"Do people genuinely care about Made in Australia? And if so, at what price point do they stop caring?"
Chris Loverseed asked me that about four minutes into our conversation, and he asked it the way you ask a question you have already been chewing on for a while. Behind him on the call was a kangaroo hide, waiting to be turned into dog toys.
Chris makes dog gear. Collars, leads, harnesses, toys, handmade in Melbourne. He has been training dogs for fifteen years, and he only makes things he would put on his own dogs. Before any of that he dropped out of school at fourteen, did a chef's apprenticeship, sold cars, ended up in corporate, and started a dog training business on the side.
Then, just before COVID, he had a mental health crisis. A breakdown, a psych unit, the full nine yards. And when he came out he saw things a little differently, picked up a DIY dog collar kit because he was fed up with his suppliers, and found that making things with his hands was the most therapeutic thing he had done in years. That is where the business came from.
I want to answer his question properly, because it is not really a question about patriotism. It is a question about why anybody buys anything.
Nobody Buys a Logo
The Three Reasons Customers Buy
There are around twenty-eight million Australians. Some of them care about where a thing is made. Some of them do not. That is the honest answer, and it is not very useful on its own.
The useful part is underneath it. People buy for three reasons, and only one of them is price.
The first is transactional. You were in the right place at the right time. It might be price, it might be that they needed a custom collar because their hound is a peculiar shape. Either way they will not remember your name.
The second is emotional. I feel better about myself because I made this purchase. This solves a real problem I have been carrying around.
The third is social, and it is the one that is growing. I am better because I bought from here. This is where Australian made actually lives — not as a badge, but as a claim about the kind of person the customer becomes by choosing you.
Which is why the logo is not enough. We have spent a very long time assuming that Made in Australia speaks for itself, and it does not. You have to spell it out. The jobs you are creating here. The kangaroo hides you are repurposing that were otherwise headed for landfill. The workshop, the hands, the offcuts.
Chris pushed back on me, and he was right to. His gut feel is that a lot of people care about Australian made right up until they have to pay for it.
I know a business that went through exactly this with organic certification. Getting certified is a long, expensive process of logistics and verification. Customers said yes, absolutely, I want organic. Would they pay eight dollars more for it? Not necessarily.
So he is not wrong. But here is what that tells you: if you are competing on price, you are in a cost equation, and you will lose it to somebody importing at a ten times margin. The question is not what does it cost to make. The question is what story is attached to it, and is that story worth paying for.
Think about luxury goods for a moment. The function of a red jacket is the same whoever made it. It keeps you warm, it is red. So why do people spend so much more on one than another? Some of it is genuinely the workmanship — and I have seen Chris's workmanship, it is real. But a great deal of it is what the purchase says.
You are not going to be all things to all people. Find the tribe it matters to.
Your Moat Is the Dog's Point of View
How to Find Your Unique Selling Point When You're Small
Chris's second question was the one every small maker asks. He is a micro business competing against the pet superstores and against importers sitting on enormous margins and enormous advertising budgets. How do you compete with that?
You do not. Not on their terms.
So I asked him why he started, and his answer was better than his question. There is so much rubbish in his market, he said, and it confuses pet owners. He only sells things he would use daily. It has to look good, but it also has to be practical for the owner and improve the dog's life. Then he said: "I see so many collars in my market and I think, this is wrong. Sure, it looks good for the owner, but for the dog's experience it's not great."
That is the moat. Right there.
"I view the world from a dog's perspective" is something a superstore cannot copy, because it is not a feature. It is a point of view.
We love our dogs like children now. They have snuck into our bedrooms and we feed them better than we feed ourselves. So the question that actually matters to that customer is not "is this collar Australian" but "what do I want my dog's life to be like?"
And being in an uncomfortable collar all day must be a bit like a woman wearing a horrible bra. Just quietly awful, the whole time, forever.
Chris asked, half laughing, whether he could use that. He should. Because that is differentiation you can build a brand on — speaking in the first person as the dog, from the dog's side of the lead. It gives you your own space, completely your own space, and it is a space nobody with a warehouse full of imported SKUs can follow you into.
