[Dillon Wascher]

Hello fellow froggers!

[redacted]
DartFrogWarehouse.com

[redacted]

Please check out our site– we have about 2,000 beautiful, healthy frogs... [redacted]!

[redacted]

Thank you very much!

Dillon Wascher

 

[edwardsatc]

What exactly is SAFE and what does it imply? You seem to make big deal of it on the website and have even trademarked it, but never explain what that means ...

The Q based age stuff and other trademarked things on the site seems a bit gimmicky and my personal reaction to gimmicky sales tactics is usually to equate that with a lack of quality.

 

[cypho23]

...what he said.

 

[phender]

What's with the "Sunbee", "Aurora", "Lunar", etc. Are you trying to make your own "common" name for the frogs? They already have morph names. I don't get it. It makes you seem either amateurish, or like you are just over marketing.

 

[JJuchems]

I am not trying to be a down, just informative but other frog/reptile breeders have used A1 designation for their offspring. While you have trademarked it they still have the right to use it out of establishment.

 

[Dillon Wascher]

Hey, thanks for the inquiry and comments. I can assure you quality is top on our list, and there are no gimmicks. Come visit our facility. We can give you a private tour. On the issues you raise, we did a pre-market study on dart frogs and why they are not perceived as a retail pet assuming supply issues could be overcome. In fact, last Tuesday we met with the owner of a five store chain ($5M annually) to carry our frogs. They saw this as the ink jet printer and ink model. Frogs and flies are profitable. This was our second meeting with a third scheduled for this coming Tuesday. Our marketing study and theirs gave the same result. The overwhelming number one response as to why people who knew what a dart frog is, and a surprising many do not, was they are "poisonous". On this basis, from a marketing standpoint, is "poison" only part of the name for them or a description of them? Sure, we in the hobby know the answer, but most others do not. In the wild, poison is probably merely a description, but even the hobby sells wild caught frogs. The retail customer, who is not a frogger, as our marketing people tell us, will not buy dart frogs unless they are harmless, and we as a hobby have not done a great job getting the message out there making the distinction (wild caught versus captive bred). SAFE, for us means ONLY captive bred. For the sake of completeness, we are told trademarks designate the source of the goods and by definition CANNOT be descriptive. Of course, ANYONE could use the word safe in a descriptive sense at any time, for example, safe dart frogs, dart frogs are safe....and we wish the hobby would champion this message better for all of us. OUR TRADEMARK WILL NEVER EXCLUDE ANYBODY FROM USING THE WORD SAFE DESCRIPTIVELY. Our trademark is powerful for retail consumer confidence for captive breeding as PETS. We hope everyone looks at these as the terrific pets they are. BTW, the SAFE trademark is very much favored by retailers who sell dart frogs so we like it. We are thrilled you brought this issue up, many thanks and good eye!!! Further, for the fellow breeder, we are planning to offer free licenses to USE the SAFE trademark if they themselves ever retail only captive bred dart frogs, but since it (the trademark SAFE) is a designation of source and we own the mark, the lawyers tell us, it is us who need to make sure the other user's quality is up to snuff. If not, we could be injured by their poor products, while ours are top notch. Most all of us here on the boards are quality breeders, but some are not. This is an unfortunate fact. Have a great day and if you need some excellent quality safe dart frogs we sell under the SAFE brand to mean captive bred and nothing wild caught, let us know. For you, we will even hand pick them by the traits you specify! Have a great day!

 

[daryl34]

This add says 2000 frogs. OK I now that is not possible , Dillon, I understand your putting togather a business with your family. Thats great I hope you do well. That being said, made up names, as well as other factors make me wonder. Please be smart, being flamed is much easier than building up a reputation where people trust and value your opinion. This is a hobby where you build relationships ,as well develop in your ability to keep more complex organisms. If is just a quick buck, just be a flipper and be done with it.


Good Luck,
Daryl

 

[daryl34]

Dillon,
Just read your post , sounds good please post pics.

