Dewar Gaines has always had the heart of an entrepreneur.
From his earliest memories of lemonade stands to his current role as the head of a multimillion-dollar dog treat company, his journey has been one of relentless drive and an instinct for marketing, of ups and downs, successes and failures.
It’s all led to Gaines founding and being CEO of Gaines Family Farmstead, an Irondale-based dog-treat maker that is now one of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S.
Entrepreneur from the start
Gaines showed his entrepreneurial spirit early.
“I had lemonade sales at about 4 years old and little businesses in junior high and high school,” he says. Born and raised in Birmingham, he attended McCallie School in Chattanooga for high school before embarking on an adventurous path.
After two years of college, Gaines headed to Montana before returning a few years later to finish his degree at Birmingham-Southern College. There, he played football with his younger brother, Paden, and experienced his first taste of entrepreneurship in the tech space.
His senior year, Gaines launched an injury prevention app, Throw Like a Pro, with renowned sports surgeon Dr. James Andrews. While the business ultimately was unsuccessful, Gaines credits it with teaching him a valuable lesson. “I think we were a little bit early, and I also didn’t know what I was doing,” he says. “But I got national media attention out of it and recognized then that I had a knack for marketing.”
A new passion: dog treats
After the app, Gaines pivoted into digital marketing, helping others build brands and tell their stories. He owned his own digital marketing company for a bit, but it was while working for another marketing agency that Gaines found himself in the world of pet treats.
He helped a client grow a dog treat company and soon realized he wanted to run his own business again. “I didn’t want to work for somebody else,” he says.
Gaines quit his job and moved to a Motel 6 in St. Louis to pursue a deal to bring that dog treat company to Birmingham. The deal fell apart, but Gaines didn’t let that stop him.
“I came home, and about 90 days later, Gaines Family Farmstead was born,” he says. “I said, if we can’t buy the company, we’ll compete with them head-on.”
For Gaines, dogs were part of the family. He grew up around them — his father’s parents raised Weimaraners on a farm, and his mother’s family were avid dog lovers. A pivotal moment came when Gaines’ family lost their dog, Beam, to rawhide poisoning, a tragedy they didn’t realize was even possible.
That loss inspired Gaines to create a healthier, all-natural alternative for dogs. “The ingredient panels of dog treats are disgusting most of the time,” he says. “We recognized the importance of clean, healthy, natural ingredients sourced from American farmers.”
From farmers markets to more sales
In October 2016, Gaines founded what was briefly Gaines Pet Treats, changing the name of the company in March 2017 after creating three brands: Gaines Family Farmstead, Farm to Fido and Gaines Pet Farm.
“Farm to Fido was my favorite, but we polled 15,000 pet owners in the United States, and Gaines Family Farmstead won by a landslide,” says Gaines, 37, who lives in Birmingham with his wife and two children.
And a family affair it was, with Paden quitting his own marketing job to work with his brother, and their mother and grandmother helping in the early days.
“We started buying empty bags, printing labels, slapping a label on the front of the bags and hand-stuffing bags, one at a time,” Gaines recalls. “There’s a picture of Gaggie, my mom’s mom, hand-packing bags at 92 years old in our little warehouse.”
The family took their homemade sweet potato treats to farmers markets and small local stores, slowly building a grassroots following.
Sweet potatoes became the core of their product line, which now includes beef and chicken treats.
“We knew the single-ingredient, sweet potato market was growing,” Gaines says. He and his brother spent hours experimenting with the right thickness, blanching time and dehydration process to create the perfect dog treat.
“There was a lot of trial and error, cut fingers, burned sweet potatoes and undercooked sweet potatoes,” Gaines says.
And there was a taste-tester. Duke, Gaines’ beloved Italian Mastiff, died earlier this year, but he spent years as Gaines Family Farmstead’s unofficial mascot. “He was the official taste-tester real quick, and he would go to all the farmers markets with us,” he says. “People would flock to our booth to see this little puppy.”
Eventually, using a manufacturer in South Alabama, the company launched with its sweet potato products. Just sweet potato.
“We literally took a sweet potato, pulled it out of the ground for the single-ingredient treats, and shaped it into either a french fry, a long chew, or into the shape of a sweet potato chip,” Gaines says. “And those were the first products that we launched.”
Six months later, though, the South Alabama manufacturer shut down. So, Gaines and his brother did the work themselves.
“We raised a little bit of money from a group of Birmingham investors, and we bought a commercial dehydrator and other equipment, including a 50-gallon crawfish cooker,” Gaines says. “We started hand-slicing sweet potatoes, blanching 90 pounds at a time, which would bake around 15 pounds of finished product. It would take seven or eight hours, so we could get three cooks in in a day. … I literally had a futon in the warehouse.”
A breakthrough came in 2019, when Paden Gaines visited the headquarters of Southeast Pet, a premiere pet treat distributor. He left that day with Gaines Family Farmstead’s first distribution deal, opening the doors to independent pet stores throughout the Southeast. That year, the company grew from one distributor to four, and at the following year’s Global Pet Expo, Gaines and company met with TJ Maxx, Costo and Chewys.com.
Navigating challenges and viral moments
The Global Pet Expo was in March 2020, and just days after returning from the successful trip, the pandemic shut the world down.
“We really were basically dead at that point,” Gaines says. But his gambler’s instinct paid off when TJ Maxx needed inventory due to supply chain issues with China. Gaines Family Farmstead stepped in and received large orders that kept the company afloat.
During the pandemic, Paden Gaines left the company (though he’s still a partner and has some ownership in it), and Dewar Gaines managed to keep Gaines Family Farmstead afloat, launching new products (including the company’s best-selling sweet potato bone) and expanding into 35 states.
And then, in 2022, Gaines Family Farmstead participated in the brand accelerator program at Amazon and was the subject of a 60-second brand video on the online marketplace that went viral, garnering 27 million views in just four days. They were also among the products selected for Amazon’s Holiday Gift Guide.
“We were out of inventory from November through January,” Gaines says. “You can’t predict viral moments.”
Going global and the Inc. 5000
2023 was a banner year for Gaines Family Farmstead.
In January 2023, the company secured a deal with Chewy.com, followed by its first order from Costco. “That one order from one region of Costco was more revenue than we did in the two previous years combined,” Gaines says.
In March 2023, the company raised $1.1 million in Series B funding, led by Skip Brock Sr. “These are guys in business who have been my mentors for a very long time,” Gaines says of his investors.
The company’s revenue jumped from $480,000 in 2022 to more than $2.2 million in 2023, earning a spot in the top 500 of this year’s Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies.
In 2024, the company also expanded internationally, launching in Canada and Europe, with plans for South Korea and Panama. In August, Gaines Family Farmstead rolled out new packaging for its products.
“We moved into a small warehouse, and now we’re in another warehouse,” says Gaines, who has two other full-time employees and a number of contractors. “In a year we’ll probably have outgrown this warehouse.”
Clean ingredients, relentless drive
At the heart of Gaines Family Farmstead’s success is the growing trend of the humanization of pet treats. “People want their dogs to eat clean, all-natural, limited-ingredient products just like they do,” Gaines says.
But beyond the trends and the clean ingredients, Gaines attributes their success to something much simpler: perseverance.
“We never quit,” he says. “When we started, people were already selling hundreds of thousands of bags a month of sweet potato products. We knew if we could just get the marketing right and the messaging right and the customer base right, we had a winner. And that’s what we did.”
Alec Harvey is executive editor of Business Alabama and Cary Norton is a freelance contributor. Both are based in Birmingham.
This article appears in the October 2024 issue of Business Alabama.