He figures he invested more than $350,000 during that time period. “My wife was questioning the sanity of it after about five years,” he says. Like a lot of passion projects, the business, then called AutoPets, began as a financial sinkhole for Baxter. After sensors detect the cat’s departure, the device rotates, sifting the dirty clumps and depositing them in a waste drawer below. The Litter-Robot is a large enough device that the cat steps inside to do its thing. He contacted the inventor, Don Reitz, and the two ultimately signed a licensing deal.īaxter convinced his dad, Jim Baxter, to invest $35,000 for 35% of the company to help launch the first product. He ran a patent search, and discovered someone had already come up with the idea. He had the idea of letting the litter pass through a screen to separate the dirty clumps from the clean litter. He bought an early self-cleaning box from LitterMaid, but didn’t like how it pushed the clumping litter. A tinkerer who’d cut his teeth at Ford and was at the time working as a consultant to automotive companies, Baxter figured he could solve his own problem. “I would forget to scoop the box, then I would go to the basement and the cats would be protesting and going outside the box,” he recalls. Whiskerīack in 1999, Baxter, now 56, was down in his basement cleaning up the mess from two cats he inherited. The marketer and the inventor: Whisker CEO Jacob Zuppke (left) and founder Brad Baxter. Meanwhile, it’s preparing more tech-enabled pet products for rollout and coming up with ways to use the data its devices generate to flag animals’ health problems early. ![]() It expects to reach $180 million in sales this year, despite glitches with its latest product rollout that angered some customers and forced the company to slow sales. Revenue hit $150 million last year, a 20-fold increase from $7.5 million in 2015. Still, Auburn Hills, Michigan-based Whisker is growing rapidly. Competitors include larger companies like Spectrum Brands (LitterMaid) and Radio Systems (PetSafe), as well as a host of cheaper knockoffs made in China, a perennial problem for most consumer-products companies. It’s not the only company designing high-tech litter boxes. That spending, combined with the popularity of robotic vacuum cleaners and the acceptance of technology in our homes, has led to a growing business for Whisker, maker of the Litter-Robot, an automated feeder and an expanding list of other products.
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