Welcome to Work and Woof!
Hi! Maybe you are new here or maybe not but welcome to Work and Woof! We are the country’s first and only (I think!) combined concept of shared office space (or Coworking) and a dog daycare, plus we have an indoor dog park right here in Austin, Texas!
Our story is a fun one and since we had so many new faces join us in 2021, Lucca and I thought now would be the perfect time to reintroduce ourselves and share our story with you. Hi, my name is Jill and I am the founder and owner of Work and Woof. The most shocking thing about me and Work and Woof is that I was a first time dog owner at the age of 29. I never even had a family dog growing up, my parents were cat people. I desperately wanted a dog from the moment I moved out of my house in 2014 but I was living in Chicago where that just wasn’t an option for me. At the time I owned and operated a small social media business called Spark + Influence where I assisted companies all over the world with social media strategy, website design, graphic design and social media implementation in their own businesses. I loved working at home but I didn’t know many people so I found a coworking space. I quickly became friends with the operations manager of my coworking space in downtown Chicago and traded social media help for a free membership. I often stepped in and did operations when the manager went out of town. I loved the concept so much and met a ton of really unique, successful and all around amazing human beings.
I visited Austin in the summer of 2015 and immeadietly fell in love with the city. I knew right away that when my 3 years were up in Chicago I’d be moving down south to Austin. When I got here in March of 2017, not knowing a single person I had a really hard time adjusting and found that most people socialized through their pets. So I took myself on a date to APA where the real life panic set in that I had absolutely no idea how to care for a dog or what to look for. My best friend flew down and after hours of meet and greets I found Lucca at AAC. It was love at first sight, and off we went.
I had tried coworking around Austin after I moved and tried again once I had Lucca but I found that the structure for some of the spaces around town were too rigid for a pet parent let alone a new pet parent who never wanted to leave their puppy. I did not know doggie daycare existed either so at the advice of some of my neighbors I hired a dog walker. That is a fantastic option for pet parents but for me, I have a ranch dog who needs 12-15 miles worth of exercise at 1 years old and $25 for a 30 min walk + 2-3 dog park sessions a day was both expensive, time consuming and not ideal for either one of us. Then a client mentioned doggie daycare, I loved the idea so much, we found a wonderful facility and Lucca quickly became a staff favorite. I would take her 9-4 for $25/day which I found to be reasonable except she wasn’t quite as tired as I would have hoped and so I started doing research and asking her facility questions about how she spent her day. Much of the pet care industry when it comes to daycares operate under the “crate and rotate” model. I’ve seen it, I’ve experienced it and I understand the benefits. It was just not what I wanted as a pet parent and I saw an opportunity to explore different types of structures.
One day I was sitting at YardBar in July of 2017 and I was looking around at the sheer number of people drinking, laughing, socializing with their dogs and it just hit me, in Austin, barely anyone goes anywhere without their dog. I thought “what if there was a place where I could work and she could play?”. Then Hurricane Harvey hit and it rained, and rained, and rained. I looked around and asked my neighbors “Where do you go with your dog when it rains?”. No one could really come up with a good response. I remember sitting at my favorite taco truck in East Austin calling my mom in California and saying “I think Austin needs a place that is like a Coworking space but with an indoor dog park” and Work and Woof was born. Fun fact: I called it Work and Wag and Leash City before landing on Work and Woof. Double fun fact: I had ZERO intention of adding daycare, it still cracks me up 3.5 years later when people ask me when I decided to add Coworking, it is still my favorite part of the concept because it makes us so unique. As I write this in December of 2021, roughly 20 months into a global pandemic, I always count my blessings because we definitely didn’t build this concept for COVID but there’s never been a bigger demand to find safe, affordable, unique places to work outside of the home and that is what we provide where everything inside our concept is built by dog parents, for dog parents.
2020 was *interesting*, 2021 was a rollercoaster I could never have planned for but we are headed into 2022 grateful, mindful and excited for what the continued growth of Work and Woof means for myself, Lucca, my team and our extended Work and Woof family (you).
So welcome to the family, we are happy to have you!