 

[Dillon Wascher]

Daryl this is Dillon's dad. We met many times before and been to your house. We have over 2000 eggs and tads right now. We rent a facility and breed them here. WE DO NOT FLIP and I feel bad you would imply such a thing. Dillon convinced me to put his first year college money in this and sell the used 2004 Corvette we bought him for graduation based on his 5.0 and a 34/36 on the ACT and 800/800 on SAT biology and math scores to do this business. This is real and very much a family affair. Our daughter 11 years old makes our tad cups, and my two other sons make the 240 cultures a day for our own use!!! My youngest son spends hours on his knees feeding, misting, leafing, and tagging frog enclosure bins. Come visit, please!

This add says 2000 frogs. OK I now that is not possible , Dillon, I understand your putting togather a business with your family. Thats great I hope you do well. That being said, made up names, as well as other factors make me wonder. Please be smart, being flamed is much easier than building up a reputation where people trust and value your opinion. This is a hobby where you build relationships ,as well develop in your ability to keep more complex organisms. If is just a quick buck, just be a flipper and be done with it.


Good Luck,
Daryl

 

[Dillon Wascher]

I am not trying to be a down, just informative but other frog/reptile breeders have used A1 designation for their offspring. While you have trademarked it they still have the right to use it out of establishment.

Hi Jason, thanks for the info. We did not know they used it and will remove any claim to it. On the other marks, again we are going retail and Tinctorius, for example, is okay but powder grey does not give us an individual image. LUNAR does. When open retail with an enclosure of LUNAR powder grey SAFE dart frogs we think the customer will be happier.

 

[Phyllobates]

What's with the "Sunbee", "Aurora", "Lunar", etc. Are you trying to make your own "common" name for the frogs? They already have morph names. I don't get it. It makes you seem either amateurish, or like you are just over marketing.

I agree. There is enough confusion in this hobby over naming and nomenclature. Why throw more names into the mix?

Best of luck on your family endeavor.

Chris

 

[daryl34]

Thats great, but understand where I am coming from, I know where you started, and in a short amount of time, things have changed.

I hope you do well, but in two adds in 2 days, I see the numbers 2000 for sale , then 1400 for sale. It make me wonder like many, whats going on.
I think its great what you are working on, and its great, my 15 yr old helps me all time. I post my contact info at the bottom of every post. I am unavailable next week, we can talk further.

Daryl

 

[FroggyKnight]

Ok. Dillon, I want you to know that I will never buy frogs that are marketed in this way. I strongly oppose your use of "sunbee" or "lunar" as these frogs are already established under other names. I would also like to point out that the dart frog hobby is NOT like the keeping ball pythons, we try to avoid the excessively fancy names and instead use species and the known locale. If a locale is not known then they may be named something different of course, but your animals are not different, they don't have the right to be called a different name.

Another thing I do not like personally is that Q system you use. Why can't you just say the age? It would eliminate some of the confusion when looking at your site. I know I was confused

 

[Dendro Dave]

I Just have a few points/questions... You guys have the benefit of the doubt like anyone else starting out. (So this is in a friendly tone )


1. Why no names on the websites? You go by name here, but looks like someone who isn't on DB isn't going to find the owners names on the site. Anytime I can't find names associated with a business, my guard goes up. Also the contact form is ok, but I really dislike it when I'm forced to use those and don't have the actual email addresses to contact vendors directly where I can store copies of all the emails sent/received and keep records of transactions. A buisness making this difficult for me again puts me on guard.

2. The "Safe" thing... Ok I get wanting to educate the public and expand your market, but until I read the site more my mind naturally went to the place that you are suggesting these were more disease free or something then other Darts. Some better clarification on what you mean by "safe" on the site might be nice. I don't really see anything that makes these more "safe" then any other darts. So it sounds like mostly "marketing".

