About Us

Who are we?

We’re just your average family who originate from a sleepy village in Essex, sold our souls to the devil when we worked in London but then woke up to the problem and decided to up sticks and move to Cornwall with no job to find a better life for our children and ourselves.

Part of this new life involved getting a dog for a family pet. As pet owners yourself you will know that along with all the good things a dog can bring to a family they also bring a lot of crap (and I mean that literally).

As responsible owners we always pick up our dog’s poo but are often then left with the problem of what to do with it then. There’s never a bin when you need one, so you are either forced to continue the walk swinging a bag of poo, leave in a discreet place and retrace your steps to collect it at the end of your walk, put it in your pocket (yuk!) or in your bag if you’re carrying one to potentially forget about for a few days until the smell
become particularly rancid.

I realised this wasn’t a problem only I suffered, when one day sitting in car after walking my dog I saw 4 other people go through the almost identical ritual I had done 1 hour earlier.

The dog poos, the owner picks up then does a 360 degree turn scouting for a bin. Upon the realisation that there isn’t one close by continue on there walk but now they have the joy of carrying a smelly bag of poo too.

This alone is bad enough but add in to the equation a small child and a dog that likes to chase a ball; you have entered dog walking hell! Do you:

1. hold the poo in the same hand as you hold the small child’s hand or
2. hold the poo in the hand you throw the ball with running the risk of a poo spillage (don’t even think about it).

This is when I thought there must be something out there that can solve my problem, but after much searching by my husband and me we found nothing. I wanted a lightweight, soft but fairly rigid receptacle that would mean I could carry the poo I had so conscientiously picked up and be able to continue my walk with both hands free. Welcome to Dog walking heaven, and welcome to the Dicky Bag.

Although my husband, Barry, and i had had successful careers in London, Barry as an advertising account director at top advertising agencies such as Bartle Bogle and Hegarty and myself as an theatrical agent and later running my own dance school and theatre school, neither of us had the knowledge or expertise to manufacture a product.

Living in Newquay, the surf capital, and being surrounded be wetsuit shops our first thought was to use neoprene. It’s lightweight, semi rigid and the rubber can form an airtight seal. So we sought advice and took our ideas to a local neoprene factory and were greeted with a sideways glance and a chuckle. They thought we had lost our marbles. Never-the-less they came up with a prototype and although some small changes have been made even from day 1 we have appreciated the qualities of the bag and all our doubters have been made to think about the problem that exists either from personal experience or from talking to friends and agree that the Dicky Bag is amazing and will be incredibly successful. People that new we were developing the bag have been nagging us waiting for the first delivery.

We have chosen some lovely fabrics, it’s amazing the variety of neoprene you can get, so the dicky bag can be a fashion statement as much as a practical solution. Friends that don’t have dogs still want to buy one because they look so good!

We’ve been using the bag for 18 months now and it is inconceivable to us to take the dogs for a walk with out the Dicky Bag. Because of the clever storage system in the lid we know we always have clean bags no matter how many poos we have to clear up. We also choose to store the dog’s ball in the bag so it’s just pick up the lead and bag and off you go (not forgetting the dog of course!).

Poo is no longer an issue for our family. Even the kids think it’s cool to carry the dicky bag. The Camouflage bag proved to be a particular hit for our boys. Now I’m not going to be as silly as to suggest that our kids volunteer to pick up the poo but when they take the dog out on there own because the deed is over and done with quickly and the evidence is hidden away in a cool looking device they don’t object. They are growing up to be responsible people.

The Family

We are blessed with a large, and usually, happy family. Patrick, Guy, Craig and Arianne. Dogs Rosie, Irish Terrier 3 and Barney Fang, Poodle x Patterdale terrier (he needed a big name because he’s only a little dog!).

We want to make the most of life hence the move to Cornwall. We don’t want to look back on our life with a list of “if only’s” or “we missed that with our kids”. We’re not work shy, in fact far from it. We did our time in the corporate world earning money for other people who always wanted more and weren’t friends with the word thanks. We have a bigger agenda now; happiness and that can be the hardest work of all.