Dr. Ian Dunbar has been studying and training dogs a long time. Kelly and Jamie Dunbar have as well. Over the years, we've offered a variety of ways to train your dog, and those offerings keep evolving and expanding. Now, there's so many, it's a little confusing. This page is meant to explain it all. If you have questions, email us at [email protected]

It started with SIRIUS® Puppy & Dog Training, which Dr. Ian Dunbar started in 1982. With SIRIUS, Dr. Dunbar invented the off-leash puppy training and socialization class, and with it, revolutionized the world of puppy training. We've offered group classes for puppies and dogs ever since, expanding to over a dozen locations in the San Francisco Bay Area. We've had to suspend in-person classes due to the Coronavirus pandemic, and as a result, we've started offering SIRIUS Live Online classes, which have been hugely successful, and we're very excited to continue, even after we can resume our in-person classes.

Next came James & Kenneth Publishers, a publishing company Dr. Dunbar founded to publish (mostly his own) books and video about puppy and dog training, and to process registrations for his many seminars and workshops. Ian's since retired from public speaking, and books and video sales are not what they used to be, but the website is still up and we occasionally use it to process registrations for webinars.

With the rising popularity of the internet, Ian and Kelly Dunbar created Dog Star Daily, a website that provided access to essentiall puppy and dog training info, plus dozens of doggy blogs, a podcast, and lots of fun and cute videos. Dog Star Daily still attracts tens of thousands of visitors a month, despite the fact that we don't have much time to generate new content for it these days.

At this point, we had recorded many of Ian's lectures and seminars and were selling them as DVD sets on James & Kenneth Publishers. We started digitizing these lectures and workshops, plus our other videos, which we started selling on an online course platform. After that proved successful, we decided we should start our own online course website, and so we created this website, Dunbar Academy.

Initially, we sold recordings of Ian's existing videos. After a while, we realized we should start generating new content, specifically for Dunbar Academy and it would be good to offer a subscription model, so that our customers could get access to everything in what was becoming an enormous library of content, for a reasonable price. That subscription is called the Top Dog Academy, and it provides access to pretty much everything on Dunbar Academy. To promote Dunbar Academy we created a whole set of Free Courses, containing essential information that we hoped to spread by organic word-of-mouth.

At this point we were approached by a marketer who thought that he could help us reach a much wider audience by actively advertising our content. We decided it would be a good way to augment our DIY promotion efforts, and hopefully attract a bunch of new people who we might not have reached on our own. We figured the more people we reach, the more dogs we help!

This marketer helped us create a free webinar and a curated collection of our content, called the Ultimate Dunbar Collection, which could be sold as a package. The Ultimate Dunbar Collection contains a lot of the content on Dunbar Academy, but certainly not all of it, and it doesn't include the new content we add on a regular basis, which is usually exclusive to the Top Dog Academy.

He runs ads online that collect people's email address and directs them to a free webinar. The free webinar provides some basic dog training tips, and then offers the opportunity to purchase the Ultimate Dunbar Collection. 

Some people purchase the Ultimate Dunbar Collection, some don't. The people who don't get a series of emails over the next few weeks that provide more dog training tips, and then offer the Top Dog Academy.

We, the Dunbars, prefer it when people sign up for the Top Dog Academy. Plus, we think it's a better deal for our customers. But we understand that some customers prefer not to subscribe to anything, and the revenue from the Ultimate Dunbar Collection allow us to pay for advertising, which has proven to be very successful at helping us reach a new audience.