it has to be a better way.

Jordan Tyler

That frustration turned into real market research, and what he found points to a much bigger shift happening across the entire Cat category.

Victor Carpio

Is now 80% millennials. Chelsea. It's the dominant demographic. Desperately miss it. This comes from the high rises. You know most people get in a house, are living in higher northern houses with gardens. So if they want a pet it makes more sense to have a cat. That's what's pushing the numbers up at the same time and things like Covid, and really helped us create that emotional attachment.

Victor Carpio

And I think that's the nicest thing about that, of having this demographic is that we're now seeing proactively in care more than rather being reacted to.

Jordan Tyler

Care from a leaflet, a lonely cat and a lot of trial and error came a device now used by thousands of cat owners. Victor summed up what's kept him going even when the early days were a little bit slow.

Victor Carpio

You know, we were clashing with the outfit, something a gold standard which is outdated. And but if we do, if we were just doing it for the money and the money wasn't coming in, others thought, yeah, but because you're doing it for a cause, there's a higher purpose of what you're doing.

Jordan Tyler

Real behavioral science applied with a lot of empathy and a little bit of trickery. I like this guy style. Now for something completely different. If inventor Cat is toy design as precision engineering, our final guest is proof that toy design can also just be funny. Deeply, unapologetically funny. Brandon Loo is the co-founder of potty, a dog toy company built almost entirely on pop culture memes and inside jokes.

Brandon Lu

Yeah, my name is Brandon. I'm the co-founder of Potty Toys, so we're a company. Our slogan is your your trendy dog's favorite toy. So we like to focus on, you know, a lot of hobbies, memes, conversation starters and just, you know, general things that are most companies don't make.

Jordan Tyler

Underneath the humor, though, potty is asking the same material and durability questions as everybody else in this episode.

Brandon Lu

So we largely focus on plush. So, you know, obviously in the dog toy world, there's a lot of different kind of materials. We started with plush just because it's the easiest to make it look like the thing that we're trying to make it look at. Totally. Because, you know, with some, you know, harder materials with the molds, like, you don't always get it exactly the way you want it to.

Brandon Lu

Yeah. But yeah, we're mostly plush, but we try our best to make sure that there's multiple, like, multifunctional ways to play. So, you know, we try to give the dog owners and the dog themselves a little bit more ways to play just because plush breaks pretty easily. And like we don't want people to, you know, have to go through so many toys at a in a given time and things like that, you know?

Brandon Lu

Totally. Yeah. So, you know, we incorporate a lot of talk. It's a pretty popular material and it's a lot of plush. We try to experiment with like other kinds of materials to like nylon fabrics. But everything is safe for pets, save for, you know, safer chewing. Everything on the inside has been certified. So, you know, in case they break it.

Brandon Lu

We know how how, how easy dogs are to to break one of these toys. So we're actually trying to experiment with a little bit more of the stuffing. Yeah. We call it inside the toy just to see if there's more sustainable materials, if there's a, you know, basically edible kind of materials. Yeah.

Jordan Tyler

That's like one cause issues.

Brandon Lu

Exactly.

Jordan Tyler

Parts of it.

Brandon Lu

Do get it because, you know, it will happen sooner or later. So like we want to make sure that it's safe for the dog, some for us.

Jordan Tyler

And then there's the part of potty that's made them famous in certain corners of the internet, their pop culture portfolio.

Brandon Lu

You know, we're a lighthearted company, right? Like, I'm here in hoodie, right? You know, we like to start off with fun things. So we actually created this during the last selection. And this has been a super popular just set of toys. And that's a mr. Donald and Mr. Musk with a little rocket in his hand. Yeah. This that's so funny.

Brandon Lu

Yeah. We get a lot of you know, it's kind of funny because like, whether you love them or hate them, both parties of people would love to buy these toys just because, you know, they, the people that hate them want their dogs to chew on them and the people that love them, they're like, oh, I want you to have a, you know.

Jordan Tyler

It's truly.

Sandra Vartanian

A.

Jordan Tyler

Foolproof yeah, I do.

