We like dogs. We even like little dogs. But we can’t take little dogs that dress better than we do, whether they’re accessories for Paris Hilton wannabes, or they wear their own accessories. Ever seen a Chihuahua in Chanel? That’s what we’re talking about.

Our desire to call out this insanity became an experiment in branding for Project 13. We’ve developed and redesigned dozens of brands over the years, but the spark of an idea that became Stupid Little Dog presented an opportunity to build a brand from scratch and take it to market, learning brand development from the inside, from square one, along the way.

The first step was the creation of an iconic mark loaded with Brooklyn attitude. Next we applied the brand to a line of t-shirts, stickers and buttons declaring war on these Prada puppies, then built a website to spread the word and take orders, which are handled by a powerful shopping cart developed by our friends at Kramer Web Development. Our marketing efforts have included email, direct conversations with stores and resellers, guerilla stickering, and social-network community building via Flickr (to show off the fruits of the guerilla stickering).

In building the brand, we’ve learned tons of new tricks, from trademarking and product sourcing to t-shirt printing and order fulfillment.  As the t-shirt line expands into licensed products, we think this experiment will help us more clearly understand our clients neeeds and the brand growth processes even better.

Perhaps most importantly, we’ve also empowered people to say what they really think about those stupid little dogs. Woof.