By Lawrence Specker
al.com
WWR Article Summary (tl;dr) After winning two local pitch competitions, entrepreneur Bailey Duos launched her startup “Port City Pups”, a new doggie daycare where the canine is King!
Mobile
The latest sign of accelerating development in downtown Mobile isn’t a condo project, a brewery or a supermarket. It’s a daycare. For dogs.
Entrepreneur Bailey Duos, freshly graduated from the University of South Alabama, said that finding a home for her new downtown business was “Terrible. That was the worst part of the whole thing.”
Duos and supporters held a ribbon-cutting Monday morning for Port City Pups, a pet care and boarding facility. One key step in getting to that point, Duos said, had been finding a building with plenty of open square footage to board and exercise pets. “That’s hard to find downtown,” she said. “Everyone’s buying it up.”
She landed at 650 St. Anthony St., becoming a tenant in a building that was formerly a city warehouse. After graduating May, she said Monday, she’d worked to “get everything up and going in a semester’s time.”
It helped that she graduated with money in hand from her wins in three business pitch competitions. She won two sponsored by USA – the 2018 Causeway Pitch Competition and the 2019 Coastal Venture Competition — winning a total of $6,200 in startup money. Then she placed second in a larger contest sponsored by United Bank, winning $10,000.
Port City Pups isn’t the only business of its kind in Mobile, but it is the first to offer services downtown, where residential development has been a hot topic in recent years. Duos said the growth that made suitable real estate scarce is exactly what drew her to downtown.
“I saw the growth,” she said, noting that she’s one block off the rapidly developing St.
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Louis Street corridor. “I mean, it was just booming … I just wanted in on that growth.”
Port City Pups offers conventional boarding, but Duos said she thinks its “doggy daycare” service may prove popular with people who live or work downtown. She said it’s an option for people who’d like their dogs to have more stimulation while the owners are away at work.
“Doggie daycare is when you’re on your way to work, typically it’s kind of catered to the 8-to-5 crowd, when you’re headed to work you drop in, you leave your dog with me, and they’ll play with other dogs all day long,” she said. “And the good thing of that is, they’re getting all their energy out and they come home and all they do is sleep.”
Duos said some of the beneficiaries of the service may be particularly pampered canines, but it’s not all about spoiling them. It’s also good for owners whose pets have a tendency to chew up the house when bored, she said. Scheduling can be daily or occasional, she said.
For more information, visit www.portcitypups.com.
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Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
