Our story — Meet Loree
I spent eleven years as a mechanical engineer, mostly in northern Sydney, designing tolerance specs for components that had to perform under load every single time. When something failed, you traced it back to a measurement someone got lazy about. That mindset does not switch off when you go home. So when I started keeping pets, I kept noticing the same problem: the products falling apart, the sizing that was off by 15 millimetres in a way that obviously mattered, the materials that looked fine on a product page and felt wrong the second you held them. I was not angry about it. I was just interested in why it kept happening and whether anyone was going to fix it.
Before Norton Goods existed, I was buying gear for my animals from wherever I could find it and testing it the way I would test anything else, writing notes, measuring wear over time, checking seams after a few weeks of real use. My kitchen table in Berry had stacks of rope samples, harness prototypes, and a set of digital callipers that lived next to the fruit bowl. I drove up to a supplier in the Hunter Valley twice in 2021 to talk through jute rope construction because I could not get a straight answer from anyone online about the actual fibre weight per metre. That trip cost me about $340 in fuel and a day off work. It was worth it.
The brand started properly in March 2022. I had a jig I had built myself for testing pull strength on woven ropes, a spreadsheet with about 60 rows of supplier comparisons, and one product I was confident enough in to sell. I listed it through a small stall at the Berry Markets first, not because I needed the income but because I wanted to watch people handle the product and ask questions. The feedback from those Saturdays told me more than six months of online research had. By July 2022 I had registered the business and started shipping from the workshop at the back of the property.
Today Norton Goods ships across Australia from Berry, NSW. The workshop is still small, about 40 square metres, and I still build test jigs when a new product needs one. We work with a small number of suppliers, most of them in New South Wales and Queensland, and I visit each one in person at least once before we commit to anything. The boring details are still the whole point. If a seam is going to fail under 8 kilos of load, I want to know that before the product leaves here, not after.
— The boring details are the whole job. — Loree, Loree Chantal Ambrose
Journal
Why it took eight months to find the right rope
Finding a cotton supplier who could hold a consistent twist count turned out to be a much longer job than I expected.
When I first started making the Kanga Chew Rope, I sourced cotton from three different places, basically whoever had stock. The problem was that each batch had a different twist per metre, and that matters more than most people think. A looser twist means dogs can pull out individual strands faster, which creates a choking risk. A tighter twist makes the rope stiffer and less satisfying to chew. I was rejecting about 30 percent of incoming stock just on feel, which is not a sustainable way to run anything. I needed someone who could hold a spec.
I spent most of mid-2023 calling mills and distributors up and down the east coast. Most of the smaller operations in the Hunter Valley either didn't track twist count at all or couldn't give me a number in writing. I eventually got a lead on a supplier out of Maitland who had been doing commercial rope for the maritime industry. They understood tolerances. They were used to customers who wanted documentation. First sample batch came in at 14 twists per 10 centimetres, which is exactly where I wanted to be, and it's been consistent across every order since.
The cotton itself is a natural undyed fibre, no bleach, no optical brighteners. That was non-negotiable for me because dogs chew these things and ingest small amounts of fibre. I know that sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised how many pet product manufacturers don't think past the retail photo. The Maitland supplier sources from ginners in the Narrabri and Walgett regions, which is about as local as you're going to get for cotton in NSW. There's a paper trail for every bale, which I keep on file.
The other thing I tested was wet tensile strength, because dogs are not going to keep their toys dry. I soaked samples for 24 hours and then tested break load by hand with a luggage scale. Not a lab, I know, but it gives me a repeatable baseline. The current rope holds above 18 kilograms before the braid starts to distort, which is well above anything a medium-breed dog is going to generate in a play session. If I'm honest, that number is probably conservative because I was testing single-strand sections, not the finished knot.
None of this is glamorous and it doesn't make for a great Instagram caption. But getting the rope specification right before worrying about packaging or photography meant I wasn't redesigning the core product six months in. That's the part of the job I actually enjoy. The sourcing calls are tedious, but sitting down with a spec sheet and knowing you've got it locked in is a decent feeling at the end of a long day.
How to fit the Outback Adventure Harness without guessing
A harness that sits 2 centimetres too far forward will restrict a dog's shoulder movement on every single step, and most owners never notice.
I get a reasonable number of emails from people saying the Outback Adventure Harness feels loose on their dog even after they've tightened every strap. Almost every time, the problem is the same: the front chest plate is sitting too high on the sternum. When that happens, the belly strap can't do its job of anchoring the whole assembly, so the harness shifts around no matter how much you cinch the sides. The fit instructions that come in the box explain this, but I know most people open a product and figure it out by touch, so I want to write it down plainly.
