What: Lyx is a Fort Worth-based company founded in 2025 that makes a hydrating powder treat for dogs that can be mixed with water or sprinkled on their food.
Contact information: lyxhydration.com and amazon.com.
Editor’s note: Made in Tarrant is an occasional Q&A series on small businesses started in Tarrant County. Submit your business here.
Fort Worth entrepreneur Dylan Jones launched Lyx, a hydrating, nourishing treat for dogs, in May, selling his product on Amazon and the company website lyxhydration.com. He’s signed with a broker who is helping position Lyx for a push into retail stores nationally.
Jones, a TCU graduate who holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in entrepreneurship and business analytics, respectively, came up with the idea while serving in the U.S. Air Force and seeing working dogs struggling to stay hydrated. After experimenting and a rebrand, Jones and his partners came up with the final formulation: low-sodium powder with electrolytes and chicken or beef broth that can be mixed with water or sprinkled on food.
Jones sat down with Fort Worth Report reporter Scott Nishimura to chat about how he forged the company’s path forward, with a lot of help from partners.
Entrepreneur Dylan Jones launched an earlier, differently branded version of his Lyx dog treats, filled with hydrating electrolytes and low-sodium chicken or beef broth, at the Clearfork Farmers Market. (Scott Nishimura | Fort Worth Report)
Scott Nishimura: What do you see as the market for Lyx?
Dylan Jones: I believe dogs alone is a $50 million revenue-generating opportunity. I’ve had mixed reviews for cats, but it’s also a very big market opportunity. Ownership of dogs and cats is almost split 50/50 in the country. Equine is also a great opportunity.
Nishimura: Where did your entrepreneurial journey begin?
Jones: My dad had a tractor shop in Fort Worth. He was a tractor mechanic. He always worked for himself, was able to set his own schedule and be a problem-solver. And that stuck with me when I went into the Air Force and began seeing myself as a problem-solver.
Nishimura: You were in the Air Force for eight years. What did you do?
Jones: I worked with the civil engineer unit all over the world. I was in Italy, Korea, Hawaii. I did everything from the foundation up in terms of building facilities, bedding down, troops on deployment, airfield, repair, carpentry, metalworking, masonry, you name it. Anything that didn’t have to do with plumbing or electrical.
Nishimura: Tell me about how you came up with this idea for dog hydration.
Jones: When I was in the Air Force, we always had military dogs patrolling the base. These dogs were always the first line of defense. And we would always joke that these dogs are worth so much more than us. If they had a cough, they would get a full MRI. We could break an arm and the military would just tell us to take some Motrin and stop complaining. So it always stuck with me that these are high-value, high-asset animals.
Lyx, dog hydration treats created by Fort Worth entrepreneur Dylan Jones, are available in 28- and 7-packs for $34.95 and $7.95 at Lyx’s website lyxhydration.com and Amazon. Lyx is making a big push to get into retail stores nationally. (Scott Nishimura | Fort Worth Report)
Nishimura: So after your discharge from the Air Force, you took an entrepreneurship class at TCU, where you had to come up with a business idea, develop it and launch it, all in a semester.
Jones: I was sitting in class, and our professor was discussing commercialization of defense technology as an opportunity to break into a new business. I went home and was looking at this website that had thousands of patents that the U.S. government had developed. One of them was software developed to triage soldiers in the battlefield. I thought, ‘Is the software able to triage a dog on the battlefield?’ And so I proposed that question to the Air Force. They said no and gave me my first defense contract to begin exploring. They were looking for dual-use technology, something that’s already been developed commercially, innovations into a new category. So I spent a few years working with the (Department of Defense).
Nishimura: Did you complete the product?
Jones: No, it didn’t get completed. It got really advanced in pre-deployment.
Nishimura: But this was the bridge to what you’re doing now.
Jones: What I do now with Lyx is all based off of military research that they were doing to keep their dogs hydrated. I just asked myself, ‘Is there commercial viability to this?’ I went home and I took my dog on a long walk in the summer, brought him home and put a bowl of water in front of him. He wouldn’t drink it. He just wanted to lay on the tile and cool down. OK, interesting. Then I mimicked the military research I had, added chicken flavoring to his water bowl. I was using coconut water as an electrolyte solution. He licked it all up. I said, ‘OK, let’s take this to the farmers market and see if anybody else cares about this.’ I went to the Clearfork Farmers Market. I brought 3,000 cans that I had developed with a canning manufacturer. I put some AI dog art on the cans, and then I just started shouting at people: ‘I’ve got Gatorade for dogs.’ This was in the summer of 2023.
Nishimura: What was the formulation at that point?
Jones: It was coconut water and chicken broth.
Nishimura: How was the response at the farmers market?
Jones: I made my first sale, and people were going wild for it. Let’s see what happens when I come back next week and see the same people again. They came back and people were repurchasing. That started a customer discovery journey that I took from summer of 2023 to summer of 2024. I was going to dog shows, farmers markets, pop-ups at running trails. I would go to bars and restaurants and try to sell the cans there for dogs on the patio. I had built an email list, and people would purchase. But I started losing a lot of money because it was very expensive to ship water all over the country. I got demand, but every time someone orders, there goes another couple dollars in lost profit. Eighteen months ago, in 2024, I was at the farmers market selling off the last of my product. And I met my investor, a Fort Worth guy. He just came up to me at the farmers market. And he asked do you need any money? He was connected to a venture capital firm in Dallas.
Nishimura: You had noticed on your visits to Costco they were selling powdered hydration packs for humans.
Jones: And everyone goes crazy for them. We decided to keep the formulation the same, but do this in a powdered version. We’ll have higher (profit) margins, it’ll solve a lot of the business problems, and this is something we can scale (up). They like that idea. We agreed to co-found the business together. That was in the summer of 2024. Shortly after co-founding the business together, I was introduced to Eric Rojas, who has a brand agency out of New York. We pitched them on the idea, and they came in as an equity partner to do the full rebrand.
Nishimura: You manufacture in Plano and you launched on Amazon in May. How has that gone?
Jones: Things are going great. We’re acquiring customers profitably. We’re not really spending too much on advertising. That means people are organically searching out electrolytes for dogs and landing on our brand. And we’re starting to put together a retail go-to-market strategy. This year, we signed a retail group called Vandelay Strategies. They work with another Fort Worth entrepreneur, Austin Patry. He referred me to them because they were looking for a pet brand. Vandelay onboarded with us, and they brought us a national pet broker. They manage about 8,000 national pet specialty retailers and about 4,000 independent retailers. We just finalized a deal a month ago or so, and now we’re starting to build out our top-of-funnel retailers that are looking to bring our brand in for 2026.
Nishimura: What’s next after that?
Jones: Get our business ready for institutional funding.
Nishimura: So you were telling me you’ve tried this with cats, and that didn’t go so well?
Jones: I tried it at the farmers market with cats. When I was selling it in cans, I put a cat on one of my cans. It didn’t really work that well. People came back and said, ‘My cat wouldn’t (touch it).’ That let me know there’s going to be more research that needs to be done. It’s not going to just simply carry over one product for multiple animals.
Nishimura: How much equity in the business have you retained?
Jones: I’ve given a lot of equity away to build the team that I want. I’m a little more than a one-quarter owner in the business.
Scott Nishimura is a senior editor at the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at eric.garcia@fortworthreport.org.News decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
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