The big players are a volume game. Throughput, shelf space, stock turn. What Chris does is closer to a fitting. When I ordered from him he came back and asked whether I was sure that neck measurement was right — because it mattered. We would not wear clothes that did not fit, or glasses that did not fit. Why would we do that to a dog?
Get the tone of voice right and let that personality run through every touch point. There are good tools to help with this now: Google Labs has a free public beta called Pomelli that reads your website and builds out brand guidelines from it. Chris had already played with it. It hallucinates a bit, he said. They all do. So do we.
Let the Story Travel
Partnership Marketing: How to Reach Customers Without an Ad Budget
Here is the part that costs nothing and is worth more than a media budget.
Chris's partner owns a grooming salon in Canterbury, in Melbourne, which her parents started back in 1995. How did they grow it? Every dog went home from a groom with a little ribbon that said I'm a yuppie puppy. And it became a thing people wanted. Not the groom — the ribbon.
That is a story travelling by itself, with the proof in plain sight. You only ever let your dog have one bad groom, so the ribbon was also a guarantee.
The dog park is the channel. Not Meta, not Google. The dog park.
Which means the branding has to do work when you are not there. Years ago, with one of the businesses I backed, we made sure the reorder details were on the outside of the packaging — this was before QR codes were on everything — so that it reached the people who had not purchased, not just the people who had. When your product is a fashion statement at seven in the morning on wet grass, make it easy for the next person to ask where it came from.
And then stop trying to buy customers one at a time. That is the slowest, most expensive way to grow there is.
Find out who is already talking to your audience. Groomers. Vets. The local dog food business with a deep belief about canine nutrition and the same customers as you. Those relationships are joint marketing opportunities, and they cost you nothing but the asking.
When I started out I had no money at all — I had spent it all on the website. So I found other businesses talking to the same kind of customer who wanted experiences and did not know they were available. There were four of us with online businesses at the time, and we put coupons in each other's parcels. You would think flowers, fragrance, subscriptions and experiences were competing for the same dollar. Apparently not. Not everybody wants an experience voucher, but they might want flowers. So we shared customers, four small businesses stacking up against the big ones, and we did it for years. We did not have to buy media. We were using each other's.
Chris has already done a version of this, putting a dog food company's material in his outgoing orders. He described it as working out who can sell our products for us without us having to put boots on the ground. That is exactly it.
There are only so many hours in a day. The word I keep coming back to is leverage: how do I take my energy and amplify it? Because what you work on is what makes you successful, and what you say no to is a distraction — the nice to have rather than the must have.
One last thing, and Chris raised it himself so I want to honour it. He talked openly about the breakdown that came before the business. He said he thought he was crazy, or alone, and that knowing other people had been through it would have made it easier. Most business owners are on a long and lonely road and we do not talk about it publicly nearly enough. Nothing about business is getting easier. It is harder than it has ever been. So if any of that landed with you, please look at the resources in the show notes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do Australian customers really pay more for Australian made products?
Some do and some do not, and the logo alone will not decide it. Australian made works when it is attached to a story the customer wants to be part of — the jobs created, the materials saved from landfill, the workshop it came from. Presented as a badge, it competes on price. Presented as a story, it competes on meaning.
How does a small business compete against large retailers and importers?
Not on price or volume, because that is a cost equation you will lose to anyone importing at a much higher margin. Compete on a point of view they cannot copy, on customisation and fit they are not set up to offer, and on the trust that comes from a maker who uses the product themselves.
What are the three reasons customers buy?
Transactional, where you were simply in the right place at the right time and they will not remember you. Emotional, where the purchase solves a real problem and they feel better for making it. And social, where buying from you says something about the kind of person they are. The third is growing fastest and is where provenance genuinely matters.
How do you market a business with no advertising budget?
Find the people already speaking to your customers — the groomers, the vets, the adjacent brands — and market alongside them. Swap inserts, share audiences, run joint promotions. It costs nothing but the asking, and it beats acquiring customers one at a time.
How do you build word of mouth for a physical product?
Make the product visible and easy to trace. Put the reorder details where non-customers will see them, give people something they want to display, and design for the moment your product is spotted by a stranger. A grooming salon in Melbourne grew for decades on a ribbon that said I'm a yuppie puppy.
Listen to the full episode with Chris Loverseed of PK9 Gear on all podcast networks