Start with the dog standing on a flat surface, not sitting. Sitting changes the shape of the chest and you'll get a false measurement. Place the front chest plate so its lower edge sits about 2 finger-widths above where the front legs meet the chest. That point is easier to find than it sounds: run your finger along the inside of the front leg until you feel the leg join the body. The plate should not touch that junction. If it does, you need a size down, or the plate needs to slide back on the adjustment rail, which you can do without tools.
Once the chest plate is in the right position, clip the belly strap first, then adjust the side straps. Not the other way around. The belly strap determines where the back panel sits along the spine, and if you adjust the sides before clipping the belly, you're just moving the problem around. The back panel should sit roughly between the shoulder blades and the last rib. On a 20-kilogram Labrador-cross, that's usually about 15 centimetres of coverage. On a barrel-chested breed like a Staffordshire, you'll find the panel sits closer to the shoulders, which is fine.
The final check is the two-finger rule, which most harness guides mention but don't explain well. You should be able to slide two fingers under every strap, but you should not be able to slide your whole hand. People tend to err on the side of loose because they worry about their dog's comfort, which I understand. But a loose harness rotates under load, and a rotating harness puts the clip point off-centre, which means when the dog pulls, the load path goes diagonal across the back. That creates exactly the kind of chafing people are trying to avoid.
One more thing: recheck the fit after the first three walks. The webbing on the Outback harness is a woven polyester and it does settle slightly with use and moisture, typically about half a centimetre of give across all the straps combined. That's not a defect, it's just how woven textile behaves under cyclic load. A quick snug-up after those first few outings and it'll hold position reliably after that.
The gusset problem that delayed the Koala Plush Bed by six weeks
I thought the pattern was finished until I put a 6-kilogram beagle in the prototype and watched the side seam give way at the corner.
The Koala Plush Bed went through four prototypes before I was willing to photograph it, which is two more than I planned for. The first two were straightforward sizing iterations, normal stuff. The third one looked right, held its shape on the shelf, photographed well, and then I borrowed my neighbour's beagle, put him in it, and watched the corner gusset split at the join. Not catastrophically, but enough that I could see the seam allowance was insufficient for the stress concentration at that point. Six weeks later I had prototype four.
The problem was specific to the corner gusset, which is the piece that gives the bed its bolster shape. I was using a 12-millimetre seam allowance, which is standard for this kind of soft goods construction. But at the corner where the gusset meets both the base and the side panel simultaneously, you get a three-way join, and the effective seam allowance at the stress point drops to something closer to 8 millimetres because of how the fabric folds. Under a dog's weight and the way dogs actually move in beds, that's not enough.
The fix was a bar-tack at each corner, which is a dense zigzag stitch that reinforces high-stress points. It's used in jeans at the pocket corners and at belt loops, and it's the right tool for exactly this problem. I set the bar-tack at 4 millimetres wide and 8 passes, which is what the sewing machine I use can reliably produce without skipping. After that change, I put the same beagle in the prototype for a week, which involved some negotiation with my neighbour, and the corners held without any visible distortion.
The fill is the other thing people ask about. I use a polyester hollow-fibre fill that's rated for repeated compression, which matters because a dog is going to sleep in the same spot every night and the fill needs to recover its loft. The specific fill I source comes through a wholesaler in Silverwater and it's the same material used in commercial dog bedding for veterinary clinics. It passes the relevant Australian Standard for resilience, AS 2464.3, which gives me something concrete to point to rather than just saying it's good quality.
I'm in Berry, which is about 15 minutes from Nowra, and the humidity here in November is noticeable. I keep a few beds in the shed for ongoing testing, and watching how they hold up through a coastal NSW summer before I finalize anything is something I've built into the schedule deliberately. It's slow, but it means I'm not finding problems after the product is in people's homes.
June in Berry and what the slow season actually looks like
June through August is quieter for sales, so I use it to do the work that doesn't fit into busy periods, mostly testing and small redesigns.
Berry in winter is cold enough to be inconvenient but not cold enough to be dramatic about it. We get frosts, the Southern Highlands road gets foggy, and the workshop, which is a converted garage with no insulation worth mentioning, gets down to about 8 degrees by 7am. I work in a fleece and I keep moving. The slower order volume between June and August is something I used to find stressful in the first year, but now I think of it as the time I actually get to think. This past winter I used most of it redesigning the attachment points on the Emu Feather Cat Wand.
The wand had a friction-fit connection between the rod and the wand head, and over a few months of use the fit would loosen and the head would spin freely instead of tracking the rod's movement. Cats are very specific about the way a wand moves, or at least my test subjects are, and a spinning head is apparently not interesting. I wanted a mechanical lock rather than a friction fit, which meant cutting a new jig for the connection collar. The jig took about a day and a half to build out of MDF and some hardware from the Nowra Mitre 10. That's the kind of task that's impossible to prioritize when you're packing 40 orders a week.
