The Big Business of the Doodle Boom

0:00Hello, I'm Stephen Carroll. I'm in Brussels where many of Europe's biggest decisions get made. And I'm Caroline Hepker in London with the hosts of the Bloomberg Daybreak Europe podcast. We're up early every weekday keeping an eye on what's happening across Europe and around the world. We do it early so the news is fresh, not recycled and so you know what actually matters as the day gets going. From Brussels, I'm following the politics, policy and the people shaping the European Union right now. And from London, I'm looking at what all that means for markets, money and the wider economy. We've got reporters across Europe and around the globe feeding in as stories break So whether it's geopolitics, energy, tech or markets you're hearing it while it happens It's smart, calm and to the point And it fits into your morning You can find new episodes of the Bloomberg Daybreak Europe podcast by 7am in Dublin or 8am in Brussels, Berlin and Paris On Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts

1:02Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. Hi. Oh, hello. Okay, come on in. Come on in. I don't know. Come on in. Hi. I'm David. Nice to meet you. Hi. So nice to meet you. And you're Sarah? Yes. Nice to meet you. Great to meet you. Thanks a lot. A few days ago, our producer David Fox and I drove to the suburbs of New Jersey to meet Lauren Houston and her dogs. This is Skylie. She turned 11 in September. And this is Vippy here. Vippy is VIP, which stands for Very Important Puppy. She is my first breeding mama in the program, and she just had her retirement litter. This is Gavin. He is one of my stud dogs.

1:54He just started breeding. And then Navy. Vippy and Skylee and Gavin and Navy aren't just any old dogs. They're Labradoodles.

2:09Labradoodles are a mix between a Labrador retriever and a poodle. They're just one branch of the doodle family tree. And Lauren is a Labradoodle breeder. In 2021, she started a company called Sunny Heart Doodles. Now she breeds and raises doodle puppies out of her home. I breed exclusively many multi-generational Australian Labradoodles who are health tested and have lineage dating back to the original lines of Australian Labradoodles. Since the first Labradoodle was born in Australia in 1989, doodles of all kinds have exploded in popularity. But Lauren was an early adopter. She got a couple cockapoos in the late 90s.

2:55That's a Cocker Spaniel poodle mix for the uninitiated. And then in the early 2000s, when Lauren was looking for a new dog to take in, she discovered the world of Labradoodles. I wound up connecting with a bunch of these different doodle clubs. And I thought, OK, I've met like 30, 40 of these dogs and they've all been amazing. I would love any one of them. What was special about them? I think they're Muppet, like bouncy, flouncy, happy-go-luckiness. I naturally gravitate towards them. They're just so human-esque in their expressions and even in their eyes. They're just kind of captivating. Fast forward to 2025, and Lauren has raised dozens of doodle puppies for other families to adopt.

3:42Meanwhile, people around the country have fallen in love with the dogs, too. Look how cute they are. You cannot find a coat anywhere like this in the animal kingdom. It's a live human, a live teddy bear. They're sweet, they're smart, they're cuddly, and you'll never go to the bathroom alone. Doodles have become a big business, one that could be worth more than a billion dollars. I'll be walking my dogs down the street and like downtown and somebody from across the street will be like, Doodle? And I'll be like, yeah, doodle? And, you know, it's kind of like, you know, thumbs up because they have a doodle too.

4:16But the ubiquity of these Muppet-like poodle mixes has also come with some puppy drama. I think it's fair to say that there is a little bit of disagreement between sort of like the institutional gatekeepers who have for centuries had the final say over what is considered and is not considered a dog. That's Ali Conti, a journalist who recently wrote a story about doodles for Bloomberg Businessweek. And then these women who have, you know, started their own small businesses, started breeding dogs. saying, you know, wait, I don't need your permission to say that I've created a dog. So will these pups stay on top?

4:54Or has America reached peak doodle? I'm Sarah Holder, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, welcome to doodle mania. We go inside the biology and the business behind the doodles' rise to fame.

5:15I'm going to give you 30 seconds, and you need to, or you are welcome to, name as many doodle breeds as you can. Are you down? Yes, I think I might embarrass myself, but let's go for it. It's going to be great. Okay, stopwatch. And putting 30 seconds on the clock. Ready, go. Well, golden doodle, bernadoodle, labradoodle. That's like the holy trinity, so to speak. Sheepoo, Maltipoo, Cavapoo, Schnoodle, Golden Mountain Doodle, Double Doodle, Great Danoodle. That was the one that I love. I'm glad I got that in before the clock. How many of those doodles did you know about before reporting this piece?

