San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Thriving in a dog-eat-treat world
Does your dog feel left out while the humans go trick-ortreating? If so, you could take her to PAWsitively Sweet Bakery on the North Side, which is selling cookies and pastries decorated like pumpkins and black cats baked specially for dogs.
The owner, Alexis Quiroga, has always been an animal lover — though she recalls being afraid of dogs as a child. She got the idea for her business after catching a segment on the Animal Planet channel about a bakery that made treats for canines.
After learning the basics of baking at the Art Institute of San Antonio — where her instructors were supportive of her ambition to cater to man’s best friend — she founded the bakery in 2013 and sold treats at a farmers market at the Rim. She later opened a storefront on the East Side, near the AT&T Center.
About 2 ½ years ago, seeking more space and a more convenient location for her clientele, she moved the bakery to its current location on Blanco Road.
She also operates a tent at the Pearl Farmers Market.
Along with Halloween treats, the bakery sells dog bones, jerky and other chewy snacks, as well as scarves, toys and hygiene products such as shampoo and moisturizing balm. All the baked goods are human-grade, meaning they are of high enough quality to be consumed by humans, with all ingredients coming from Texas, Quiroga said.
From the start, her mother has helped with the bakery. More recently, her sister has begun helping with the baking and her brother with the financials, so that it is now a “family affair,” she said. Altogether, the bakery has
eight employees, three of them full time.
When she started, many San Antonio residents were skeptical of a boutique dog bakery, she said.
“I had a lot of people be kind of rude to me, actually. They’re getting upset at me, like, ‘When did dogs stop being dogs?’ ” she said. “I did not have the best reception when I first started. Now everybody has a dog side business or something. It’s so funny how things have changed.”
Quiroga recently sat for an interview about how she kept the
bakery going through the COVID-19 pandemic, how she learned to make shelf-safe products and her struggles to make treats for cats. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q:
How much of an impact did COVID-19 have on your shop?
A: It was a huge impact, because we made a lot of our sales through farmers market events. That’s how we met a lot of our customers. So when the markets were gone, obviously that was a huge hit to us. A lot of people like
that in-person experience. I would go to the farmers market and people liked knowing the owner, knowing the business, knowing the people that were behind it. I got to know my customers very well — I got to know their dogs, I knew their orders.
And we didn’t even have Fiesta! Fiesta usually is huge for us. We would go to King William; the whole month was pretty busy because we did special Fiesta accessories, outfits, treats. It’s sometimes even bigger than the holidays. So not even having Fiesta was another huge blow.
Luckily, we had things like the (Paycheck Protection Program) loan help us out. We did not get the first round, because, as you know, a lot of huge businesses that probably shouldn’t have gotten that money did. We, unfortunately, got it later, which was very nerve-wracking for us because our income obviously had greatly decreased. But luckily we did eventually get it. And we somehow managed to survive.
And now our sales are doing great. We’re doing more than pre-COVID numbers. So we’ve bounced back quite well.
Q: Did you make any changes during COVID?
A: We did start to make more specialty cakes. Our cakes before were more of a standard birthday cake, but if you go to our website, you can see we have all sorts of themed cakes now. We have a taco cake, a Fiesta kind of cake.
After being at the (farmers) market a couple of weeks, I listened to (the customers) and I realized, OK, so their price point is a little bit lower than what they usually want to spend. I understood: You know, people just weren’t making the same amount of money as they used to. So we listened to that and we were able to adjust it to where we made products that fit their budget.
Q: Have you always been a dog person?
A: Actually, I didn’t like dogs when I was little. I was really scared of them, to be honest. Not that I had a dog bite me — I had just experienced dogs that were very energetic and they would jump on you and knock you over. And to me that was so scary because I was so shy and timid. So I really liked cats first.
I’m really happy I got over my