Brandon Lu

Yeah, yeah. This is one of our first products. This took off. So this is for those drinkers. This is a, you know, we call a causal with this is a tequila. We are we were one of the top selling toys on Amazon for a couple years in a row. Just this.

Jordan Tyler

Is really.

Sandra Vartanian

Actually.

Jordan Tyler

A beautiful toy. Yeah. You know, like, it's.

Victor Carpio

It's good.

Brandon Lu

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. No, we we got this is actually how the company got started. So this is our first hero skew. So it's actually a mimic of a tequila bottle. So. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So you know, a lot of people like, it's kind of like a status symbol in, like, clubs and. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. So like, you know, our our our CEO, you know my co-founder, he when he started it, he was like, you know, I would love my dog because he, he likes to drink closet at home.

Brandon Lu

And so he's like I would love it if my dog can have like a few of these horse. And so he made one of those and it really just took off him there. You know, we got a ton of those. We have like a soju bottle. We have like champions. We have we have a lot of the drink series for sure.

Brandon Lu

You know, I love it. Yeah. We actually have you have you, do you know, happy dad. It's like it's kind of like a seltzer. Yeah, yeah. So we actually did a colab with them. So, like, official happy dad boy is actually met.

Jordan Tyler

With us, but our favorite might be the one that solves a problem every single dog owner has felt. What happens when a plush toy dies?

Brandon Lu

So this is actually one of our birthday cake toys.

Jordan Tyler

So deconstructed.

Brandon Lu

Deconstructed. Yeah. First and foremost. So, you know, I was talking a lot about how we like to have a multi waste of play. And so you know how when plush you know when plush breaks, that's typically the end of its own life. Right. So we typically we've been trying to come up with a series where, you know, there's kind of like a 3 in 1 play.

Brandon Lu

So basically you break through the very first layer, you get a second layer of toy surprise, second layer, and then after you break through the second layer, you get a third layer as well.

Jordan Tyler

That's amazing. Sound familiar? That's almost word for word. The hybridization trend Sandra described earlier in this episode a modular toy built to survive deconstruction. Instead of ending with it.

Brandon Lu

Especially with larger dogs, they just go through toys like crazy. Totally. You know? And so like, we try our best to, you know, make it as long lasting as possible. We try to make a lot of different means before, but our production process, as we're kind of making the toys and sampling the toys, maybe the mean kind of died out.

Brandon Lu

We've been seriously contemplating on controversial figures. So like, you know, our Mr. Donald sells really well. Right. And so, we've been seriously considering doing a few more controversial figures, like, for example, we're considering. So, like, you know, some figures we were considering was like, you know, people like Kim Jong un, for example, like, super recognizable, like, you know, Uber controversial, super con.

Brandon Lu

Right? But then, like, you also don't piss off so many people. Yeah. By making something like that. Yeah. We try to make a Joe Biden at the same time as we when we make Trump. But, you know, the guy dropped out so we didn't actually produce it. He had a lot of samples. But we're we're still trying to figure it out.

Brandon Lu

Like we're trying to walk that fine line. There's a lot of a lot of ideas that we we ended up pushing through.

Jordan Tyler

I think we all need a little comedy, right?

Brandon Lu

You know, pet toys are supposed to be fun, right?

Sandra Vartanian

Exactly.

Jordan Tyler

Three completely different designers, three completely different philosophies. And yet the same through line connects all of them. Sandra reminded us that a toy is really a behavior system built around instincts that haven't really changed in thousands of years. Victor showed us what happens when you take that idea seriously enough to solve a health problem. Most of us have just quietly given up on, and Brandon proved that a toy can be genuinely silly and still be thoughtfully engineered underneath the joke.

Jordan Tyler

So the next time your dog destroys a plush toy in record time, or your cat refuses to let you anywhere near its mouth with a toothbrush, remember somebody out there thinking very hard about exactly that problem and how to solve it? And somewhere there's a very good boy or girl carrying around a tiny rubber tequila bottle, completely unaware that they're part of a multi-billion dollar design conversation.

Jordan Tyler

Jordan Tyler

A special shout out to David Perez for the original music. See you next time.