A lot of pet brands will tell you they care about animals. Modernbeast built its entire business model around the claim and then did the thing that actually proves it: the company donates 100 percent of its profits to animal rescues. Not a percentage of one product line, not a round-up-at-checkout program. All of it.
The brand, a women-owned operation, curates and designs dog and cat gear around what it calls a refined sense of adventure, and it’s aimed squarely at the kind of conscientious pet owner who already chooses rescues over breeders and small makers over big-box shelves. Co-founders Hope Reiners and Lona Williams built it to refuse the usual trade-off between style, usefulness, and sustainability. We caught up with Reiners about how a pet company ends up structured like a nonprofit.
The idea came from a friendship and a famous salad dressing
The concept originally belonged to Williams. She and Reiners met roughly five years before the brand took off, bonding, naturally, over dogs, after Reiners did pro bono design work for a charity event Williams ran benefiting Best Friends Animal Society. Williams had been kicking around a business idea modeled on Newman’s Own, the food company whose profits all flow to charity, only for pets. The two teamed up and, by Reiners’s own account, did everything slightly backwards.
Rather than launching online, they started on the wholesale side, with their first store a well-known Los Angeles boutique and a splashy launch party. Wholesale grew quickly, which led to a pop-up retail shop at Westfield Century City that was supposed to last a month and instead ran for nearly two years. Only after all of that did they finally build out their own e-commerce site.
Why give away the profits
Ask Reiners why she and Williams chose a charity-first structure over a conventional one and the answer is disarmingly plain: their real passions are animals and giving back, and it never sat right with them to build a product company without funneling something meaningful back to a cause. The point, as she frames it, is to keep the possibility of doing good for others in view rather than treating profit as the only scoreboard.
Choosing where that money goes started close to home. Because the founders met through a Best Friends Animal Society event, that organization anchored their giving for the first couple of years. As they got deeper into the animal-welfare world, they widened the circle to Los Angeles groups they’d come to know and trust, and eventually reached the point where rescues were approaching them, an arrangement Reiners appreciates because it keeps introducing her to new organizations. The roster has grown to include A Purposeful Rescue, Stray Cat Alliance, Wags & Walks, Vintage Pet Rescue, and NKLA.
Sustainability baked into the materials
Modernbeast’s environmental thinking isn’t a marketing layer, it’s in how the products are physically made, with an emphasis on not generating waste in the first place. The company’s toy bones are cut from wool, and the offcuts become felt hats; each bandana is cut from a single yard of fabric, and the leftover scraps become tiny felt “modern mice.” Open up one of the beds and you’ll find a greenish recycled fill, much of it repurposed soda bottles. Wool runs through the dog line precisely because it’s renewable, it grows back and can be sheared without harming the animal. Those top-selling felt dog toys come filled with either recycled bottles or soothing organic lavender, while the cat toys, fittingly, get catnip. The brand even stocks a small collection for the humans, from boutique candles to artisan stoneware mugs.
What’s next
Reiners says the company has been building out internationally, with new distribution in Japan and South Korea, and expanding into product categories the founders had long wanted to tackle, including collars and leashes. They’re also growing the apparel side, since the T-shirts have turned into one of their stronger sellers, proof, Reiners notes with some amusement, that people simply love dressing up animals they treat like their children.
For a category crowded with brands competing on aesthetics, Modernbeast’s pitch is refreshingly concrete: buy a nicely made, thoughtfully sourced thing for your pet, and the profit lands with an animal that needs it. You can find the collection directly through Modernbeast; it’s a house brand sold direct, so there isn’t an equivalent Amazon listing.
