The Big Dog Leash Co, a leash made from ski rope and a run of weekend markets.

EzyDog dates itself to 1995. On the history page of its Australian website, which in 2025 marked “30 years of EzyDog,” the company says it began that year as the Big Dog Leash Co, making shock-absorbing dog leashes by hand. The workshop was a garage. The company’s timeline shows Luke, one of its founders, “working in his garage in Palm Beach, Gold Coast,” hand-making the first line of products, and its anniversary pages describe the business that grew from there as having moved “from a handcrafted shock-absorbing leash made in a Gold Coast garage to a global network of distributors.”

The first product still gives the brand its character. EzyDog says the Cujo Leash — the one it calls “the leash which started it all” — was born from the idea of weaving shock cord into water ski rope. It is still on sale, alongside later variations the company lists as the Cujo Extension and the Coupler Cujo, and a related lead called the Mongrel. Both materials came from water sports rather than from saddlery or leather goods.

The early sales route was just as hands-on. According to the company, the founders sold the Cujo directly to dog owners at markets on the Gold Coast, and within three years were trading at markets across Australia. EzyDog adds that pet specialty stores at first hesitated at the idea of stocking a handmade leash.

Wetsuit neoprene, a chest plate, and a life jacket called the DFD.

The second product in the company’s own telling also borrowed from the beach. EzyDog says the Neo Classic Collar grew out of an experiment with breathable wetsuit neoprene, finished with stainless steel hardware. The third of what it calls its “originals,” the Chest Plate Harness, is built around a padded plate across the dog’s chest; the company says it shifts the load from the neck to the chest and uses a two-tier size adjustment. All three are presented on the anniversary page as products “still going strong” three decades on.

Water also runs through the rest of the range. EzyDog sells dog life jackets under the name DFD, short for Dog Flotation Device. A guide on the company’s store, dated May 2023, describes three models: the original DFD, the DFD X2 Boost and the smaller Micro DFD. The company says the DFD has a handle on the back, reflective trim, neoprene-padded straps and a leash attachment, that the X2 Boost adds a mounting point for a dog light and an aluminium leash fitting, and that the Micro keeps most of the DFD’s features and look in a smaller package.

Not every line is technical. The trade magazine Pet Insight reported on 25 June 2021 that EzyDog had added corduroy to The Friday Collective, a company initiative that puts designer materials onto its most popular accessories. The magazine said the corduroy pieces combined the fabric with leather and copper-coloured accents, followed a denim range released in 2019, and covered the Quick Fit and Chest Plate harnesses, the Double Up collar and the Zero Shock and Soft Trainer leashes.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all dog toy and accessory names: Outward Hound, FURminator, flexi, Nylabone, Benebone, Rogz and EzyDog. Brands like these sit at many different points in the pet trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s idea to names that now belong to much larger pet-products groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a supermarket aisle to an independent pet shop.

A dog toy or accessory brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a name, a shape and a colour on a hang-tag or a box, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its toys, leads and tools are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging and marks have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

An Australian brand with a North American base.

EzyDog also has a North American base. In October 2017 the Sandpoint Reader, a weekly paper in northern Idaho, visited the company’s distribution centre and warehouse at Ponderay, Idaho, which it said handled North America, including Canada and Mexico, and did not sell directly to the public. The paper’s pet column named John Hatcher as chief executive there, said he had started the company in 2003 with a partner from water sports, and said that Hatcher’s partner in Australia distributed to the rest of the world. The two dates — 1995 for the Big Dog Leash Co on the Gold Coast, 2003 in the Idaho account — come from these different sources, and the company’s own history uses 1995.

The products the Sandpoint Reader saw in 2017 show how far the range had spread from the original leash: a dog jacket called the Element, the Zero Shock leash, a no-pull harness, a clip-on light, a car restraint and a fold-up travel bowl, all of them, the paper noted, carrying reflective detailing. The company’s web presence still reflects the split between hemispheres, with an Australian site at ezydog.com.au and a separate American site and store under ezydog.com.

One practical note for searching: retailers often write the name as “Ezy Dog” or “Ezydog,” while the company itself uses EzyDog, with a capital D.

For a design guide, EzyDog shows how a brand’s raw materials can become its look: ski rope, shock cord and wetsuit neoprene gave it a vocabulary of surf colours, reflective trim and bold, sporty lettering that suits a life jacket as well as a leash. Compare Rogz, another southern-hemisphere maker of leads and collars, and flexi, the German retractable-lead specialist. For this guide we use deep swell, rescue red and float yellow with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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