There is a tidy symmetry to Calley Benoit Belli’s life that she probably did not plan. She is president of Edie Parker, the accessories brand whose reopened bespoke program will put your pet’s face on an acrylic clutch. And her own home is, by her cheerful account, a shrine to a single dog, full of objects that exist only because she and her husband cannot stop turning their love for him into things. The custom-portrait business is not an abstraction to her. It is the commercial version of how she already lives. To understand what Edie Parker is actually selling when it offers to immortalize your pet in acrylic, it helps to look at the person running it, who got there first, with a papier-mâché bench.
The dog the whole house is built around
Shuggie, named for the musician Shuggie Otis, is a six-year-old mix with a backstory that explains the obsession. “My husband paid $40 for him, which covered shots and fees,” Benoit Belli says. “Shuggie’s mother was found in Arizona, somehow made her way to Topanga Canyon, and had a litter of six or eight puppies that all looked completely different. Ours is certainly a mix.” They have never DNA-tested him, content to guess at his makeup from how he behaves. With both of them working from home, “there might be little verbal dialogue, but I get constant picture updates: Shuggie on the lounge chair outside, Shuggie on the couch inside.”
That low-grade, all-day attention is the soil everything else grows in. The household’s centerpiece is “Shuggie Two,” a giant papier-mâché bench in his likeness that started as an early-pandemic project. Her husband, a furniture designer, welded a steel base; the two of them paper-mâchéd it using cement as a binder and “stacks and stacks of found newspaper” they drove around collecting. “It was a satisfying project that was sad when we were done, kind of like completing a puzzle.” From there the Shuggie objects multiplied: a ceramic portrait from a friend’s brand, Zozo’s General; a watering can with a white body and black spout that, she insists, “is similar to his face.” Anything black and white in the house eventually gets read as Shuggie-inspired.
How that instinct becomes a product
This is where her personal life and her job fuse, and where the piece earns its keep as a guide rather than a celebrity portrait. Edie Parker, founded by Brett Heyman in 2011, made its name on acrylic clutches with a distinct quirk and humor, pieces meant, in Heyman’s words, to “make statements while remaining sophisticated.” In 2012 the brand launched a bespoke program letting customers personalize bags and home items, and pet portraits became one of its most-requested offerings. The reopened commissions can put a pet’s face on clutches, coasters, lighters, vanity trays, hand mirrors, and cooler boxes.
If you are considering one, here is the process, which Benoit Belli oversees and which doubles as a buyer’s checklist:
- You start with a photo. Customers send an image of their pet to the brand’s customer-service contact, and the design team draws the pet’s likeness from it. A clear, well-lit photo that captures the animal’s actual proportions does more for the result than any other single factor.
- There is real back-and-forth. “We send a mockup, and clients will say, well, my dog looks a little more sad than the picture, or there’s more white under the chin,” she says. The brand treats those notes as the point, not a nuisance. “We want customers to feel like the acrylic interpretation feels representative, so we welcome that open dialogue.”
- You choose the details. Depending on the item, you pick colors, fonts, and finishes, so the piece reads as yours and not a generic template.
- Plan the lead time. Custom acrylic work runs roughly five to six weeks, which matters if you are aiming at a holiday or a gift date. For a present, start well ahead.
Why does the back-and-forth matter so much? Because, as Benoit Belli puts it, “pets are, to a fair amount of people, family members, so capturing the likeness is extremely important.” The same exacting eye she brings to a watering can that vaguely resembles her dog is, it turns out, the brand’s actual quality-control standard.
A wedding that could not leave the dog out
The clearest proof of how seriously this household takes the bit is the wedding. “In a perfect world, our dog would carry our rings down the aisle,” she says, “but there was absolutely no chance of that happening.” So they engineered guaranteed cameos instead. Her husband made clay figurine cake toppers of the three of them. He designed a custom acrylic clutch with Shuggie’s head on it, doubling as a memorial to their merged new last name, Benoit Belli. And because their wedding photographer was a dog lover, they came away with solo portraits of Shuggie from the ceremony, including a favorite of him lying on the porch, facing away from the vows entirely. “He was like, this sucks, no snacks.”
Why this is really a story about how pet-love gets monetized, gently
It would be easy to be cynical about a brand selling acrylic dog portraits to people who already own everything. What makes Benoit Belli’s version disarming is that she is plainly the target customer and the proprietor at once, and she is not pretending otherwise. She grew up with a black Lab, discovered after meeting her husband that he had an almost identical childhood Christmas photo with his own bow-decorated black Lab, and structures her workday around a 4:30 walk where Shuggie “is like a metal detector and we’re like, he’s walking us.” The custom-portrait business works because it is built by someone who would commission one for herself, and largely has, over and over, in papier-mâché and ceramic and acrylic. Edie Parker is not inventing a desire. It is selling a tidy, beautiful version of a thing devoted pet people already do with whatever materials are lying around.
You can see the reopened custom commissions on Edie Parker’s customize page.
References
- Edie Parker. “Customize / Bespoke Program.” edie-parker.com.
- Edie Parker. “Our Story” (founder Brett Heyman, 2011 launch). edie-parker.com.