6:07Which one? The Golden Doodle. The ubiquitous one. Back in 2024, reporter Ali Conti started looking into a strange phenomenon. Why doodles seem to be everywhere. On sidewalks with their owners, in cafes, breweries, on TikTok, in her editor's neighborhood in New Jersey. Ali set out to find out just how big the doodle biz had gotten. This is like super back in the nappy end, but I think it is just north of a billion dollars. Wow. And what goes into that calculation? The number of dogs, then the amount that they cost, and then how much it costs to maintain them. So like Golden Doodles, for instance, actually cost more to maintain than other dogs because they need more grooming.

6:52So that factors in as well. But it's just north of a billion. There are no official doodle population figures. But for the past several years, the pet care site Rover.com has found that doodles are among the most popular dogs on their platform. The pet insurance division of Nationwide has reported that from 2013 to 2021, the number of doodles they were insuring had increased 160 percent. Each of these dogs can cost thousands of dollars a year. Doodle breeders charge an average of$2 ,000 per dog. And there are higher end options, too. A company called Pride and Prejudoodles asks for more than$15 ,000 for a fully trained dog.

7:35Then there's about$3 ,000 a year in maintenance costs. Think grooming, feeding, and health care. It adds up. So how did the doodle market get so big? To understand that, you have to begin far away from New Jersey. So the doodle origin story is that in 1989, a man named Wally Conran in Australia bred this dog that was supposed to be for this blind woman with a allergic partner. So he combined a lab and a poodle. And, you know, after like, I think it was like 33 different trial runs of this, he found like the magic sort of combination of dogs that could like, you know, be like the seeing eye dog for this person.

8:23So, you know, obviously very intelligent and, you know, listens to people and can be taught. and then also didn't trigger the partner's allergies. So that was sort of how this started. It was to fill a very specific need, ironically, and now the dog has become, like, the dog of choice for all different kinds of people. The doodle began to take off in the U.S. in the late 90s, when a couple of American breeders started marketing them widely. And then once one person got one, they would tell their friends, and then, you know, the friends would want the sibling dog, and then that kind of grew from there.

8:56That word of mouth reached Lauren Houston. She got her first doodle straight from Australia in 2004 and joined a passionate and growing community of doodle lovers. While I was waiting for this puppy, I was on the Breeders Chat page like every day looking at photos and connecting with people. So when I got Reagan, I felt like I kind of knew this whole group of people. And it was pretty, it was a pretty extensive network, actually, I have to say. So we would do playdates, birthday parties for the dogs and stuff like that. And as Labradoodles became more and more popular, breeders tried to ride the wave and come up with new variations.

9:40They were making all kinds of poodle mixes. Cockapoos, Maltypoos, Golden Doodles, Miniature Golden Doodles. The dog's popularity grew to the point that by the end of the decade, a doodle nearly reached the highest office in the land. So another inflection point would be 2009. Nine, Obama famously, I say famously, but like it's only because I know. Sorry, it's when Obama famously was like considering getting a doodle. It was a milestone that caught the attention of the American Kennel Club, a group founded in the 19th century that registers purebred dogs and advocates for dog health. And the AKC like released a statement being like, oh, well, he should really think twice about this.

10:24You never know what you're getting into. Like, they clearly had, like, this, like, PR crisis where, like, oh, my God, like. And is that why he went with the Portuguese water dog? I would imagine that it probably gave him paws or, you know, we've all seen beep. I feel like there was a conversation about it. The doodle may have come short of being America's first pup, but people like Lauren were already hooked. In 2014, Lauren got another pet doodle named Skylie. She made her an Instagram account. Within a year, it had 25 ,000 followers. In 2016, Lauren started working for Skylie's Breeder, running their social media accounts.

11:02Then COVID hit, and Doodle Demand reached new heights. People were home and everybody was getting puppies. But for our program anyway, or their program, it was explosive. Lauren decided to go solo. She launched her own breeding program in 2021. Since then, she's sold 83 puppies. Her website says each puppy currently costs$3 ,400 plus tax. And on Instagram and Facebook, her doodle-related accounts have a following of more than 140 ,000. I'll just say it. I'm a beast. When I have puppies on the ground, I'm posting a minimum of 40 stories a day. It's all day long. There will never be a family that can say, I don't know what's happening over at Sunny Heart Doodles.

11:48Like, no, they see everything. But the rise of the doodle has raised some concerns from purebred enthusiasts and some of the most powerful gatekeepers in the dog world. The doodle drama. That's after the break.

12:10This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. The time is approximately 11.15 a.m. About to start consensual telephone call with Dr. Daiwa Zhang. China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world. But in 2017, the FBI got inside.

