Lynne Wieder, of Newport, above, designs sweaters for dogs and sells them on her Web site, mhound.com. Sherry Raposa, left, who runs the canine clothing business Emma Rose Design along with her mother, Carol Blanchette, works in the basement of her mother’s house in Tiverton. Two of her dogs, Emma, left, and Katie keep her company.

The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

Lynne Wieder, of Newport, above, designs sweaters for dogs and sells them on her Web site, mhound.com. Sherry Raposa, left, who runs the canine clothing business Emma Rose Design along with her mother, Carol Blanchette, works in the basement of her mother’s house in Tiverton. Two of her dogs, Emma, left, and Katie keep her company.

The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

Katie, above center, and Emma, far right, model dresses designed by Sherry Raposa and Carol Blanchette. Lynne Wieder’s canine sweaters are shown at right, on her dog Eloise, and above.

Katie, above center, and Emma, far right, model dresses designed by Sherry Raposa and Carol Blanchette. Lynne Wieder’s canine sweaters are shown at right, on her dog Eloise, and above.

Katie, above center, and Emma, far right, model dresses designed by Sherry Raposa and Carol Blanchette. Lynne Wieder’s canine sweaters are shown at right, on her dog Eloise, and above.

Carol Blanchette, left, and her daughter Sherry Raposa, both of Tiverton, show off the wedding gown they designed, made and sold for $5,500 to a dog lover in New Jersey.

The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

Affairs of the heart usually don’t mix with business.

But there are always exceptions, especially when the object of one’s affection is a pet.

Five years ago, retail executive Lynne Wieder had no idea she would be making her living designing and marketing sweaters for dogs.

Nor did Carol Blanchette and her daughter Sherry Raposa, both homemakers in Tiverton, have a clue they would end up in the canine clothing business.

But that was before each of them got a new puppy.

Today Wieder, of Newport, is president and chief executive officer of Mhound, a one-woman clothing company that translates the urbane style of J Crew into suitable outdoor wear for man’s best friend.

Blanchette and Raposa have established Emma Rose Design, a high-end clothing label that runs the gamut from everyday togs to formal wear — all for pooches.

Both Mhound and Emma Rose Design exhibited in August at the first-ever New York Pet Fashion Week, the brainchild of Rhode Islanders Mario DiFante and Alexa Cach.

With about 150 exhibitors and about 1,500 buyers for retail outlets in the United States and abroad, the trade show made a splash in the media, not only in the United States but around the world.

Emma Rose Design grabbed headlines on the fashion runway with a $5,500 doggie wedding dress and its 10-foot train.

The dress, along with a one-of-a-kind $250,000 diamond dog collar made by a Pittsburgh company, sold before the show was over.

Blanchette, who five years ago was between jobs, now works seven days a week to meet the demand for new orders. The same goes for Raposa, who juggles the business with the demands of her three school-aged children.

Wieder, meanwhile, is hardly sitting still.

“There are all kinds of niches in the business,” she said.

“There were so many people at this Pet Fashion Week that some people probably didn’t even notice me,” she said.

“They were looking for ‘over the top’ ” she said.

But Mhound “is very approachable,” and Wieder took lots of new orders for dog sweaters featuring argyle, cable, Fair Isle and nautical styling.

New business contacts “exceeded expectations,” she said, leaving her “scrambling a little bit” to make sure production keeps pace with demand.

New York Pet Fashion Week capitalized on a growing trend, especially among empty nesters with disposable incomes, to treat their dogs like the children they never had, or replacements for the ones who grew up and moved away.

According to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association, Americans will have spent a total of $38.4 billion on their pets by the end of the year, about $10 billion more than they did five years ago.

Dogs are the most popular, with nearly 74 million of them living in 43.5 million households in the United States, according to the association.

DiFante, the executive director of Pet Fashion Week, said there is a practical side to clothing for dogs.

Small ones, as well as those with short hair, get cold in the winter and need some sort of covering outdoors, the same way people do, he said.

Although pet-store chains carry clothing and accessories such as carrier bags for small dogs, a woman who shops for herself at a high-end boutique wants the same quality for her dog, DiFante said. “If the woman is wearing a cashmere sweater, you can bet the dog is going to have a cashmere sweater.

“This is why Gucci makes dog collars and Vuitton makes dog collars and carry bags,” he said.

DiFante has 30 years experience in the pet industry, building a national reputation as a dog groomer and stylist. He also knows the retail market as a buyer for his own Four Paws salon in North Providence.

After attending many trade shows over the years, either as a buyer or an exhibitor, DiFante concluded that the events were “somewhat stale and static” even as the pet industry was growing.

He had long wanted to put on a high-end event that focused on dogs and brought a sense of style to the products, but his idea did not take off until he met Alexa Cach four years ago when the two worked on a benefit for Providence-area animal shelters.

Cach, who had produced fashion shows in her native Switzerland, had moved to Rhode Island with her new husband two years earlier.

As business partners, Cach said, she and DiFante complement each other perfectly. “He is the pet industry professional, and I am from the design side,” she said.

Although some reviews, such as one in the Village Voice, slammed the Pet Fashion Week as a tasteless display of excess, Cach takes the criticism in stride.

“Is it right to put a quarter-of-a-million-dollar dog collar on a dog, when people are starving? Where does it end?” she said, paraphrasing the criticism.

That is a “justified point of view,” she said, but it is only one view.

Cach noted that the fashion runway has always been about innovation, spawning more wearable and affordable clothes that later appear in the stores.

She said the pet show brought much-needed visibility to products for dogs and focused attention on their welfare and the psychological benefits of having a pet.

Blanchette said she was as surprised as anyone to learn that people buy wedding outfits for their dogs.

