Why Nala Paws Exists
It started with a harness that didn't fit
Nala is a Bernese Mountain Dog. Like most Berner owners, we worked our way through a small pile of gear that looked right on the size chart and wrong on the dog — straps sitting in the armpits, a neck opening that wouldn't pass over the ruff, a coat that covered about two thirds of her back and gave up.
None of it was badly made. It was all made for a different dog.
The actual problem
Almost every piece of dog gear on the market starts life as a pattern for a medium dog and gets scaled up. That works until roughly 35 kilos, and then it stops, because large breeds don't just get bigger — they change shape. Deeper chest. Broader shoulders. A neck that's genuinely thick rather than proportionally thick. A longer back. Enlarging a small-dog pattern gives you something with the right girth and the wrong geometry, which is why so much big-dog gear technically fits and still doesn't work.
You can watch this happen in public. Independent gear reviewers testing cooling vests note openly that the largest breeds remain a problem, that dogs fall between sizes, and that their own test panels rarely go past medium dogs. The gap isn't a secret. It's just that nobody has been especially interested in filling it.
What we do differently
We size on four measurements instead of a letter: chest girth, chest depth, neck circumference and back length. Every product page publishes the exact range in centimetres that each size covers. Our Fit Finder turns your dog's measurements into a size, and if we get it wrong, the Fit Guarantee makes the exchange free.
That's the whole idea. It isn't clever. It's just what happens when the person choosing the sizes owns one of the dogs.
And yes, the fun stuff too
Big dogs are also excluded from the enjoyable end of the pet aisle. Halloween costumes and Christmas sweaters tend to stop at a size that would fit one of Nala's legs. So we make those too — same measurements, same honesty about what fits, just with more tinsel.
Where we are right now
Nala Paws is new, and we'd rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise. We're building the size data with real dogs, correcting it as we learn, and we publish what we know. If you measure your dog and send us the four numbers, we'll tell you honestly which size we'd choose — including when the answer is that we don't make one that fits yet.