Westie Wear: A Year of Discovery

How a custom dog sweater business grew into a dog personality experience with The Honored Dog in its first year.

This past month marked my first anniversary with Westie Wear®, and I have been trying to figure out how to summarize a year that began with dog sweaters and somehow grew into a personality framework, an online experience, workshops, Relationship Sessions, and a much larger purpose.

The story actually started a few years earlier, after entirely too many surgeries left me with more downtime than I knew what to do with. I taught myself to knit and crochet, eventually creating sweaters for my own Westies.

By last summer, I had built enough inventory to start wondering whether people might actually buy them.

Apparently, I couldn’t just put some sweaters on a table and see what happened. I spent five weeks staging and restaging my first booth in my kitchen, moving displays, creating signs, and making sure everything had a place before I was willing to take it out in public.

I had no idea where it all would lead. But last September, as I sat in my kitchen looking over my mock-festival booth layout, I remember thinking, this is the moment worth holding space for: the moment before anything has happened. The moment of complete uncertainty. Complete potential.

So, in September 2025, I officially launched Westie Wear at the a Connecticut event, the Bloomfield Food Truck (& Craft) Festival.

More Than a Favorite Color

From the beginning, I wanted Westie Wear to offer something more personal than choosing a sweater in a dog parent’s favorite color.

I wanted each sweater to reflect the dog wearing it. That idea led me to create four personality-based color profiles inspired by the four Westies I have loved: Fergie, Dudley, Murphy, and Josie.

Fergie became the Doggy Diva, poised, particular, and a dog with standards. Dudley inspired the Goodest Boy, gentle and steady, never asking for much while giving everything. Murphy was the obvious Bossy Pants, a natural supervisor with strong opinions about nearly everything. And Josie inspired the Social Butterfly personality profile, bringing enthusiasm to everyday moments and treating most strangers as friends she hadn’t met yet.

I created an online quiz to help dog parents identify their dog’s personality and corresponding color profile. I then used those results to develop custom color palettes for each sweater.

But even then, my vision extended beyond selling sweaters. Ultimately, I wanted to create a safe, creative space where people felt seen and understood. A place where they could participate in creating something that reflected the dog they loved while sharing the stories that made that dog unmistakably theirs.

At that point, I didn’t know what that space would eventually become.

Finding Our Footing

Westie Wear found its footing through its initial launch at a local festival, and continued momentum through online sales of handmade sweaters designed specifically for the dogs who would wear them. Business was strong through the holidays, and I crocheted steadily for customers during those first few months.

I also donated more than ten sweaters to shelters throughout New England and to individual dogs who had experienced trauma, illness, or injury. It became important to me that Westie Wear not only create something beautiful, but also bring warmth and comfort to dogs who needed it. After all, my handmade, custom fitted sweaters have been known to reduce anxiety in some of the dogs I’ve made them for. A delightful and unexpected benefit of these creations.

After the holiday rush, sweater orders slowed. That was not necessarily what I wanted from a sales perspective, but it was a trend I anticipated, and one that gave my creativity room to continue growing.

And the personalities were not done with me yet.

When the Profiles Became the Product

The more I talked with people about the four profiles, the more I realized they were connecting with something much deeper than color.

People wanted to tell me about their dogs.

They told me about the dog who ran the household, the dog who greeted everyone as a future best friend, the quiet companion who never asked for much, and the dog whose standards applied not only to themselves but to everyone around them. Dog parents lit up when they felt that I understood who their dog was.

The profiles gave people language for things they had already noticed but had not necessarily known how to describe. That realization fueled my enthusiasm and gave me the stamina for the months that followed.

It also brought me back to my original goal of creating a space where people felt seen, safe, and understood. Only now, I began recognizing that the need to feel understood extended to both ends of the leash.

Creating, Developing, and Launching The Honored Dog

In March 2026, I began working with my tireless AI assistants, Claude and ChatGPT (Max).

Over the course of several weeks, I used them as thought partners to challenge my ideas, help me identify what was missing, and turn the original color profiles into a much larger experience. I didn’t enter a prompt asking AI to build a business for me and wait for the finished product to appear. We worked through it together.

I questioned ideas, rejected plenty of them, argued when something missed the mark, and continued refining the concept until it reflected what I was actually trying to create.

With Claude and Max as my thought partners, I expanded the original quiz into a 15-question personality assessment that identifies both a dog’s primary and emerging personality profile. I wrote individual guides with stories and reflections to help dog parents explore how their dog’s traits show up in everyday life.

