Our Story

I don’t have a dog, I never have, but they’ve always been a huge part of my life. When I was around 8 years old, my neighbor started fostering dogs. About a year later, my neighbor brought this little spaz named Sputzie home to foster. I quickly fell in love with her and convinced my neighbor to adopt Sputzie after a few weeks. We quickly grew inseparable as I’d spend time with her and walk her just about every day.

I started with paracord as it was all the rage at the time. I posted on Sputzie’s account and people became interested in what I was making, so I started an Etsy shop by the name Blue Dog Collars PDX. Yeah... I have no idea where that name came from either. It was then changed to PDX Collars which was more fitting at the time. I quickly grew tired of paracord, it just wasn’t my thing, but I knew I didn’t want to close my shop. I loved the look of fabric collars though, so I borrowed my grandma's sewing machine and taught myself how to sew.

I practiced for quite a bit until I had a good product, and once I was ready, I reopened my shop under my new brand, Gray and Hound. The name is a combination of my last name ‘Gray’ and my love for dogs, aka ‘Hound’, put it together and you get Gray and Hound! It was going great! Our collars were getting increasingly popular and at times I’d be up until 3 am sewing orders that needed to be shipped. I made all of our products from 2013-2018 until I decided I couldn’t keep up anymore and I needed to delegate that aspect of the business. After switching seamstress’ a couple of times, I finally found an incredible mother/daughter team right here in Oregon to sew all of our orders!
Since then, we’ve grown tremendously we’re working towards continuing to grow slowly so I can eventually turn this into a full-time gig!