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How This Corgi Creator Made Over $1M in One Year
We recently shared a video about Maxine the corgi (@madmax_fluffyroad)—a corgi whose brand earned over $1m in revenue in one year. This might sound crazy, but it isn’t too far off for most pet owners to achieve.
Bryan Reisberg was a film school graduate struggling to pay rent. He and his fianceé decided to get themselves a wedding present—Maxine the corgi.
Shortly after, he started sharing Maxine on social media. He “just wanted the world to see how damn cute [his] puppy was.” Their page quickly reached 50k followers, and Bryan’s filmmaker brain kicked in.
Their content expanded, amassing over 6.4 million followers across all of their social media platforms. Now, Maxine lands consistent 5-figure brand deals—we’re talking $75k brand deals with Dell.
The two (well…Bryan) have since launched:
• Little Chonk → A line of dog backpacks, treat pouches, and (soon to be) doggy water bottles that earned $1m in revenue in its first year
• Chonkfest → An in-person festival for dog parents
• Maxine Gets a Job → A children’s book
Maxine isn’t a one-off success. There are tons of other pet parents doing similar things. Hammy and Olivia make well over six figures, Brodie the Goldendoodle earned over $800k in 2022, and Nala Cat has a net worth of over $100m.
What We Can Learn
There are a few major learnings we can take from this:
1. Incorporate your pet into your content. This will only work for certain niches (ie. lifestyle, finance, health, etc.), but it’s worth exploring if you can.
2. People love relatable content. Part of what works so well for pet influencers is how relatable their content is. We’ve all tried to guess a pet/our pet’s thoughts, make up some silly dialogue about what they’d say, etc.
Pet influencers leverage this a ton, and it creates a powerful community.
3. Create a community, not just a following. People drove hours to attend Chonkfest and even purchased Maxine’s children’s book despite not having children.
People do things like this when they feel like they’re part of a community, not just a follower.
Data pulled from the Free Press interview.
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