Buff Cake Got a Makeover: Come See What's New Around the Barkery
If you've been hanging around Buff Cake Barkery for a while, you may have noticed things look a little different around here.
Okay, a lot different.
We recently gave the Buff Cake website a pretty serious rebuild, and while we absolutely wanted it to look better, this wasn't just about changing colors, moving some pictures around and calling it a redesign.
Buff Cake has changed.
What started as a small New Hampshire dog treat business has grown into crunchy treats, soft treats, hand-decorated dog cookies, birthday and Gotcha Day celebrations, wholesale partnerships, retail shelves, BCB Crew Wear and quite a few other things that didn't exist when earlier versions of our website were built.
Eventually, the website needed to catch up. So we rebuilt it.
And since you're already here, we figured we'd give you the tour.
First things first: the dog treats
The dogs still run this place.
Our Crunchy Dog Treats collection brings all four of our everyday crunchy recipes together in one place: Buff Nutter Bones, Pumped Up PB Pumpkin, Pawfect Apple and Barkin' Blueberry-Banana Crunch.
They're handmade in New Hampshire in small batches, with simple, limited ingredients and recipes built around recognizable ingredients like peanut butter, pumpkin, apples, blueberries and bananas.
The new site makes it much easier to compare the lineup and find the recipe that works for your dog instead of making you hunt around for it.
Some dogs are Team Soft
Our Soft Dog Treats have their own home now, too.
That's where you'll find Berry Dawgnuts, our soft blueberry dog treats made with real blueberries, almond flour, organic oat flour, flaxseed and honey.
Berry Dawgnuts are made to order and available by pre-order, which helps us keep up with demand without constantly throwing up that dreaded sold-out sign. Once you order, we bake them fresh for you, so you'll want to check the product page for current production and shipping timing.
They're especially handy for puppies, seniors and dogs who simply prefer a softer bite.
Apparently dogs can have texture preferences. Because of course they can.
The cookie situation needed its own space
This may be one of our favorite parts of the rebuild.
Decorated cookies have become a much bigger part of Buff Cake over the years, and trying to squeeze birthdays, Gotcha Days, funny sayings, specialty cookies and every holiday imaginable into one place was starting to feel a little like opening the junk drawer and hoping for the best.
So now our Decorated Dog Cookies have a proper home.
From there, you can see the decorated cookies currently available and find the right place to go depending on what you're celebrating.
Planning your dog's birthday or celebrating the day they officially became yours? Our Celebration Cookies are offered by pre-order, with birthday and Gotcha Day designs baked and decorated to order.
That includes our Celebrate Good Times Bundle (Birthday/Gotcha Day), where you can choose your cookie combination and color palette, then give us the details we need to make the set for your pup. Because these are custom, decorated-to-order cookies, you'll want to plan ahead and check the product page for the current lead time before ordering.
For a single celebration treat, our Celebration Bones let you choose Happy Birthday or Happy Gotcha Day, along with the available flavor and color option, for a hand-decorated bone made for the occasion.
And when Halloween, Christmas, Valentine's Day and the rest of the calendar start creeping up on us, our Seasonal Dog Cookies have their own spot, too. Those designs rotate throughout the year, so the collection reflects what's currently being offered rather than promising a particular cookie year-round.
Sometimes you just need a really good dog cookie
Not every cookie needs a holiday attached to it.
Some dogs deserve one because it's their birthday. Some deserve one because it's their Gotcha Day. Some deserve one because they managed to go outside in the rain without acting personally betrayed by the weather.
The rebuilt cookie section gives us room for all of that, while also making it much clearer what's currently available, what's seasonal and what needs to be pre-ordered.
Basically, we've accepted that there are significantly more reasons to buy your dog a cookie than there are actual holidays. We're comfortable with that.
Buff Cake is showing up in more places, too
The website isn't the only place Buff Cake has been growing.
You'll still find us face to face at markets and events, and Buff Cake treats are also making their way onto more retail shelves.
Most recently, Buff Nutter Bones and Pumped Up PB Pumpkin are available at five Hannaford locations in New Hampshire, where you can find Buff Cake in the dog treat aisle and on Shop Local walls.
We put together a separate guide showing where to find Buff Cake Barkery at Hannaford, including the participating New Hampshire locations and which treats you'll find there.
For the latest participating Hannaford locations, you can also check the Hannaford section on the Buff Cake Barkery homepage.
Want Buff Cake in your store?
This is another part of the website we wanted to make much easier.
We're always interested in meeting retailers who think Buff Cake would make sense on their shelves, particularly as we continue growing throughout New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
Our wholesale partners aren't all the same, either. Buff Cake can be a fit for pet stores, locally focused markets, general stores, gift shops and other independent retailers whose customers like discovering products made by smaller businesses.
If that sounds like your shop, our Become a Retailer page explains our wholesale dog treat program and gives you a place to start the conversation.
Already part of the Buff Cake retail crew? We didn't forget about you. There's now a separate Existing Retailers area to make getting where you need to go easier.
We're proud of the stores that choose to put Buff Cake on their shelves, and we're definitely not finished meeting new ones.
Then there's something for the humans
At some point, we realized the people buying all these dog treats might like something too.
Enter BCB Crew Wear.
BCB Crew Wear is the apparel side of Buff Cake Barkery, created for the humans behind the leash. It's where dog humor, Buff Cake personality and our New Hampshire roots ended up on tees, hoodies and hats.
This isn't us slapping a paw print on random merchandise and calling it dog apparel. These are designs inspired by actually living with dogs.
Case in point: Sometimes Sit Happens. Treats Help.
If you've ever watched a perfectly trained dog suddenly forget every command they've learned because something more interesting appeared 30 feet away, you already understand the shirt.
We wrote about the story behind the design in Sometimes Sit Happens: The Dog Life Behind Our BCB Crew Wear Tee.
The website changed. Buff Cake didn't.
That's probably the most important part.
The new Buff Cake Barkery website has more places to go, more things to discover and a much better way to find what you're actually looking for.
But underneath all of it is still the same idea that started Buff Cake in the first place.
We're still a small-batch dog treat company based in Nashua, New Hampshire. We're still making treats with simple, limited ingredients. We're still decorating cookies by hand. We're still probably talking about dogs more than socially necessary.
And Zane is still involved in quality-control discussions despite contributing remarkably little actual labor.
If you're new here, you can read our story and meet the Buff Cake behind the Barkery.
If you've been here for years, thank you for growing with us.
And if you only came here because your dog needs treats? Honestly, that's how most of this started anyway.