Alumni News
KA Brother Brings Man’s Two Best Friends Together by Rick Moore
Left: Bark4Beer retractable dog collar bottle opener in action; right: Bark4Beer co-founder John Hornbeak selling his dog collars at the San Diego International Beer Festival.
Man’s proverbial best friend, as we all know, is his dog. And some guys’ best friend, for better or worse, is their beer. Now a KA brother has found a way to capitalize on an unlikely relationship that he realized those two can have with one another. John Hornbeak, (AΠ-Stanford ’00), is the co-founder of a company called Bark4Beer, whose product is a dog collar with a retractable bottle opener on it. So when a gentleman needs a beer, all he has to do is call Fido, and he doesn’t have to leave the comfort of the chair from which he’s watching the football game, catching some rays, or whatever.
The collar itself is made from a highstrength nylon that Hornbeak said will hold up under repeated use, although it’s hard to say how many people will actually use it a lot compared to the number that will simply buy it as a novelty or gag gift. The sale price online is $19.95, with a $5.00 fee for shipping.
Hornbeak graduated from Stanford in 2003 with a B.S. in management science and engineering, and then graduated from the MBA program at Oxford in the United Kingdom. He said that he had to write a business plan for his MBA thesis, and that he used the Bark4Beer model, which was soundly trashed.
Hornbeak said that, without having been a KA brother, he may not have had the drive and savvy to bring his business idea to life. “Being in KA instilled in me the dedication to work for a goal I really believed in,” he said. “I’ve worked really hard at this, and I know that’s part of who I am because of the people I was around, the examples and mentors I had to observe and follow.”
“My advisor at Oxford, to coin a British term, said the idea was ‘rubbish,’ and that ‘I’d never sell one.’ I actually took second place in the business plan competition, which seems kind of ridiculous,” he said, laughing.
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For more information, go to www.bark4beer.com.
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“Some other guys and I were joking about the idea one day, you know, the way people talk about all kinds of things that never actually get done,” Hornbeak said. “So we (he and an unnamed partner) spent about a year and a half developing it.”
“We actually started this in November of ’09, just before ‘Black Friday,’ and we sold over 1,000 units the first month,” he said. “So we figure this year we’ll do well at Christmas again.” Hornbeak said he didn’t have sales figures readily available, but he has sold “in the thousands” overall.