Clara Selle, local 4-H member, opens online store featuring dog owner needs

By LENNY C. LEPOLA

News Assis­tant Man­ag­ing Editor

Clara Selle is an active mem­ber of Sun­bury Hal­ter & Sad­dle 4-H Club and Home­grown 4-Him 4-H Club. She’s also a 15-year-old Ohio Vir­tual Acad­emy senior (she skipped a cou­ple of years) who will go on to The Ohio State Uni­ver­sity next year to study Vet­eri­nary Science.

What many area res­i­dents may not know is that Clara Selle is a young busi­ness­woman who just began her first entre­pre­neur­ial endeavor. She opened an online dog store in Sep­tem­ber that serves folks who are into dog obe­di­ence, agility, rally and show­man­ship, and has just about every­thing a dog owner needs.

Dogs are one of Clara’s areas of exper­tise. As a 4-H Club mem­bers she has com­pleted projects not only involv­ing dogs, but also horses, cats, vet­eri­nary sci­ence and mul­ti­ple still projects.

Clara said she came up with the online dog store idea dur­ing a teen entre­pre­neur camp last sum­mer because it was always dif­fi­cult find­ing equip­ment for obe­di­ence, agility and show­man­ship at one sin­gle online store.

Clara’s store, Elite Dog Show & Sports Store, is a drop-ship arrange­ment with Ama­zon and sev­eral other sup­pli­ers, so cus­tomers not only have a com­plete inven­tory of prod­ucts on one web­site, they also have a vari­ety of con­ve­nient pay­ment and ship­ping options.

“I would go to other dog sup­ply web­sites and they would have some items, but not oth­ers,” Clara said. “I wanted to start an online store that had a large selec­tion and was easy to nav­i­gate; to make shop­ping an eas­ier process than what I was find­ing on the Internet.

“At Elite Dog Show & Sports Store cus­tomers have an all-in-one shop­ping expe­ri­ence with a large selec­tion,” Clara con­tin­ued. “I have prod­ucts for obe­di­ence train­ing, agility train­ing, rally, show­man­ship and just about any­thing else a dog owner needs.”

Clara said her web­site also has a Tips sec­tion with short arti­cles about equip­ment and train­ing, with more arti­cles on the way; and a blog is in the plan­ning stages.

“Feel free to browse the Elite Dog Show & Sports Store web­site,” Clara said. “If you have any ques­tions or need some­thing that you can’t find, feel free to email me.”

As an added note, Clara said she encour­ages oth­ers, espe­cially teens, to start their own busi­ness and develop an entre­pre­neur­ial spirit.

To visit the Elite Dog Show & Sports Store, go to < elitedogshowandsportsstore.com >.

For addi­tional infor­ma­tion email Clara Selle at < elitedogshowandsportsstore@yahoo.com >.

Posted by Gary Henery on Oct 17 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.