3. A small criticism.... All the marketing stuff with "safe" and etc..etc.. gave me the impression as someone who's been in the hobby for almost 10 years that someone was trying to blow smoke up my butt, or up the butt of new hobbyists. It seems you are kinda trying out a new sales style or something and that's cool, but like I said the feel I got when reading the site was "smoke up my butt", so it's your call but you might wanna tone the marketing lingo down a bit and give the site a more sincere feel. The proprietary names and a lot of the other marketing stuff is likely to alienate the core hobbyist.

4. This kinda goes along with 3... The "science" and "research" aspects of the the marketing kinda seem kinda superficial, and more a marketing ploy then any real science going on. Also the color phenotyping at it's most harmless seems kinda pointless, and at its worst almost seems like you are trying to position yourself to start line breeding and creating designer dart frogs under the justification that the experts say our hobby names are meaningless as far as the species goes.

In many of those cases those morphs/locale names represent "races" and/or "locales" of dart frogs, and I think most of us know that an oyapock is near genetically identical to an azureus, but if you start crossing them based on the idea "well they're all tincs", you're going to get lynched by the hobby community, because we want to have those frogs continue to represent a morph/race or what would be found in a specific locale. We want our frogs to be as representative of the wild population that particular frog's ancestors or whatever came from, and generally try to segregate them in our homes like they would be in the wild.

If you're going to try to change that, you're going to meet with a lot of resistance. If that isn't your plan then I'm not really sure what the point of the phenotyping research is all about. It seems like your saying based on phenotype you can make the healthiest pair with the healthiest offspring, and If that is your claim it seems kinda dubious. Some clarification and supporting evidence might be good.

5. Lastly, I saw you guys sold a bunch of frogs earlier in the month, but have no feedback thread (did I miss it) Why? ...And can we expect this to change soon?

Anyways like I said, you've got the benefit of the doubt for now, but just the overall feel I get from your site makes me wary for some reason. Just throwing all this out there with the intent for it to be constructive criticism not a lynching


A note on the Q system... Ok I don't really know why people have a problem with this, or what is confusing about it. All it seems to be is shorthand for the age so they can't easily setup and keep their pricing straight. I got no problem with it and with their tiered pricing it makes perfect sense to have something kinda short hand to easily designate and separate frogs for the website.

 

[curlykid]

One thing is for sure and that is that throwing big numbers around does not impress hobbyists. We are not interested in knowing that you guys are selling to big chains and many more hobbyists who are not active on forums who may not know the proper care of the frogs. Most of those who read the thread, including me, actually shutter at the fact that you are distributing so many frogs. Most hobbyists are interested in the smaller breeders who are usually more punctual in the care of the frogs. It seems like everyday our standards are dropping more and more in this community.

 

[Dillon Wascher]

Thanks Daryl! The 1400 was the number we picked last night before we submitted the ad, and it was a conservative guess last night. The classified did not get posted until a little while ago. In the interim, Dillon used a calculator to count the number of frogs offered directly from the website and he got 2020. The numbers were generated originally by looking at/in each enclosure and then tabulating them. No guesstimates! The backoffice spreadsheet for Q2-Q4 only gave 1774, but I did not include count some pairs and adults and others allocated for retail sale right now. Dillon changed the number under his signature to be over 3,000 frogs in house (as a facility), but that includes Q1 (0-3 month old froglets too). We look forward to chatting with you! Oh yeah, what do you think of the shipping idea we have for the hobby: ShipYourFrogs

(As to the short time span, Dillon harvests every single egg. We have "egg reports" for every couple of days and could provide anyone the data match to our frogs and eggs for correlation. We will show them to you personally, but not share them openly.)

 

[Halter]

I have a few questions myself.
So you guys produce every single froglet yourself? Is there anyway you could post a picture of your facility?
Are all of your producing adults captive bred? Is there a particular line that you got a lot of your frogs from?
I am also curious on your shipping methods. What type of packaging do you use to ship to Pennsylvania in the middle of winter when it is 10 degrees outside?
Do your frogs have any warranties?