I also spent time this winter doing something I'd put off for over a year, which was properly documenting my cutting templates. All four products have fabric components and I had been working from paper patterns that were starting to show wear. I transferred everything to 6-millimetre plywood templates and laser-cut them at a maker space in Wollongong. Each template is now labelled with the version number and date, which sounds like basic record-keeping but was genuinely not happening before. If I ever need to train someone to help cut fabric, I now have something I can hand them.
The feather sourcing for the cat wand is something I sorted out late last year and it's worth writing down properly. Emu feathers in Australia are regulated, which surprises people. You can't just collect them or buy them from anyone. I source through a licensed emu farm near Narromine in central NSW, which processes birds for meat and oil, and the feathers are a byproduct of that operation. The farmer I work with has the relevant permits and I keep copies. Each batch I receive gets inspected before it goes into production, mostly checking for shaft integrity, because a broken shaft can splinter.
By September the orders start picking up again, usually around the time the school holidays bring people through the South Coast and they find us through the Kangaroo Valley markets. It's a predictable rhythm now and I've stopped fighting it. The winter months produced 3 meaningful product improvements this year, which is a better return on that slow period than I've managed before.
Customer reviews
Priya M. — Brunswick, VIC — 2024-03-14 — 5/5
Solid harness, great fit
Ordered the Outback Adventure Harness for my whippet and it arrived in four days — faster than I expected for standard post. The sizing guide on the website was accurate; I used the measurements and landed perfectly on a medium. It sits well on the chest and hasn't rubbed after three weeks of daily walks.
Tom B. — New Farm, QLD — 2024-05-22 — 4/5
Cat loves it, packaging was simple
The Emu Feather Cat Wand turned up well packaged and my cat was obsessed with it from the first wave. The feathers did start to thin out after about six weeks of daily use, which is fair enough. Would buy again — just treat it as a consumable.
Sarah K. — Fremantle, WA — 2024-07-09 — 5/5
Koala Plush Bed is the real deal
My staffy refused to sleep anywhere except this bed from the first night. I've washed the cover twice now and it's held up fine — no pilling, no shrinkage. Shipping to Fremantle took six business days on standard, which is normal for WA.
Declan F. — Surry Hills, NSW — 2024-09-03 — 4/5
Chew rope doing the job
Picked up the Kanga Chew Rope for my lab who destroys most things in under a week. It's held up for about three weeks so far, which is a win. The cotton does pull apart a bit at the knots so I keep an eye on it during play. Good value for the price.
Megan O. — Hobart, TAS — 2024-11-18 — 5/5
Quick delivery to Tassie
I ordered the Dingo Dental Chews expecting a wait since I'm in Hobart, but they arrived in three business days with standard shipping. My border collie demolished the first one slowly, which is exactly what you want from a dental chew. Already reordered.
James W. — Northcote, VIC — 2025-01-07 — 5/5
Great gift, handled returns query fast
Bought the Koala Plush Bed as a gift and needed to exchange the size. Emailed Norton Goods and got a reply the next morning with clear instructions. The exchange process was straightforward and the new size arrived within four days. Good customer service from a small business.
Lena C. — Paddington, QLD — 2025-02-21 — 4/5
Harness looks good, sizing runs slightly small
The Outback Adventure Harness is well made and my kelpie looks great in it. I'd suggest measuring carefully and sizing up if your dog is between sizes — mine was right on the boundary and the medium was a snug fit. Buckles are solid and the chest pad is comfortable.
Nina R. — Glenelg, SA — 2025-04-10 — 5/5
Arrived fast, well packaged
Ordered the Emu Feather Cat Wand on a Tuesday and it was on my doorstep Thursday via express. The packaging was minimal and recyclable, which I appreciated. My two cats have been fighting over it for a week straight.
Returns
We want you to be happy with what you ordered. If something isn't right, you can return most items within 30 days of the delivery date, provided they're unused and in their original condition and packaging. To start a return, email hello@nortongoods.com.au with your order number and a brief description of the issue. We'll confirm the return address and any next steps within two business days. Return postage is at the buyer's cost unless the item is faulty or we sent the wrong product.
Your rights under the Australian Consumer Law apply to all purchases from Norton Goods. If a product has a major fault — meaning it doesn't do what it's supposed to do, is unsafe, or differs significantly from how it was described — you're entitled to a replacement, repair, or full refund. These rights exist independently of our 30-day returns window and do not expire. We take product quality seriously and will always work to resolve genuine faults quickly and without hassle.
Certain products are excluded from change-of-mind returns. Opened consumable items such as the Dingo Dental Chews cannot be returned for hygiene and safety reasons. Items that have been used, washed, or visibly worn do not qualify for a change-of-mind return. Once we receive and inspect your return, refunds are processed back to your original payment method within 5–7 business days. You'll receive an email confirmation when the refund has been issued. If you haven't seen it after seven business days, check with your bank before contacting us, as processing times vary by institution.