Dear Friends,
Hey we are 20! This month we kick off the celebration of Small Dog Electronics’ 20 years in business. When I first started the company up at my home on Prickly Mountain I had no idea of the amazing adventure that Small Dog Electronics would become. I went to public auctions and bought Macs by maxing out my credit cards and took them home to sell on online services, such as AOL, and to my friends and neighbors. Some of you probably bought your first Mac up there in Warren. In the early days, every time I came back with a load of Macs I would fax out a list to folks with my current inventory. Soon, however, we decided that email was the better way to go and in October of 1996 we launched Kibbles & Bytes.
We launched our website (originally www.smalldoggy.com) a few months later and eventually traded a broken PowerBook Duo and some other gear to gain the www.smalldog.com URL. You might say that we were one of the first bloggers because I would come in early every morning and post my thoughts or a special value on the web site. This section eventually evolved and became Barkings, our blog.
We got our start selling Apple refurbished and discontinued products, later became authorized to sell new Macs, expanded into offering Mac clones, and then launched our “clicks to bricks” strategy as customer demand led us to open retail stores. We are pleased to be, once again, offering a great selection of Apple Certified Refurbished products that are a direct line to our roots!
Many people have asked me where the name Small Dog Electronics came from. It was well before the company started that a former employee, Wendy Cohen, jokingly suggested that name as we were searching for a name for a different company. I immediately pooh-poohed the idea and forgot about it. That is until one summer day when I was sitting on the hill in my yard and watching my small dogs play and realized that it might not be a bad name. I really didn’t want to name my company Mac-this, Data-that and after all, Apple doesn’t really relate to the products they sell, so it seemed a natural. It was also a reminder to keep that small company feel, no matter how big we got. We knew that we wanted to measure our success by the triple bottom line of People, Planet, and Profit so Small Dog Electronics became our moniker.
As I shipped out Macs from Prickly Mountain with the help of our UPS drivers who came rain, snow, mud, or shine, I wanted to give a gift with each Mac. I ran across Archie McPhee and bought some small plastic dogs and rubber brains. Each order got a couple plastic dogs and the bigger orders got a rubber brain. That was until I got a call from a customer that had put their rubber brain on their monitor and it melted all over it. So brains were out but to this day we send small dogs with every order!
This week’s Kibbles & Bytes special is a home-and-away MacBook Air bundle. I use a MacBook Air as my main computer but at my office I have a full size ergonomic keyboard, mouse, and large display to convert it to a desktop Mac. This bundle is sort of in memory of the PowerBook Duo which was Apple’s first stab at the versatile laptop that could be used on your lap or at your desk with the Duodock. This bundle includes the Apple Certified Refurbished MacBook Air 13-inch 1.3GHz i5 processor with 4GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD storage. It comes with a 1-year Apple factory warranty. We are bundling it with and Apple Magic Mouse, Apple Bluetooth wireless keyboard and a 27-inch Samsung display. We are also including AppleCare which will extend your 1-year warranty to 3 years and also extend your 90 days of free technical support to 3 years. With this bundle you have the best of both worlds: a lightweight, yet powerful laptop and a desktop setup for those huge spreadsheets, too. This is normally $1599 but exclusively this week only for Kibbles & Bytes readers you can get this bundle for only $1449!