Most pet brands slap “eco-friendly” on the label and hope you don’t ask follow-up questions. P.L.A.Y. is one of the few that invites them, because the answers are the whole story. This is a company that can tell you how many plastic bottles it has kept out of landfills, name the causes it funds, and point to a third-party certification most of its competitors have never bothered to earn. It started, like a lot of good things, with one dog and one problem.
The bed that became a business
A pug named Momo joined Will and Deb Chen’s household twelve years ago, and the couple set out to give her the best of everything. The trouble was the bed. Chen couldn’t find one that met the standard he wanted for her, so he built his own, leaning on relatives whose cut-and-sew experience stretched back more than twenty years. That bed turned out to be the first official product of P.L.A.Y., short for Pet Lifestyle and You.
Chen is the company’s founder and CEO. Momo, fittingly, was promoted to Chief Pug Officer. What began as a single well-made bed has grown into a full catalog of interactive toys, carriers, and travel gear, all held to the same rule Chen set at the start: he won’t sell anything he wouldn’t hand to his own pets. The team still tests products in the office with their own dogs and cats.
Chen has been open about how Momo reshaped his thinking. He grew up loving animals, but Momo was his first dog, and what struck him was the lopsided math of the relationship, that a pet is a small part of our lives but we are the whole of theirs. That realization is what pushed him to obsess over safety, not just fun.
How a bed company became a toy company
Chen didn’t plan to become a toy maker. The beds were the problem: they were built so well that happy customers rarely needed to replace them. Looking for a category that would let the business grow, the team landed on toys as a natural companion to bedding and launched their first collection in 2013. From there it grew organically, a handful of collections a year, until what you see now represents close to a decade of work.
The humor came later, and on purpose. Early toy development was rudimentary, Chen has said, with a pattern-maker simply mimicking real objects like a carrot or a butterfly. Bringing in professional toy designers and, importantly, more voices from across the team and the brand’s ambassadors is what unlocked the playful, characterful toys P.L.A.Y. is now known for. Chen credits that collaborative process, not any single designer, as the key.
The part that isn’t marketing
Here is where P.L.A.Y. separates itself. Sustainability was not a positioning decision for Chen; he frames it as simply the right thing to do, sharpened by becoming a father and thinking harder about the world he’d leave behind. That conviction runs through the products.
Many P.L.A.Y. items are stuffed with PlanetFill, an eco-friendly filler made entirely from post-consumer certified-safe recycled plastic bottles. Finding it wasn’t quick. Chen has described spending close to a year researching suppliers and rigorously testing materials for both safety and practicality, down to whether the filler would hold up to washing. The payoff scales with the company: as P.L.A.Y. has grown, it has diverted millions of bottles from landfills and oceans.
Durability is part of the same philosophy. Chen argues that a short product life cycle is inherently wasteful, comparing throwaway toys to fast fashion. Dogs all play differently and no toy is truly indestructible, but he considers it the company’s job to make everything, plush, rope, and rubber alike, as durable as it can be. Longer-lasting toys mean less waste, and, not incidentally, happier customers.
Giving that goes beyond pets
P.L.A.Y.’s generosity is unusually wide. The brand has raised money for animal-welfare groups including the Snow Leopard Conservancy and the International Fund for Animal Welfare, decisions Chen says tend to emerge organically from a team of animal lovers who vet each opportunity for legitimacy, impact, and feasibility.
It has also given outside the animal world, donating proceeds to ZERO, an organization fighting prostate cancer, and founding the Scholars Helping Collars Scholarship for U.S. college students in 2012. Now in its tenth year, the scholarship draws hundreds of essays annually and awards one high schooler who tells the best story of impact on a rescue animal or welfare cause. Chen calls reading the essays a highlight of the team’s year. A recent winner, Blake Austin of Brunswick, Maine, stood out for creating an organic garden so shelter animals could have fresh food and for logging more than 2,000 volunteer hours at Midcoast Humane.
When it comes to choosing which groups to support, P.L.A.Y. leans toward 501(c)(3) organizations aligned with its animal-driven mission, verifying nonprofit status and details before offering products for in-kind donations matched to a fundraiser’s theme. The company accepts requests from across the country, which is why, Chen notes, you might spot P.L.A.Y. at an animal fundraiser near you.
What’s new since this was written
The credentials behind the story have only firmed up. P.L.A.Y. has been a Certified B Corporation since 2016, making it one of the first pet businesses to earn the designation, which B Lab awards for verified social and environmental performance. Its PlanetFill program has now recycled roughly 14 million plastic bottles since the company’s founding, and the brand has added FSC-certified packaging and Green America’s Gold-level Green Business certification to a headquarters that already runs on renewable energy.
Prices, meanwhile, keep the mission accessible: stuffed toys still start around $5.90, so buying into a B Corp’s recycled-bottle toy line doesn’t require a splurge.
As for what’s next, Chen’s stated goal is unglamorous and telling. He wants the brand to keep building on its decade of work until it’s a name pet parents everywhere recognize, all while staying creative, staying true to its principles, and having fun in the process. For a company that started because one pug deserved a better bed, that seems about right.
References
- P.L.A.Y. “P.L.A.Y. is a B Corp Certified Force for Good.” petplay.com
- B Lab. “P.L.A.Y. Pet Lifestyle and You Inc. — Certified B Corporation.” bcorporation.net
- U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “How P.L.A.Y. Spotlights Sustainability Through Eco-Friendly Pet Products.” uschamber.com
