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S5 E21 From Bike Tubes to Dog Toys: How Lanette Fidrych Built Cycle Dog
This week on Crunching Your Growth, Phil Masiello sits down with Lanette Fidrych, founder and owner of Cycle Dog, an Oregon-based company creating dog gear from recycled materials.
After leaving her career at Nike, Lanette started with a simple but powerful idea: turn old bike tubes into durable, sustainable dog products. What began as a small project has grown into a full Made-in-the-USA manufacturing operation producing leashes, collars, toys, and more.
Today, Cycle Dog sells through independent retailers, larger chains, and direct-to-consumer channels, while staying committed to sustainability, quality, and domestic manufacturing. The company’s Portland factory employs 30 people and is home to the Cycle Dog Tavern, Dog Park, and retail showroom. Cycle Dog is also currently the only nationally distributed plush toy manufacturer in the United States.
In this episode, Lanette shares the real story behind building a business by hand from product development and manufacturing to retail growth, sustainability, and the daily grind of entrepreneurship.
Scaling isn’t magic—it’s systems. Crunching Your Growth brings you inside the playbooks of founders, operators, and marketers who turned good products into durable businesses. Hosted by Phil Masiello—4x exit founder, agency CEO, and author—the show unpacks real numbers, real bottlenecks, and the decisions that move needles: sharpening positioning, building demand beyond one channel, turning ops into an advantage, and evolving from founder-doing to team-owning. Expect crisp segments (What Worked, The Stall, The Fix, The System), on-screen frameworks, and case-specific metrics (CAC/LTV, retention, contribution margin) you can copy. If you’re building a consumer brand on DTC, Amazon, or omnichannel retail, Crunching Your Growth is your weekly working session.
