How Bhooki Dog Collars Are Made: From Fabric to Finished Product

How is a Bhooki collar actually made? It comes up often enough to answer properly rather than in a one-line reply to a message. The short version: a length of African print fabric, cut by hand rather than by machine, built up over webbing or interfacing, piece by piece, until it's something a dog or cat can safely wear.

The founder's own path into this started well before the business did, sewing scrunchies for family and friends as a child, long before that turned into cutting and sewing pet accessories for a living, and long before Tami, Bhooki's Shih Tzu, became the one testing most of what comes out of it.

It starts with a length of fabric, not a pattern book

Every collar begins with a length of African print fabric. We've written separately about where that fabric comes from and how it reached the UK, so this isn't the place to repeat that history. What matters for the making process is what happens once the fabric is in front of whoever is cutting it: there's no single motif repeating identically down the length of the roll, so each piece cut from it captures a slightly different section of the print. A machine stamping identical blanks from a pre-printed sheet doesn't have this problem, and doesn't produce this result either.

Why no two collars ever look quite the same

Because pieces are cut individually from patterned fabric rather than stamped from a plain, uniform material, the exact position of the print varies from piece to piece. This is stated plainly rather than dressed up: print placement can't be guaranteed to match a product photo exactly, and custom fabric placement isn't offered, doing so would waste more fabric than it's worth.

In practice, two dogs can end up wearing the "same" design and still have visibly different collars, one might catch more of a swirl, another more of the plain background between motifs. That's presented as a fact of the process, not a compromise, and it's the direct, mechanical result of choosing to hand-cut from patterned fabric rather than print a design onto a pre-sized blank.

What's underneath the print

The printed fabric is only the visible layer. Most dog collar sizes, small through extra large, are built over nylon or polypropylene webbing, which gives the collar its structural strength for a dog that pulls, jumps or plays rough. Extra-small dog collars and cat collars use interfacing instead, a lighter, iron-on layer that gives smaller pieces enough body without adding bulk a small dog or cat would notice. Hardware goes on at this stage: metal D-rings and a tri-glide for adjusting size, along with a plastic quick-release buckle on most dog collars. Cat collars use a different buckle entirely, a safety breakaway design that releases under around five pounds of pressure, so a collar caught on a fence or in a scuffle lets go rather than tightens.

Made to order, not made to stock

None of this happens ahead of a sale. Collars are made to order rather than kept in bulk, so most orders are processed and shipped within three to seven days, though handmade items can occasionally take up to two weeks. Custom orders aren't offered as standard, the one exception being a preferred print made up in a collar style it isn't already listed in.

That's a deliberate trade off, not an oversight: no warehouse of pre-cut stock waiting to sell, and a slightly longer wait than a mass-produced collar bought off a shelf and shipped the same afternoon. Made-to-order production is slower for exactly this reason, and it's also the reason a specific print can sell out of a specific size without a backroom of spares to draw on, once it's gone, the next one is cut fresh, not pulled from a shelf.

What happens after it leaves the workshop

Care is simple and worth following properly: a soft hand wash, no scrubbing, laid flat to dry rather than tumble dried. Like any fabric accessory, wear and tear happens over time, and it's the owner's job to check a collar still looks and feels secure before putting it back on, the same standard we've written about for supervising pets in bandanas elsewhere on this blog.

The process is fairly simple to describe and slower to actually do than a factory line would be, which is more or less the point of making things this way rather than any other. It's also the reason the business exists at all in its current form, a hobby that started with scrunchies didn't turn into a pet accessories brand by finding a faster way to do things, it turned into one by doing the slower version properly and consistently enough that people kept asking for more.

If you want to see the range that comes out of it, our dog collars collection has the full set of current designs.