Take A Bow Wow Wow

Cheadle-based davinia hamilton-maddox knows all about putting pets in the picture as she runs her very own animal model agency. Janet reeder finds out more.

- Janet Reeder

EVER wondered how you could make your pet pooch a star? Well you could sign up to a model agency specifically created for our four-legged friends.

Davinia Hamilton-Maddox, from Cheadle, runs Animal Direction, a company that supplies pets to film production companies, photographers, PR companies for anything from TV shows to advertising campaigns.

It was when she was working on a big campaign for a marketing company that she had the idea to set up a model agency specifically for animals.

Davinia explains: ‘We had a pet client and we needed some animals for a photoshoot, so I contacted two I had found. One was in London and one just outside London. Both were extortionately expensive and also the service was just horrendous. They were just so rude. It was like they couldn’t be bothered, so I ended up using my own dogs and all my family’s and friends’ dogs on the shoot.

‘Everybody I knew with a pet was on it! We had 15 dogs, ten cats and more and amazingly managed to pull it off. It was then I thought “Hang on, there’s a business idea in this somewhere”. I looked into it, did all my research and discovered that my only other option would have been to contact dog trainers but even that wasn’t viable. They had their own jobs to do, so I set up Animal Direction.’