NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — It's a story about life taking a new focus. That's because when Alex and Whitney Kimerling first married, they didn't expect where they'd be today.
"Absolutely not!" Whitney Kimerling said. "He was a mechanical engineer. I was a lawyer. We had the absolute antithesis jobs of what we're doing right now."
So, what is happening right now?
At Urban Dog Bar on Saturday morning, dogs and their people headed in for a photoshoot with photographer Morgan Gill.
Here's where the Kimerlings come in.
In 2023, they launched Hootenanny Games, their company based out of Nashville.
"Oh my gosh. We love board games," Alex Kimerling nodded. "We will be up to about twelve games by the end of this year."
"We have a game called Feelin' Cute," Whitney Kimerling added. "It's a game where you rank the cuteness of animals."
That one has this certain personal connection.
"My dog is in this," Alex said, pointing to a yellow lab on the game box. "This is my dog EmmyLou right here."
"She's a good one!" I told him.
"She's the most special dog in the world!"
EmmyLou got the Kimerlings thinking they wanted to do a new version of the game with just dogs.
"It's going to be made up of 150 dogs people have submitted all over the country," said Whitney.
Gill's photoshoot was the start of the search for dogs to be in the game Feelin' Cute: Top Dog. Anyone can submit pictures of their dogs through the Hootenanny Games site through August 6. You can find that site here.
"We're going to get thousands of entries of dogs," Whitney said. "We've already gotten hundreds that have poured in the past days."
"It takes one thing above everything else, and that's character," Alex added. "The smile, the personality of these dogs needs to come through."
Sure, this is pretty different from their lawyer and mechanical engineer days, but a change of focus can be great.
"Ultimately, the mission of this company is to make people smile, which I can't imagine a better mission," Alex said. "Every morning we wake up and think, how is this our job?"
"Hopefully, if we do our jobs right, people have fun," Whitney added.
Do you have a positive, good news story? You can email me at forrest.sanders@newschannel5.com.
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