A Dating App For Dog Lovers

Amanda Levine graduated from the College of Charleston in 2015, moved back to her hometown of Chicago for graduate school, and dove into the world of dating apps: Hinge, Tinder, and JSwipe, the platform for Jewish singles. A mental health therapist, she moved to Charlotte for a job in 2018 and kept using the apps to meet men. She met them, all right—a procession of dudes and dates that went nowhere.

“The actual men I went out with, they were all … OK,” Amanda says. “I would spend time texting or talking to them on the apps, and then maybe we would meet, and they were different than how they were talking on the apps, or maybe they would disappear or ghost or …” She trails off and sighs. Hey, we’ve all been there. “It just became emotionally draining.” By 2022, she was about done with the dating app experience. She shared her frustrations with her mother, Cindy Himmel, who looked at her daughter’s profile and matches. She was curious at first, then fascinated.

 “I loved it!” Cindy exclaims. We’re sipping coffee at The Hobbyist, a Villa Heights shop that also sells beer, wine, and cocktails. Jazz blares from the speakers above us. Patrons hang with their dogs on the patio. It’s a suitable setting for, among other things, a first date.

Amanda Levine; her mother Cindy Himmel; and Artemis.

“I was in awe of how much you got to see online, and I would be like, ‘Let’s see who’s on today.’ It was so foreign to me,” Cindy says. “I never had that opportunity: ‘Oh, look at him.’ And she’s swiping away, and I’m like, ‘Wait, stop, what about him?’ As a general idea, it’s sort of brilliant, because, in my day, it was either bars or fix-ups.”

We’re speaking in July. Cindy expects that, by the time you read this in late September, she’ll be ready to launch an unlikely venture for a 66-year-old who didn’t own a dog until she was in her 40s and admits she knows little about technology: her own dating app, exclusively for dog lovers. It’s called Frolly, a hybrid of “frolic” and “jolly.” Its slogan: “Dating happier.”

That’s the whole point, isn’t it? When you sign up for a dating app, you accept that you’ll have to sort through an indeterminate number of people to find someone worth the bother. But if the sorting turns into a multi-year slog through a battalion of non-starters, you’ll either give up or look for a way to waste less time and effort. To Himmel, dog ownership provides a litmus test for fundamental character traits that, right away, make or break your interest. It’s not just a matter of “must love dogs”—although, realistically, you must love dogs.

“The qualities of dog lovers, as far as trustworthiness and responsibility and authenticity—it’s almost like the relationship with our dogs is so authentic, that quality can be carried over into our relationship with people,” she says. “That is the hope.”

Cindy has an entrepreneurial bent. She co-founded a popular Chicago bakery, Sweet Mandy B’s—named after Amanda, whom friends call “Mandy,” and Amanda’s brother, Brian—in 2002 and still owns a minority share. Cindy and her husband, Jeff, moved to Charlotte in 2020 to be closer to Amanda and to allow their two dogs, Ruby and Lulu, to experience tolerable winters and the joys of a yard.

All the while, Cindy kept up with her daughter’s digital pursuit of happiness. Cindy’s “light bulb moment” came a couple of years ago, when Amanda passed on a potential connection because he said he didn’t care much for dogs. This was not acceptable. Amanda had adopted a rescue pit bull, Artemis, who had suffered abuse and trauma from her origin as a bait dog in dogfighting. (Artemis was the inspiration for Artemis Cares, a fund mother and daughter established to provide veterinary services for Charlotte-area pit bulls in need.)

Artemis, who started the whole thing, really.

“Artie was really everything to me,” Amanda says. “So it was hard—” She catches herself. “It was impossible to date someone who didn’t like dogs.”

Amanda told her mother, and, Cindy says, “something just ding-dinged in my head.” It took a while to develop the app: An initial effort wasn’t quite joyful enough, and Cindy ran into trademark issues with her initial name idea, Catch. An unrelated family matter cost her several months.

But she got going again last year. A friend in Chicago put her in touch with a developer, FYC Labs, in California. She did the requisite market research. Dating apps are still popular—42% of American adults say online dating has eased the search for a long-term partner, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center report—and Charlotte, with its growth and apartment complexes full of young people and dogs, is a sound test city for a dog-inclusive dating app.

As we speak in July, FYC Labs is wrapping up the app’s beta testing; Cindy aims for a formal launch in October, with the first six months free “so the subscription base can build.” If it works in Charlotte, she’d love to expand to Chicago, then maybe New York City, and then who knows? “Who we really are—you can see it when we’re with our dogs,” she says. Just then, as if in agreement, a small dog on the patio starts to bark.

Amanda’s future is a little more predictable than Frolly’s. Around the time when her mom had her light bulb moment—when she was ready to give up—one of her Hinge matches messaged her through the app about a photo she’d posted of her and Artemis. What an adorable dog, he said.

Soon after, Amanda and Kevin Pietrick had what both believe was their last first date. They got married in April.