Kelly Costello started Puppy Cake in her Pittsburgh apartment in 2007. After switching to Fulfillment by Amazon in 2010, her sales exploded from 100 units per month to thousands—transforming her side project into a woman-owned manufacturing business that now operates from a 20,000-square-foot facility in rural Pennsylvania and generates 65% of its revenue through the Amazon store.
In a town of just 250 people in rural Porterville, Pennsylvania, Kelly Costello is celebrating something remarkable: over 100,000 dogs celebrating their birthdays annually with Puppy Cake’s cakes and treats.
What started in 2007 as an experiment in her one-bedroom Pittsburgh apartment has grown into a thriving woman-owned manufacturing business operating out of a 20,000-square-foot facility in Porterville, Pennsylvania.
Costello, CEO and founder of Puppy Cake, got the idea while working for a sales and marketing firm. One of her clients made cake mix for people, and she thought, “wouldn’t that be great if they made that for dogs?” After researching canine nutrition and finding nothing similar on the market, she experimented with recipes, modifying cake mixes to include only dog-safe ingredients. She launched Puppy Cake in November 2007 with her first two flavors: banana cake mix and carob cake mix, a dog-safe chocolate alternative.
A year later, she started selling in the Amazon store, fulfilling orders herself. But in 2010, she switched to Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), which handles storage, picking, packing, fulfillment and customer service for sellers. “Switching to using Fulfillment by Amazon was taking our sales from a dripping faucet to a fire hose,” Costello explained. Sales went from roughly 100 units per month to thousands of units per month almost immediately.
FBA solved critical challenges Costello faced during her growth phase: not enough physical space, capacity to keep up with orders, and money to hire full-time employees. FBA allowed her to scale the business without hiring more people and adding more space, while getting orders to customers in two days.
Today, Amazon represents 65 percent of Puppy Cake’s total sales and continues to be their fastest-growing channel. The company processes over 3,000 orders per month through Amazon, with the peanut butter cake mix as a top seller.
Puppy Cake manufactures everything at its Porterville facility, with approximately 90 percent of materials sourced in the U.S. The company’s growth has rippled through the tiny community. Local businesses, including the grocery store and pizza shop, reported increased sales when Puppy Cake moved to town. The company now employs six full-time workers—five women in production and operations, plus Costello’s husband, who handles machinery and process engineering.
“I’m really proud of all the women who work here because they’re both mentally and physically strong,” Costello said. The facility now operates equipment capable of producing up to 65 units per minute, a far cry from Costello’s early days hand-scooping everything in her apartment.
Manufacturing capacity is one component of Puppy Cake’s growth. But Costello also leverages multiple Amazon seller tools to make data-driven decisions and engage customers.
She uses Amazon’s SKU Economics to track costs and compare year-over-year sales, helping identify which products are growing versus slowing. She uses Sponsored Ads to experiment with different campaigns while monitoring conversion rates and ROI. When Costello’s team created a new type of product packaging, they used Amazon’s Manage Your Experiments tool to A/B test it against the old design. The old packaging won 75/25, saving them from a costly mistake.
Costello can also enhance customer engagement by providing detailed ingredient information using Amazon’s A+ Content tool, which helps brands add videos, enhanced images, and product comparison charts to their product detail pages. This is critical for ingredient-conscious consumers who want to ensure they’re giving their dogs something healthy and safe.
After eight years of selling in the Amazon store, Puppy Cake hit $1 million in revenue in 2018, a milestone Costello described as transformative. “Everything got easier; more and more doors got opened to us,” she recalled. Better economies of scale, improved ingredient pricing, and the ability to justify more machinery all followed.
For Costello, the partnership with Amazon has been essential. “I can say confidently, we would not have reached this level of growth at all without Amazon,” she said. “I do think Amazon’s a great partner and I’m really thankful for it.”
The company continues innovating, with Kitty Cake (chicken flavor) launching soon after more than 10 years of customer requests, and Puppy Cake Junior designed for use with toy baking ovens. Costello’s philosophy is clear: “If companies become stagnant, they essentially die on the vine.”
Looking back at her journey from apartment to 20,000-square-foot facility, Costello reflected: “Every once in a while, after everyone’s left and most of the lights are turned off, I will walk through the building and just go, I can’t believe that what I started in my little one bedroom apartment has gotten this big.”