Dana Ujobagy, owner of Paw Palace, plans to relocate her shop to Monmouth Street in June.
One of downtown Red Bank’s premier addresses is going to the dogs.
Dana Ujobagy (pronounced ‘you-ja-bayj’), owner of the Paw Palace luxury dog boutique on West Front Street, plans to move her shop and a year-old dog grooming business to 16 Monmouth Street, an ample space that most recently served as home to the Asher Neiman Gallery and, for 24 years before that, Charlotte Scherer‘s Art Forms gallery.
For Monmouth Street, the move represents a potential kick in the
tail after several high-profile tenant departures, including those of Asher Neiman, Red Bank News and Fameabilia. Throughout the business district, some 40 stores were vacant in a recent count by Red Bank RiverCenter.
But for Ujobagy, the move is the latest in a rapid-fire series of expansions in which the former office worker, with no experience in either the Internet or retailing, built a nationally recognized web retailer of dog goodies, bootstrapped it into a thriving bricks-and-mortar store, and last year added a grooming component.
“I’ve always had a vision of where I wanted to take the business,” the 35-year-old Union Beach resident tells redbankgreen.
Renovations are now underway at 16 Monmouth Street, the former Asher Neiman Gallery space where Ujobagy plans to move Paw Palace and her dog-grooming business, The Dog Spaw, in June.
A Sayreville native, Ujobagy says she knew even as a teenager that she wanted to be an entrepreneur. But she went straight from high school into what turned out to be a series of mid-level corporate jobs — at Amerada Hess and later at the law firm Wilentz, Goldman & Spitzer as a legal secretary.
At her last gig, with a unit of Citicorp, she survived seven downsizings, and the recurring threat of losing her job took its toll.
“I said, ‘I just can’t do this anymore,'” she recalls. “I’ve got to do something else.”
Sensing the time was right — and inspired by her love of dressing up her pet Boston terrier, Sophie — she quit her job in the summer of 2004 with the idea that she would sell pet supplies online.
“The executives I worked with were like, ‘You’re going to do what? Open up a pet boutique? Yeah, good luck with that,'” she recalls.
Ujobagy says she “sat at home every day as though I was going to my normal job” and taught herself how to build an attractive website while forging ties with designers and makers of dog clothing and accessories.
She also focused keenly on search engine optimization to drive her business to the top of Google and other searches.
It worked. Just a few months after launching the business, she was included in a cover story in USA Today on the lavish ways in which American dog owners fawn on their pets.
“I called a few of my friends at Citi and said, ‘Do me a favor, drop a copy of USA Today on the desks of all those people who were laughing at me and said I wouldn’t amount to anything,'” she says, positively gleeful at the memory. “It was sweet revenge.”
The store on West Front Street followed just a year later, selling top-name dog beds, harnesses and gourmet treats displayed under glass as they would be in a bakery. The shop has so many tiny outfits for dogs that pregnant women sometimes wander in under the mistaken impression that it’s an infant-clothing boutique, Ujobagy says.
“Whenever a pregnant woman comes in, we always make a point of asking them right away what kind of dog they have,” she says, laughing.
A year ago, Ujobagy partnered with a dog groomer to offer grooming services under the name The Dog Spaw in the basement of her shop. When the relationship didn’t work out, Ujobagy took over the operation herself.
One reason for the move to Monmouth Street, in fact, is to get the grooming business out of the cellar. Clients will be able to watch “their babies” getting washed, dried with heated towels and gussied up through an interior window toward the rear of the store, she says.
An apostle of using the web as an essential component of retailing strategies, Ujobagy says that the Internet drives numerous customers to her store, where few walk out empty-handed. In the past year, the walk-in business has begun to outsell the online operation in part because of the heightened visibility it’s gotten via the web, she says.
But her business has grown because of something more fundamental, Ujobagy says.
“I just listened to my customers,” she says. “That was key.”