I like your website and the idea. I wish there was more pictures for the buyer to make a better decision of what is what. For example, if your target market is the newer hobbyist, just having a list of the auratus or tincs that you have without pictures can throw some people off, and can ultimately hurt the decision that they make. Just a thought.

Good luck on your family endeavor.

 

[JJuchems]

You have responded so can you please answer this question that have been asked:

What's with the "Sunbee", "Aurora", "Lunar", etc. Are you trying to make your own "common" name for the frogs? They already have morph names. I don't get it. It makes you seem either amateurish, or like you are just over marketing.

This has has done no favors for the hobby, but only adding confusion to your customer base.

Also, why does your "Breeding Stock" state USA Frogs and FrogZoo? Again, not clear to future customers. And what is your current number of breeding pairs?

 

[Dendro Dave]

Oh another suggestion that I would like to see all vendors do us list upfront which lines they are working with and what the lines are of the frogs we'll get on the site.

You claim on the site you have this info and that all frogs have great "pedigrees" but the closest thing you have listed on the sale page to this info is "Breeding Stock: U.S.A. Frog and FrogZoo" for all frogs... That doesn't tell me what line they are unless you are claiming credit for every line you sell, which would mean you had to have started with WC frogs for everything you sell...which I doubt is the case.

 

[ndame88]

Hey, thanks for the inquiry and comments. I can assure you quality is top on our list, and there are no gimmicks. Come visit our facility. We can give you a private tour. On the issues you raise, we did a pre-market study on dart frogs and why they are not perceived as a retail pet assuming supply issues could be overcome. In fact, last Tuesday we met with the owner of a five store chain ($5M annually) to carry our frogs. They saw this as the ink jet printer and ink model. Frogs and flies are profitable. This was our second meeting with a third scheduled for this coming Tuesday. Our marketing study and theirs gave the same result. The overwhelming number one response as to why people who knew what a dart frog is, and a surprising many do not, was they are "poisonous". On this basis, from a marketing standpoint, is "poison" only part of the name for them or a description of them? Sure, we in the hobby know the answer, but most others do not. In the wild, poison is probably merely a description, but even the hobby sells wild caught frogs. The retail customer, who is not a frogger, as our marketing people tell us, will not buy dart frogs unless they are harmless, and we as a hobby have not done a great job getting the message out there making the distinction (wild caught versus captive bred). SAFE, for us means ONLY captive bred. For the sake of completeness, we are told trademarks designate the source of the goods and by definition CANNOT be descriptive. Of course, ANYONE could use the word safe in a descriptive sense at any time, for example, safe dart frogs, dart frogs are safe....and we wish the hobby would champion this message better for all of us. OUR TRADEMARK WILL NEVER EXCLUDE ANYBODY FROM USING THE WORD SAFE DESCRIPTIVELY. Our trademark is powerful for retail consumer confidence for captive breeding as PETS. We hope everyone looks at these as the terrific pets they are. BTW, the SAFE trademark is very much favored by retailers who sell dart frogs so we like it. We are thrilled you brought this issue up, many thanks and good eye!!! Further, for the fellow breeder, we are planning to offer free licenses to USE the SAFE trademark if they themselves ever retail only captive bred dart frogs, but since it (the trademark SAFE) is a designation of source and we own the mark, the lawyers tell us, it is us who need to make sure the other user's quality is up to snuff. If not, we could be injured by their poor products, while ours are top notch. Most all of us here on the boards are quality breeders, but some are not. This is an unfortunate fact. Have a great day and if you need some excellent quality safe dart frogs we sell under the SAFE brand to mean captive bred and nothing wild caught, let us know. For you, we will even hand pick them by the traits you specify! Have a great day!

I am sure you have quality frogs, but this post makes me feel as if all that matters is selling frogs to whoever by making our hobby "more marketable". PDF are not for everyone, nor should they be unless you have researched and fully understand what is involved with keeping PDFs. I enjoy the scientific approach to our hobby and by trying to dumb it down kinda offends me. Sorry just my opinion and little rant.