Trace Your Dog’s Ancestry with BreedStory

by RENEE PATRICK Cascade Business News Feature Writer

Have you ever stared at your Rottweiler or Miniature Poodle and wondered where they got some of their unique characteristics? Would you believe those two breeds share similar wolf ancestry? In fact, most of today’s breeds can trace their lineage back to just a handful of animals, a story that is now illustrated on canvas prints called BreedStory.

Through the partnership of Premier Printing Solutions and Bend Veterinarian Dave Colton, BreedStory presents dog owners with a visual representation of the history of man’s best friend. 115 breeds are represented on the 12” x 16” gallery-wrapped prints, presenting a staggering array of archaeological and historical research of the modern-day dog.

“Dave Colton started the project on his own years ago,” explained Brett Davis of Premier Printing Solutions (PPS). Colton, not only a veterinarian, but dog lover, spent years researching breeds and their histories before working with his mother, a dog portrait artist, who hand painted each likeness on ceramic tiles. She worked from wooden carvings and old illustrations and at times used a “really good imagination for what those breeds could have looked like.”

“I have been interested in breed origination for a long time,” commented Colton. When he began the project, he read every book he could find on the topic and conducted a gigantic survey of all the literature he could find. “I started going deeper and deeper, and went back to books that were hundreds of years old to try and come up with a consensus of what we thought happened way back.”

He learned that dogs had begun to be domesticated about 1,500 years ago with the wolf. “I made a gigantic key which basically breaks all the breeds up based on what the early naturalists thought, and made an illustrated ancestry, I make it clear that these are a best guess of what probably happed, what isn’t available is the whole picture,”

Dog lovers themselves, the staff at PPS took an interest in Colton’s work, and with the addition of PPS’s gallery wrapped canvas printing capabilities within the last year, Davis proposed partnering with Colton to update his work and begin marketing the visual histories to dog lovers.

“It seemed like a really good fit,” Davis continued. “He spent a lot of time on the project and we do the canvas printing and framing in-house here.”

Davis and the team at PPS digitally updated the look of the prints, branded the product and has taken over the marketing and selling of BreedStory. To ensure the durability of their work, PPS applies a UV protective coating to the canvas after a 10 color printing process, in effect preserving the color for life.

“We are typically a business to business operation,” said Davis, “so this is a new product for us. We are now trying to get out there and interact a little bit with the public.” While only available for sale over the past few months, BreedStory has garnered a lot of attention in their shop on Etsy, an online marketplace for handmade, vintage and art items.

Having done a fair amount of research into similar products, he found very little competition in regards to artistic representations of dog ancestry. “There’s a lot of data out there, but you won’t hang that on your wall,” he laughed. “It’s purely unique and a one of a kind product.”

“It’s interesting,” he said. “A lot of the 115 breed’s ancestry is the same; there are basically three wolves [at the root of all lineage], and two of those three are in almost every breed. The Asian

Dingo is also in almost every breed,” Davis explained.

PPS has a display of BreedStory prints in their office at 920 SW Emkay. “There is a lot of interest in them,” he said. “We always have really good conversations about our pets when people come in.”

“What I tried to do initially was try to take this to the dog shows and give people a way to look at their breed and learn where their dog came from,” Colton said. “I’m a busy vet, don’t have time to do marketing, I’m really happy they could put it in a form that could be marketed.”

Currently the prints are only available for sale on Etsy, “We will look at other avenues of sales eventually; we want to grow it out a little more, that was the initial push,” Davis said. “We wanted a means to conduct business, when people come in and want to get one we can refer them there.”

While Davis admitted the market on Etsy for products focused on specific breeds like Labs and German Shepards is saturated, many of the other 115 breeds covered in BreedStory have fairly low competition.

“We are right on track, and our traffic is good, It’s pretty cool to watch the interest grow,” he said. About 50 breeds are currently available in the Etsy shop, but interested parties can contact Davis to enquire about others.

BreedStory prints retail for $129 and can be found at www.etsy.com/shop/breedstory.