Katie & Norman

Katie Hunt did not grow up planning to run a pet brand. She graduated from Rye Country Day School in 2002, where she majored - to the extent a high schooler majors in anything - in literary and theater arts. She spent her early twenties doing what people in their early twenties in New York have always done: she figured it out. She was an extra on Ugly Betty and All My Children. She circled marketing without committing to it.

Then her brother Andrew Hunt, a Warby Parker co-founder, brought her in as employee number three. There was no website yet. There were no offices yet. The role had no real job description because the company had no real precedent. Hunt has described those three years as the equivalent of getting an MBA, except instead of writing case studies she was running marketing experiments on a brand that was about to redefine direct-to-consumer eyewear. She left in 2013 to start her own strategy consultancy.

From there: Hinge. Hunt joined as Chief Brand Officer in the period when the app was deciding what it wanted to be when it grew up. Tinder had already won the swiping wars. Hinge needed a story. The rebrand that emerged - love, not games - is now a textbook example of brand-as-product. Hinge became the third-largest dating app on the market. Hunt moved on.

Next was SHOWFIELDS, the four-story SoHo retail space she co-founded that gave emerging brands a stage that wasn't a website. SHOWFIELDS was loud, beautiful, ambitious, and - eventually - over. Hunt was 36. She has spoken openly about what came next: broke, back at her parents' house in Rhode Island, no map. Around the same time she helped start The Fund (now Everywhere Ventures), a community-driven VC for early-stage founders in NYC, LA, and London. It is not lost on her that she co-founded a fund before becoming the kind of CEO who pitches one.

Naming conventions are often where a brand dies politely. The committee chooses something neutral. The lawyers swap two letters. The internet ignores it. Hunt's instinct, and arguably the entire creative center of Oh Norman!, was to refuse that. The bottles say what people would actually say. The products are vet-approved, made with what the company calls clean, science-based ingredients. The label is a joke. The contents are not.

This is the kind of decision that makes sense only with the right resume. Hunt has spent a decade and a half watching consumer brands ride or die on the first six words a customer reads. She knows that a label is rarely an explanation. It is permission. The bottles give pet parents permission to be tired, exasperated, in on the joke, and also serious about their dogs' wellbeing. Few founders could pull off the tonal balance. Hunt does.

The personal details collected from Hunt's interviews resist neat packaging. Her brother is one of the founders of Warby Parker. Her favorite dogs are the ones nobody else wants. She is on the record as having found out she was pregnant the day after announcing Oh Norman! on Instagram, which is the kind of timing a screenwriter would reject as too tidy. She has talked about that moment changing how she leads. Becoming a mother, she has said, made her more focused, more willing to delegate, less interested in being good at everything.

Her rescues, Rome and Machete, are the unofficial R&D department. They taste-test, they wear-test, they nap-test. There is a real continuity between the SHOWFIELDS years - where Hunt was obsessed with making physical retail emotionally legible - and what she is doing now. Both bets are about the same question. What does it feel like to use this thing? Pet wellness, like retail, is full of products that look correct on paper and feel terrible in the hand. Hunt has built a career on the gap between those two.

Her motto, adapted from her high school's "Not for self, but for Service," is "Not for self, but for community." A portion of Oh Norman!'s sales goes to rescue organizations. It is the same instinct that drove The Fund: build infrastructure for people coming up behind you. Pay attention to who got left at the shelter.