Training Axl: How we digitized a Doberman

Let’s rewind to January. That’s when we started building the digital front desk, and from day one we had one client in mind: K-Nine Solutions. Seriously. Anytime a friend asked what we were working on, we’d start with “ok, imagine you’re a dog trainer.”

K-Nine is the top dog trainer in Santa Barbara. A staff of 7, does a million dollars a year, an impeccable reputation, and a lot of local fame. They sell high ticket training, and they care a LOT about hospitality.

Here’s the idea. Picture walking into K-Nine for the first time. Before anyone says a word, you’re already sizing the place up. Is it clean? Are the dogs chill? Is this somewhere you’d trust with yours? You’ve entered their world, and you’re already deciding what you’d pay.

Then you walk up to the front desk, and there’s Michael. He says hi, asks about your dog, and answers whatever you throw at him. Depending on how that goes, you sign up or quietly back out the door.

Your website is now your digital headquarters, front desk up and center. It’s the first impression, the reason anyone shows up to the real one. But nobody’s at the desk. Just a contact form and a whole lot of pages.

So we put someone there. An always on, fully custom front desk that lives in your digital lobby, your website.

That’s the visitor side. What happens behind the desk?

A great front desk person notices things. Three people asked about weekend sessions this week. Two asked about something you don’t even offer. And they pass it along to the boss.

Websites are terrible at this. Analytics can tell you someone spent 40 seconds on your pricing page and scrolled 60% of the way down. Cool. What were they looking for? No clue.

We started with personality. Who should this thing even be?

We went back and forth. A brand new mascot with a random name? Eric himself, in pixel form? Some abstract shape?

What we did know: it had to be fun. Dogs are fun. Then it hit us. Who’s the actual hero of K-Nine? Who’s the top dawg?

Axl. Eric’s 100lb Doberman.

Axl looks like he should be on the cover of Men’s Health, and he is a complete goofball. He walks around the facility like he owns the place. Well, at least like his dad does.

He’s also a giant baby. Eric leaves him in the car for two minutes and he starts crying. When we pitched the idea over Google Meet, the team tried to get him on camera to say hi and he literally couldn’t fit in the frame.

Axl gets his attitude from Eric. Eric’s a military veteran who trained dogs in the Army’s K9 unit, and you can feel it in how K-Nine runs. This is legit dog training. Boot camp, and that’s how they like it. They take some seriously bad dogs, straighten them out, and send home a happier, healthier dog.

Looking to get your pup a facial? Wrong building.

So Axl had to carry all of that: respect, empathy, experience, and a sprinkle of humor.

“Axl’s been the face of this place for years. Now he finally has a desk job.”

First we had to get to know the guy. We studied a ton of photos, then met him in person. He’s big.

Then we digitized him. Cool, a pixel Doberman. But a still image just kind of sits there. If Axl was going to feel alive, he had to move.

So we went down the rabbit hole on pixel art animation, and we kept ending up in the same place: Street Fighter III: Third Strike. Nobody in Street Fighter ever stands still.

Even between rounds they’re bouncing, breathing, cracking their knuckles. Tons of personality in a handful of frames. We wanted that.

From there, we defined three key motion states: idle, listening, and thinking. We thought about how a dog would present itself in these situations and wrote it out.

• Idle: sitting there licking his paw, totally chilling
• Listening: stands up and eagerly awaits your command, as if you are holding a ball in your hand
• Thinking: discovery mode, he’s smelled something interesting and is trying to find it

Each one has its own transition, so he flows from one to the next. No awkward snapping from sitting to sniffing.

All the animation work happened in Melius.

We dropped in our character designs and started talking to Mel, the Melius agent. We described how each state should look, how Axl should move between them, and handed over our Street Fighter references.

Melius took it from there. They built out the entire artboard, and wrote clear prompts for the generative video tools to work from.

Then it was just a back and forth. “He looks too stiff when he sits up.” “Slow down the sniff.” Mel would adjust, and we’d go again.

Usually this is the painful part. You write a super technical prompt, it misses, you rewrite it, it misses again. Here, we explained what we wanted in simple terms and Melius translated it into something the video tools could actually use.

Axl had to sound like K-Nine. So we sat down with Eric and the team and asked questions. How do you greet a new client? What do you say when someone’s dog is a total disaster? What makes them laugh?

We recorded and analyzed every call and interview we had with them, and pulled the team’s tone of voice straight out of it. Then we trained Axl with real examples, like inquiry emails the team had already answered.

What came out is a dog who’s confident, warm, and a little funny. He’s direct like a trainer, and he’ll never make you feel bad about your dog.

Everything from those interviews, plus K-Nine’s whole website, went into one knowledge base. That’s Axl’s brain.

This part is sneaky good. We run a small business too, and setting up a front desk makes you think hard about your own value prop. What is our business? What are our core offers? What should we say to someone who just landed on the site?

Those answers become a simple playbook, laid out as a graph you can edit, that Axl walks every visitor through.

Some questions need a human. If someone types “my dog just bit someone,” Axl gets them to the team, fast. For the serious stuff, Eric needs to meet your dog. Axl knows his limits.

He also never says “I don’t know.” If something isn’t in his brain, he points you to the team, and the question gets flagged so we can teach him the answer.

Before launch, we talked to Axl. A lot. We threw every weird question we could think of at him to see if he’d crack.

Now people talk to Axl the way they’d talk to someone at the desk. In their own words. “My dog pulls on the leash.”, “Do you take puppies?”, “Can Eric do Saturdays?”

A contact form never hears any of that.

Visitors get excellent hospitality and quick answers, no more digging through pages of information. Eric gets the data.

• Real leads. Axl plugs right into K-Nine’s existing booking and lead systems. When someone’s ready, they book, and the lead lands where the team already works, tagged as coming from Axl.
• Customers in their own words. Every chat shows what people actually want.
• Gaps in the offer. When Axl gets asked something he doesn’t know, it turns into a suggestion for Eric.
• Time back. The team stops answering the same five questions all day.
• The hub. One place to read conversations, spot patterns, and edit what Axl knows.
• A weekly analysis email. The highlights, straight to his inbox.

The insights are what we geek out on. People tell Axl things they’d never say on the phone.

If most of them say their dog pulls on the leash, guess what Eric’s next Google Ad says. If a bunch of people keep asking about grooming... hmm. Maybe it’s time to offer grooming.