From handmade leather toys to a company run by the next generation.

Multipet International is a pet toy company in New Jersey, and it describes itself in family terms. The regional news channel News 12 New York, profiling the business in its “Made in New Jersey” series on 10 March 2025, placed Multipet in East Rutherford and introduced Mark Hirschberg as its president. The segment called it a “nearly 30-year-old company” and explained, in Hirschberg’s telling, how it had changed along with the habits of pet owners.

The family story behind it goes back further than the company. According to News 12, the business traces its roots to Hirschberg’s grandparents, who made handmade leather dog toys, and Multipet remains a family business. By 2025 three of Hirschberg’s children were involved, the channel reported, among them Dean Hirschberg, the vice president of marketing.

The company’s own description, carried on retailers’ product pages as an “About the Manufacturer” note, says the Multipet International brand was established in 1995, and that it focuses on internationally sourced fabrics, unique designs and quality, with an eye on value for its customers. That date sits comfortably with the “nearly 30-year-old” figure in the 2025 broadcast, though the year itself comes from the company.

Hirschberg told News 12 that Multipet concentrates on unique products rather than copies of what is already on the shelf. The example he chose was the one most dog owners know: Lamb Chop, a plush lamb that, the channel said, dogs treat as if it were their own pet, and that had become a sensation on TikTok.

A 1950s television puppet, turned into a squeaky plush toy.

Lamb Chop did not begin as a dog toy. The New York Times, in a feature by Alexandra E. Petri published in December 2024, recalled that the ventriloquist and entertainer Shari Lewis introduced an inquisitive puppet with a mop of curly hair called Lamb Chop in the 1950s, and featured it on The Shari Lewis Show from 1960 to 1963. In the 1990s Lewis brought the puppet to a new generation of children with Lamb Chop’s Play-Along on PBS. The puppet had already inspired a children’s toy, the paper noted, before it reached the pet aisle. Much of the dog toy’s appeal, the paper suggested, lies in the nostalgia of owners who watched Lamb Chop on television as children in the early 1990s.

That step came in 2010, when, the Times reported, Multipet International Inc. brought Lamb Chop to the dog-toy market as a plush squeaker toy. As demand grew over the next few years the company added mini and jumbo versions, and began to issue seasonal editions. The paper described owners buying Lamb Chops dressed for birthdays, Halloween and Independence Day, and a dog owner who had collected a pile of them for her rescue dog.

The toy keeps a direct link to the puppet’s family. Shari Lewis’s daughter, Mallory Lewis, has taken on the voice of the puppet, and the Times interviewed Lamb Chop herself over a video call. Mallory Lewis told the paper that the dog toy helped keep her mother’s legacy, and her family’s legacy, alive.

Inside the company the toy has become a yardstick. “Every day we’re like, ‘What’s the next Lamb Chop?’” Dean Hirschberg told the Times. “That’s what we think about 24/7.”

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all dog toy and accessory names: Planet Dog, Petstages, ZippyPaws, Petmate, Multipet, Coastal Pet and Lupine. Toy and accessory brands for dogs sit at many different points in the pet trade, from small workshops that still carry a founder’s story to names that now belong to larger pet-products groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from an independent pet shop to a national chain.

A pet brand’s identity is usually carried less by one toy or collar than by a name, a mascot and the promise printed on its packaging, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its toys, collars and leads 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.

A television character, and a range built on squeakers.

Lamb Chop is the face of a wider range. The company’s retail listings show plush and latex dog toys under the Multipet name, many of them built around squeakers, from crinkle versions of Lamb Chop to a latex pea pod holding three squeaky peas, each a separate squeaker. The common thread in the company’s own description is fabric, design and value rather than a single material or technology.

Much of the toy’s identity is borrowed directly from the puppet: a white, fluffy lamb with a mop of curly hair, small enough to carry. Owners have turned that look into a vocabulary of their own. The Times described dog owners who call the toys “Lambys”, throw Lamb Chop-themed parties and photo shoots, dress their dogs as Lamb Chop for Halloween and buy Lamb Chop beds, and it opened its feature with a small dog who carried a miniature Lamb Chop in a birthday hat out on her walks. For a brand, that is a rare position: the character, rather than the company name, is what customers ask for.

The name is written Multipet on packaging and listings, while the full company name, Multipet International Inc., appears in press coverage such as the 2024 Times feature. The longer form is a useful search term for older trade coverage and retailer records, and the shorter one is the brand that sits on the toy tags.

For a design guide, Multipet shows how a family toy company can borrow a television character’s warmth and make it the centre of a range, so that a puppet from the 1950s becomes the shape most people picture when they hear the company’s name. Compare ZippyPaws, another plush dog-toy brand, and Outward Hound, the Colorado toy and gear company. For this guide we use fleece white, ear pink and raspberry with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Multipet’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.