Sometimes the pets wear the clothes as members of their owners’ wedding party, she said. Other times, the gowns and tuxes are bought for the dogs’ own wedding, Blanchette said.

“It is amazing what people want for their pets,” she said.

Over the last five years, Blanchette and Raposa have learned to respond to the market through their customers, with much of the contact coming over the Internet. They have separate Web sites for retail sales (myuptownpooch.com) and for wholesale buyers (emmarosedesign.com).

Emma Rose Design and Mhound have grown up around three very special dogs.

Wieder was born and raised in Hershey, Pa., and always had beagles and terriers when she was a child.

“I love, love, love dogs,” she said.

But as an adult, she pursued a career in marketing and retailing that took her all over the country. She never stayed in one place long enough to have a dog, let alone marry and have children.

“I literally was on a plane Tuesday through Friday,” she said.

Wieder worked for more than a decade as a marketing and retailing executive for Ann Taylor, the Gap and Mother’s Work, a leading manufacturer and retailer of maternity wear.

In the mid-1990s, she landed a job as president and CEO of Portico home furnishings in New York.

“One of my objectives was to be president of a company before I was 40,” she said.

She planned to expand the business, “but it was the middle of the dot-com boom, and we were having trouble raising money for growth,” she said.

Six years ago, she left Portico and reassessed her professional life.

She sold her apartment in New York and moved to the Hamptons.

For the most part she stayed put there, except for occasional trips to Europe, where she had clients as a business consultant. She resumed knitting, a pastime she had learned as a child from her grandmother.

And she got a dog named Eloise.

Eloise belongs to an ancient French breed, a quail-hunting pointer known as braque du Bourbonnais, which nearly became extinct after World War II.

The breeder Wieder found did not let Eloise go easily. Wieder had to make repeated trips to the man’s Connecticut kennel to convince him she would give Eloise a good home.

Soon Wieder was knitting sweaters for Eloise, who has a short silky coat of mottled tan, brown and white.

Passersby stopped the pair when they were out for a stroll and asked where they could get a sweater like the one Eloise was wearing.

At first, Wieder looked to a couple of assisted-living centers on Long Island to hire knitters for her line. But production was slow and she spent too much time visiting with the knitters, at the expense of the business.

Then, through a friend of a friend, she made contact with a cooperative in Peru that knits alpaca sweaters for export.

At first, she said, the Peruvian knitters had a hard time understanding that she wanted them to make sweaters for dogs. But the arrangement has worked well, with Wieder expanding her business for the last three years.

“At the Potter League, they all wear Mhound sweaters,” Wieder said, referring to the animal shelter in Middletown, where she donates a portion of her profits.

Wieder moved to Newport a little more than a year ago to be closer to the textile industry in Fall River, where she has found one company to sew coats for dogs and another to make bedding to her specifications.

She recently expanded her line to include the coats, as well as velvet Edwardian neckties for the holidays. The bedding will be available in the spring, Wieder said.

Although Mhound has an Internet presence at mhound.com, she does not sell online. Her products are available at retail outlets in 24 states plus Canada, the United Kingdom, Denmark and Norway, Wieder said.

Wieder declined to disclose sales volume but said she has doubled her business this year and hopes to do the same in 2007 by adding new product lines.

Blanchette, meanwhile, estimates that Emma Rose Design will hit the half-million-dollar mark in sales by the end of the year.

Blanchette and Raposa have recently hired two people to help them, although they still make all the clothes themselves, turning out about 50 outfits a day.

Blanchette says she is reluctant to farm out production for fear of losing control over the quality of the products.

In contrast to Wieder’s far-flung business ventures, Blanchette and Raposa’s business is home-grown Rhode Island.

Blanchette has already had several careers, in bridal wear, hairdressing and as a ceramics teacher in the local schools. An animal lover, she has also run a pet store, as well as a plant store.

She said she is self-taught in her approach to the creative elements and the technical side of Emma Rose Design.

The company is named after Blanchette’s dog Emma, 4½ pounds of fluffy teacup poodle, and Raposa’s dog Rose, who dwarfs Emma by comparison, weighing in at about 10 pounds.

Emma and Rose joined their respective families — Raposa lives only a few miles away from her mother in Tiverton — within a month of each other.

Mother and daughter began sewing because “the girls were cold and they needed a coat,” Raposa said.

Working in their homes — one room in Blanchette’s basement is devoted entirely to fabrics — they have acquired a total of nine sewing machines. Raposa alone once turned out 200 dog coats in about 2 1/2 weeks.

Once a design takes shape, Blanchette and Raposa use each other as sounding boards, passing photos of a sample garment back and forth via e-mail while they tweak the details until they are satisfied.

Since the close of New York Pet Fashion Week, the name of Emma Rose Design has popped up all over the Internet, including the Web site of Forbes magazine, where Blanchette recently was quoted in an article entitled “Platinum Pets.”

And guess whose telephone number has been added to the little black books of animal lovers with money and clout?

In mid-October, Blanchette got a frantic call from an organizer for a fundraiser for the SPCA of Westchester County, N.Y. Two Labrador retrievers belonging to David Letterman’s bandleader, Paul Shaffer, had nothing to wear in the canine fashion show the next day.

Could Emma Rose Design provide his-and-hers outfits?

In 90 minutes, Blanchette and Raposa whipped up a canine tux and a red organza dress.

The next day, they personally delivered the doggie formalwear to the event at the historic Lyndhurst Castle in Tarrytown, N.Y. They were invited to stay for the show, hosted by actress Stockard Channing.

Emma Rose Design already has been asked to contribute a runway design at next year’s SPCA charity event in Westchester County, Raposa said. And the company is also in the lineup of the fashion “dogwalk” at the second annual Pet Fashion Week in New York in August.