Dollars in collars: a former engineer with a passion for pets turns a hobby into a thriving business.

• Author: Martin, Cathy

Minutes after I arrive at 2 Hounds Design in Union County, Alisha Navarro, the company's founder and president, tells me there's someone I have to meet. "Have you seen Oberon?" she asks a woman working nearby, who motions outside. After a quick search of the parking lot, Navarro scoops up a black and white shorthaired cat and brings him over to greet me. Oberon, she says, is part of a colony of managed feral cats the company feeds and cares for, all spayed or neutered. He is the company's unofficial "therapy cat," she tells me.

Navarro's passion for four-legged creatures is an obvious inspiration for the business she started in 2003 with $500 and a sewing machine. 2 Hounds Design employs 36 people at the Monroe plant making dog collars and harnesses. But the business, which had sales of $2.8 million last year, was started "by accident," she says.

After studying math and physics at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, then earning a master's in physics at Appalachian State University, the Statesville native took a job in Wadesboro as a project manager at Selectronics, a now-defunct technology company. There, she tackled projects such as programming security systems and machines that control yarn at textile plants. "I thought it was a great match for me," Navarro says. "I liked getting my degrees, I enjoyed the labs, I enjoyed the schoolwork. But when I had to stare at the same four walls every single day, and I didn't get to build something new every day ... I was really unhappy." So at 26, after just one year at the company, she quit.

That was almost 14 years ago. Navarro had sewn a few collars for Paradise and Iceman, two greyhounds she and her husband, Bob, adopted in the early 2000s. "People liked them, so we made a few more and gave them away. Then we made a few more and sold them. It just kept snowballing," she says.

Starting out in the tiny spare room of their 1,100-square-foot home in Monroe, the couple soon moved to a larger home in Indian Trail and operated the business there with five employees. "We bootstrapped every step of the way until 2009," she says. That's when the company moved to its current, 7,500-square-foot location off U.S. 74 and, borrowing money for the first time, purchased a patent for the Freedom No-Pull harness, an alternative to choke or shock collars sometimes used to control large or unruly dogs. "It's a more positive, more kind tool ... that doesn't cause pain for the dog," Navarro says. The Freedom No-Pull...