About Us: Meet the Dog & Product Designer Behind Élevé
Our Mission
Built for dogs. Designed for real life.
We help modern dog parents simplify everyday care and elevate life with their dogs, without sacrificing style or sustainability.
'Tails & Tones didn't start with a product idea. It started on some of the harder days with our dog, Piper.'
The kind of day where you're walking in the pouring rain with a French bulldog in one arm and a broken stroller in the other. Or when a leash clip breaks mid-walk on a busy road.
That's when we started noticing how many everyday pet products feel temporary. Built to work… until they don't. As a dog product designer, I couldn't unsee it.
Our dream is to build the best pet company, one that creates thoughtful, robust products that won't let you down when it matters most.
We started with Élevé, our first product, because feeding is one of the few moments that happens every single day. And small improvements, repeated daily, quietly change everything.
But feeding is only one part of life with a dog.
Our goal is to thoughtfully redesign the everyday systems around dog care, one small improvement at a time.
Because our dogs deserve better. And honestly, so do we.
Meet Mariska
Founder, Dog Product Designer & Podcast Host
I've always loved building things. As a kid that meant homemade fudge sold door to door. I didn't know the word entrepreneur yet. I just loved creating something from nothing.
Years later, standing on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, I heard someone say something that stayed with me: "You should have seen it 10 years ago." I came home, quit my corporate job, and started looking more closely at how the things we use every day shape the world around us.
That curiosity took me from wearing my own trash for 30 days, all 65 kilograms of it, to a postgraduate in Environmental Science and a Master's in Sustainable Design, my thesis focused on the pet industry. The more I learned about how things are designed and made, the more I started noticing how little of that thinking had made its way into the world of dog care.
Piper was there through my studies, quietly shaping the direction I was heading. Everything I'd learned, questioned, and cared about had been pointing here the whole time. That's Tails & Tones: our podcast, where I talk with vets, trainers, and pet-industry founders, and Élevé, our first product, built on everything that research taught me.
Most days you'll find me designing, researching, recording an episode, or out and about testing ideas with Piper, our very opinionated Chief Paw-duct Tester.
Meet Piper
Chief Paw-duct Tester
Before Tails & Tones had a name, a product, or even a half-formed idea, there was Piper.
She was born with a cleft palate and needed round-the-clock care just to survive. Tube-fed every two hours. More vet visits than any puppy ever should need. But Piper had other plans. She was doing zoomies long before anyone said it was a good idea.
As she's grown, new challenges have come with her breed: a luxating patella, an early arthritis risk, the kind of mobility issues that quietly shape a French Bulldog's whole life if you let them. Living with her taught me to notice the small things. How dogs eat. How they move. How the everyday things around them can either support their bodies, or quietly work against them.
She tests everything. Not gently. Not diplomatically. But honestly. Exactly how it should be.