Barking Up The Right Tree

You better watch out, Hyattsville. The Big Bad Woof is coming our way.

No, that wasn’t a spelling glitch.

Big Bad Woof is a pet supply store in Takoma, Washington, D.C. that is dedicated to sustainable practices and selling eco-friendly pet needs, fair trade items and things manufactured in the United States.

With Hyattsville’s and of , there doesn’t seem to be any pause that this store will be a good fit.

At least that’s what co-owner Julie Paez thinks.

“We’re getting a huge amount of buzz here at the [Takoma] store as to when it’s going to open,” she said of the new store, to be located on “There’s a lot of excitement.”

The Takoma store, which developed organically over the past six years, gets customers from the Hyattsville area, Paez said.

“We hope to draw customers from College Park and Mount Rainier that may not necessarily come down to this part of town,” she said of the new store.

Paez expects that the core of the new store will mirror that of the Takoma store—the store is being franchised—but it will likely be geared toward the Hyattsville dog population.

“The Hyattsville store is going to be a very finely designed, very well put together store … a really beautiful store,” she said, adding that they will pay attention to things like traffic flow. “There will be a core group of merchandise in all stores and some variation … which will suit the customers.”

The Takoma store is geared toward large dogs.

“In Hyattsville … we may find that we want smaller dog items because there’s a lot of townhouses and those people may not have large animals,” Paez said.

The owners chose Hyattsville because of the developing retail and residential areas, she said.

The new store will be about 2,261 square feet and will create 12 jobs, according to documents provided to the city. It will open sometime between mid-May and early June.

Big Bad Woof sells items such as “thundershirts,” “canine caviar” and West Paw eco-friendly dog toys.