A laundry problem in a hilly city turned into a product.

Molly Mutt is an American pet brand built around a simple idea: a washable duvet cover for a dog bed. Its co-founder is Molly Mundt, whom Chewy’s editorial site Be.Chewy describes, in her own words, as “a textile designer by trade, and a lifelong dog lover.” In a profile published on 17 July 2013, the San Francisco magazine 7×7 said the idea for the company was born in 2009, when Mundt was living in a tiny San Francisco apartment with three dogs. She told the magazine she had wanted a bed cover that was “something durable, stylish, and easy to wash.”

The origin story that Mundt tells is about laundry. In her interview with Be.Chewy, written by Alyssa Sparacino and most recently updated on 30 April 2025, she explained that her apartment had no washer or dryer, so she carried her laundry, dog beds included, to a laundromat. San Francisco, she said, is a city notorious for its steep hills, and she had to haul her basket of dirty clothes up and down them. On one of those climbs, with dog beds in her arms, she asked herself why nobody made covers for dog beds. Her first sketch, she told the site, was for a cover that would fit over an existing bed and could easily be removed when it needed to be washed.

That framing — the cover as the product, rather than the bed — is the centre of the brand. Instead of selling a filled cushion, Molly Mutt sells the outer layer and leaves the filling to the owner. In practice that means the part a customer sees, washes and chooses by pattern is the part the company designs.

Stuffing, canvas and a warehouse across the bay.

7×7, in its 2013 profile by Dana Rebmann, explained how the system works. Owners stuff the duvet cover with things they already have — old clothes, towels, blankets or an old dog bed — to make a new pet bed. The magazine presented this as a way of keeping textiles out of landfill. The covers themselves, it reported, were made from durable, washable, pre-shrunk cotton canvas.

The same article set out the range at that time. Alongside the dog duvet covers, the company made cat duvets under the name molly meow, written in lower case, as well as crate covers, reversible tote bags and waste bag holders called Fillmore Street pouches, a name that points to a well-known San Francisco street. By then the business had moved its stock to a warehouse in Berkeley, on the other side of the bay, just north of the 4th Street shopping district. 7×7 noted that the warehouse was not open to the public, but that the company’s first warehouse sale had raised money for the East Bay/Berkeley Humane Society. At the time, according to 7×7, the products were sold through the company’s own website and through independent pet stores. The magazine also introduced the company’s product testers: three dogs named Beans, Pickle and Rocky, two of them rescues.

The Be.Chewy interview, a decade on, describes the business in much the same way. It says Molly Mutt makes beds, blankets and crate covers developed with ease and sustainability in mind, and that its covers go over existing pet beds. By then, the site noted, Mundt had two dogs of her own. She told the site that the company’s office is a warehouse where most of the team works. The interview also mentions Stuff Sacks, mesh inserts sold by the company that let owners store seasonal items inside the bed.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all make beds for dogs. Dog bed brands in general sit at many different points in the pet trade, from small workshops run by the people who started them to names that now belong to much larger pet companies, textile manufacturers or investment groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a specialty pet shop to an online marketplace or a hardware store.

A dog bed brand’s identity is usually carried less by one bed than by a name, a mark, its fabrics and colourways and the way its range is described and packaged, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown well beyond its first product. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its beds are actually designed and made.

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

Prints with song titles.

The visual side of Molly Mutt lives mostly in its fabrics. 7×7 reported in 2013 that the brand’s print designs were named after songs, and the product names quoted by Be.Chewy follow the same habit: the interview lists the Amarillo by Morning square dog bed duvet cover, the Papillon square cover and the Your Hand In Mine round cover. According to the interview, Mundt designs the fabric patterns herself, which ties the look of the range directly to the training of its co-founder rather than to an outside studio. The names do a branding job of their own: instead of a size code or a colour number, each cover carries a title that reads like a record sleeve.

The company’s own name works the same way. It is a play on its co-founder’s name, and the cat line’s lower-case molly meow continues the pattern with a second rhyme. Together with a story rooted in a particular city — the hills, the laundromat, the street name on the waste bag pouches — the brand presents itself as personal and local rather than as a corporate range. That is a choice of tone as much as of product: the covers, totes and crate covers are presented as household textiles for people who live with dogs, designed by someone who does too.

For a design guide, Molly Mutt shows how a pet brand can build its identity from textile design, song-titled prints and a founder’s story rather than from a logo alone. Compare West Paw, another American dog products brand, and Furhaven, a maker of pet beds. For this guide we use canvas rust, sage green and natural canvas with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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