The easiest part of being emailed by us is saying no

This morning's run went out to British Bulldog kennels in Victoria, Finnish Lapphund owners scattered across Australia and Scandinavia-by-way-of-Rocketmail addresses, Samoyed and Cocker Spaniel breeders, French Bulldogs, Bernese Mountain Dogs, a long run of Flat-Coated Retriever kennels in Ontario and Alberta, Labradors, Papillons, Manchester Terriers, Whippets, Australian Terriers. Fifty-odd emails, each one to a real person whose contact details we found published on their own page or their breed club's. Nobody on that list asked to hear from us. That's the position we write from every morning, and it shapes what the email is allowed to ask for.

What's actually in the first email

The template hasn't changed in months, because the offer underneath it hasn't needed to: we introduce ourselves, say where we found them, and say we've already built a listing for their kennel from what's publicly available. There's no form attached, no document to upload, no account to create first. The listing exists, in draft, before the breeder has said a single word back to us. All we're asking is whether they want it to go live.

That's a narrower ask than it looks. Most marketplaces that cold-contact a seller are asking for the seller's labour — fill in this profile, upload these documents, verify this detail — before showing them anything in return. We do the opposite. The work happens on our side first, against sources we can already see, and the breeder's first real decision is whether to correct what we got wrong, not whether to start from nothing.

A yes requires effort; a no requires one line

If a breeder wants the listing to go live, there's a real conversation to have — confirming details, checking the listing reads true, agreeing what happens to it later. That part takes time, on both sides, and it should.

Saying no takes one sentence. The line in every outreach email is direct about it: no cost, no commitment, and if it's ever not wanted, one email takes it straight back down. We don't ask why. We don't follow up a second time to check. The reply that says "please don't contact me again" gets the same courtesy as the reply that says "yes, let's talk" — it gets read, it gets actioned, and that kennel goes on a list we check every subsequent batch against, permanently.

Why the law only asks for one of those two things

Most of the people on our lists are sole traders or individuals breeding under a kennel or stud name rather than a registered company, which under UK electronic marketing law (PECR) puts them in the "individual subscriber" category — the one the rules were written to protect. Unsolicited marketing email to an individual subscriber is only lawful with their consent, or under a narrower exception, and either way the sender has to identify themselves honestly and make opting out genuinely easy, in every message, with no catch.

We could have built an outreach process that did the legal minimum — an identifiable sender and an unsubscribe line buried at the bottom. We didn't, because the minimum and the thing we're actually trying to do aren't the same. A breeder who has spent a career building a reputation one litter or one foal at a time isn't going to trust a platform because its unsubscribe link technically works. The ease of saying no is itself part of what we're asking them to trust us on — a welfare-first marketplace that makes itself difficult to leave is not one, whatever the badge says.

What building it first actually costs us

It means some mornings' work is thrown away entirely. A listing built from a breed society's published record, sent to a kennel that turns out to have stopped breeding two years ago, or doesn't want to be found this way, or simply never replies — that work doesn't get reused or repurposed. It was built for one breeder, on spec, and if the answer is no, it's deleted, not banked for the next similar-sounding kennel down the list.

We've kept the process that way on purpose. The alternative — asking the breeder to do the work of describing themselves before we'd lift a finger — would be less wasteful of our time and considerably more wasteful of theirs, and theirs is the scarcer thing in this arrangement. We're the ones asking.

What it's for

A verified listing is supposed to mean something specific to a buyer looking at it. None of that meaning survives if the breeder behind it feels cornered into keeping it there. So the offer stays built around two settled points: the listing is ready before we ask, and leaving it is never harder than the single sentence it took to arrive.

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Sources

• ICO — what are the rules on direct marketing using electronic mail

Related: fifty emails a day, and what that actually looks like, what verified breeder actually means

— Rene