I built a new website, personality pages, online learning experiences, customer accounts, automated emails, database connections, and the systems that move someone from taking the quiz to receiving personalized results and continued support.

Behind the scenes, that meant connecting WordPress, Fillout, Airtable, Make, Brevo, Sensei, WooCommerce, Stripe, and several other tools into one working system. There were many moments when one small change broke three other things. There were late nights spent trying to understand why information was not moving from one platform to another. There were also moments when the entire system finally worked, and I could see that an idea I had carried in my head had become something real.

Along the way, the purpose became clearer:

Breed can tell us something about a dog. Personality helps us understand the individual dog sharing our life.

The Honored Dog Is Born

In June, I launched The Honored Dog™.

The expanded personality quiz became the entry point into a larger framework designed to help people recognize, understand, and celebrate their dogs.

The profiles were no longer just helping me choose sweater colors. They were helping dog parents look at their dogs differently. Which opened another important conversation: the difference between the dog someone imagined and the dog they actually brought home.

Most of us meet our dogs twice. First, we meet them in our imagination. We picture their personality, how they will fit into our lives, and the relationship we expect to share. Then we meet the real dog, who arrives with their own personality, preferences, needs, fears, energy, and opinions.

Sometimes the difference is funny. Sometimes it is surprising. Sometimes it is genuinely difficult.

The Honored Dog helps people navigate that difference with more intention, patience, and compassion. Through the personality profiles, guides, workshops, and Relationship Sessions, dog parents can better understand what their dogs are communicating and build a stronger relationship with the dog in front of them.

This work is not a replacement for dog training or behavior modification. It is a complement to those services. Training may help address what a dog is doing. The Honored Dog helps people understand who their dog is and how that understanding can shape the way they respond.

Just as importantly, it gives people a place to explore their own experience without judgment or the immediate assumption that they or their dog need to be fixed.

A Season of Milestones

By summer, both Westie Wear and The Honored Dog were beginning to move beyond my website and into the community.

In August, Westie Wear sweaters were featured on the cover of Connecticut Dog Magazine. The magazine also published an article about how The Honored Dog personality profiles could support shelters, adopters, and dog parents by helping people build more realistic expectations and relate to their dogs with greater understanding.

That was especially meaningful to me because my professional life began in humane education at the Arizona Humane Society. After spending the next 20 years coaching and training people through change in corporate environments, I began to see those two parts of my background coming together through The Honored Dog.

I also began building relationships with local shelters. One shelter has offered to include The Honored Dog materials in its adoption packets and invited me to explore workshops and educational programs with them.

By the end of summer, beginning of fall, ,y sweater models, Murphy and Josie, and I headed out to festivals to connect with the community. In 2025, I was a vendor at two events. In 2026, we’ve had a booth at seven events through October. And the Westies and I will close the year out having participated in at least eleven events.

At the Chester Dog fair, a breeder approached me about creating workshops for her breeder group. She immediately saw how understanding personality could help breeders better match puppies with families, prepare new dog parents for what to expect, and potentially reduce the number of dogs returned when reality does not match a family’s expectations.

Nearly 100 people have now entered The Honored Dog system, taken the quiz, and begun discovering their dogs through this new lens. While I’m offering people a new way of seeing and engaging with their dogs through The Honored Dog, I’m the one who’s most honored to hold space them to relish their relationship with their dog.

Looking Ahead

When I look back at this first year, I’m amazed by how much has changed, and how much has stayed the same.

What began as a creative outlet during some difficult years became a small business, and eventually something much bigger than I could have imagined. But the heart of it hasn’t changed. I still want to create something meaningful for dogs and the people who love them.

Westie Wear will continue celebrating dogs through thoughtfully designed, personality-inspired sweaters. And The Honored Dog will continue growing through guides, workshops, conversations, and relationships that help people discover and appreciate the individuality of their dogs.

There is still so much I want to build, so much to learn, and plenty of uncertainty that comes with creating something new. But if this first year has taught me anything, it’s that sometimes the most meaningful opportunities are the ones you never saw coming.

To everyone who has purchased a sweater, shared a story about their dog, taken the personality quiz, stopped by our booth, or simply encouraged me along the way: thank you. You’ve helped turn an idea into something I am incredibly proud of.

Here’s to another year of discovery, creativity, connection, and celebrating the dogs who make our lives so much richer.

— Kindly, Kimberly (& The Westies)