12:51I've never seen that much evidence in my entire career, and I don't think we'll ever see that much evidence again. I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question, of his life. And that's a unicorn. This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to The Sixth Bureau from Bloomberg Podcasts starting on February 13th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

13:35As part of her reporting on the doodle business for Businessweek, Ali Conti also wanted to understand another aspect of the doodle boom. It's critics. Online, you'll find a lot of vitriol directed at doodle breeders and a fierce debate over whether their breeding practices are ethical. So if you talk to people who breed doodles, they will often talk about doodle hate and how they get a lot of hate mail and people commenting on their Facebook pages from people who are into purebred dogs, essentially, saying these dogs are bred unethically, they're not healthy, spreading messaging about like you never know what you're going to get when you get a doodle.

14:14And Ali says you can find some of the loudest doodle opponents at events put on by the American Kennel Club, the nonprofit registry that has final say on what is and isn't considered an official breed in the U.S. The organization's stamp of approval is the best way for an emerging dog breed to become popular with the public. And the AKC doesn't recognize doodles. An AKC spokesperson told Allie that no doodles have applied to be recognized. Earlier this year, Allie went to the club's Meet the Breeds event in New York. It's where people go and like basically proselytize about their favorite breed.

14:52And it's like fun. You get to go pet a bunch of dogs. But people have these like anti-doodle like buttons on. What does an anti-doodle button look like? If you have a picture of a doodle, it's so cute. It just says doodle with a line through it. The AKC makes the majority of its$100 million in annual revenue from registering purebred dogs and selling tracking chips to owners. But since doodles hit the scene, the AKC has seen purebred poodle registrations decline. In 1990, there were just under 72 ,000 registered poodles. By 2008, that number had dropped to just under 22 ,000. They haven't released dog registration data since then.

15:34So it's kind of like the AKC is rapidly losing its relevance. Like, people are not super hung up on having a purebred dog anymore. I mean, this is their livelihood, right? And the rise of the doodle has absolutely cut into their market share. You know, they always say, like, this is about the health of the dogs. And there are backyard breeders who are doing unethical things for sure. But there are also ethical breeders, so it's not really fair to say if you get a golden doodle, it's going to have health problems. You know, it's going to be from an unethical breeding situation. Like, that's not true at all, but that is sort of the line.

16:10Through a spokesperson, the AKC told us in an email that, quote, we are not anti-mixed breed or anti-doodle, nor do we see these dogs as a threat to the organization in any financial or organizational way. The spokesperson also said they don't consider financial factors when considering whether to recognize a breed. were cutting into their market share, the spokesperson said no, that there was no way for them to track that. She said the organization includes doodles in, quote, many of the AKC-sanctioned sports and activities, and that they value the enthusiasm, athleticism, and joy that they bring to their events and to the dog community as a whole.

16:49And how has the doodle community responded? Well, if you ask anyone who's like an ethical breeder in the doodle world, they will say, well, we want nothing to do with the AKC. And it's hard to know if they don't really care about getting this recognition from the AKC because they just don't need it or if it's in a reaction to how they've been treated by these purebred breeders. So it's hard to know. The AKC spokesperson said in an email, As a doodle breeder, Lauren Houston says she's learned to live with the discourse. She just cares about her dogs. In my personal life, like everybody loves my dogs.

17:42Everybody just adores them. In the public space, it's a little more critical because there are many people who hate breeders and who hate doodles. I don't care who adopts what or who buys what purebred. I don't think that there are a whole lot of people out there who are going to be able to convince people who love doodles to not get doodles. Ali, when you think about the future of the doodle industry, have we hit peak doodle or could their popularity rise even more? I think the popularity could rise even more. You know, like there is still a bit of a stigma around doodle ownership, in part due to the AKC's messaging and messaging of some of these individual purebred breeders.

18:25And if that were to disappear, then I think there would be absolutely no barrier to doodles completely overtaking every dog park in America.

18:40This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. The show is hosted by me, David Gura, and Wan Ha. The show is made by Aaron Edwards, David Fox, Eleanor Harrison Dengate, Patty Hirsch, Rachel Lewis-Kriskie, Naomi Ng, Julia Press, Tracy Samuelson, Naomi Shaven, Alex Sugiura, Julia Weaver, Yang Yang, and Taka Yasuzawa. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg.com, subscribe today at Bloomberg.com slash podcast offer. Thanks for listening. We'll be back on Monday.

20:01Transcription by CastingWords AI is happening very quickly. When people buy EVs, they generally are quite happy with them. Bitcoin is pretty firmly an institutional play. Look for new episodes of Here's Why every Friday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you listen. Here's why AI isn't taking your job yet. Subscribe to Here's Why today, wherever you get your podcasts.