Founders Everywhere: Katie Hunt
Katie Hunt is the co-founder & CEO of Oh Norman!, a pet care brand creating well-made, eco-friendly, and ethically sourced products for pets everywhere.
Welcome to Founders Everywhere, where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at Everywhere Ventures, a global pre-seed fund supported by a community of 500 founders and operators.
Oh Norman! is a new pet care brand that creates well-made, eco-friendly, and ethically sourced products for pets. It was developed by actress Kaley Cuoco, best known for her role in The Big Bang Theory, and for being an absolute animal lover. When Kaley’s heart dog Norman passed away, she made a promise to herself to build a company worthy of him. It all began with a simple yet powerful idea—to develop a pet care brand that could truly meet the needs and values of pet owners, who, like her, consider their animals an integral part of the family.
Kaley teamed up with Katie Hunt who is the company’s co-founder and CEO. She and Kaley share a passion for animal rescue and decided that a portion of every sale will go directly back to rescue organizations. Katie was the co-founder of multiple enterprises including The Fund, now Everywhere Ventures and SHOWFIELDS. She was also one of the first employees at Warby Parker and the Chief Brand Officer for the dating app Hinge. We were excited to chat with her about her newest endeavor, Oh Norman!, and what it’s like working with celebrity Kaley Cuoco.
Tell us about how you teamed up with Kaley to create Oh Norman!
Kaley always had the idea to start a pet company with ethically sourced and eco-friendly products. She embarked on this journey to create a brand that would not only honor her cherished Norman, but also revolutionize the pet care industry. In the process of making this dream a reality, she was introduced to JOBI Brands, who previously helped other celebrities take their mission over the finish line, such as Courteney Cox and her brand Homecourt. They reached out to me to become her CEO and co-founder, and within 30 seconds of meeting Kaley, I knew this was something that I needed to work on and that she was the perfect person to do this with. We both have a passion for animal rescue and a shared vision to offer products truly worthy of our beloved animals. With Kaley’s creative insight and my operational experience, we set out to bring Oh Norman! to life.
What's Oh Norman!’s mission?
Our mission is to do good by the people we work with, the products we make, and the consumers that trust us. We believe in offering affordable, ethical, eco-friendly, pet products, and we're committed to giving back to animal rescue. In other words, better pet products for all.
What sets Oh Norman! apart?
There's currently no one-stop-shop for ethically sourced, eco-friendly pet products. We’re building a space where you don't have to research every ingredient; it's already done for you. There’s no questioning where the products came from, what they’re made of, or how people were treated in the making of those items. And yet, they're still the same price as everything else that you would normally buy for your pet. We sincerely believe that there’s so much opportunity to increase the wellness of pets, both physically and mentally, and to do it all with natural ingredients.
Tell us about some milestones that Oh Norman! has crushed.
We’ve officially launched! Our best selling products are Stop Effing Itching! and Calm the Eff Down!, which are liquid supplements for dogs.
We just raised a $3 million seed round from investors including Midnight Venture Partners, Everywhere Ventures, JOBI Brands, and Freedom Trail Capital.
We have close to 150,000 organic followers on Instagram less than two weeks post launch thanks to a successful pre-launch campaign
Do you have any book recommendations?
A CEO Only Does Three Things: Finding Your Focus in the C-Suite is a good one. This chapter of my career is about focus. It's not as much about being great at as many things as humanly possible; it’s about maintaining focus on the things that I need to do in order to clear a path for our team. I'm learning how to let go of the small stuff and to empower the team to build something that we can all be proud of.
Fun fact: I have two rescue dogs who are my absolute life, Rome and Machete. Rome was rescued out of a dumpster in LA and Machete was found on the street in Mexico. Now they both have beds in every room in the house and are official treats and toy testers for Oh Norman!
Episode 18 of the Venture Everywhere podcast, Tune In with Serge Kassardjian and Jenny Fielding is out. Listen now on Apple, Spotify, Pandora and check out all our past episodes here!
