How Little Lumiverse Started

Lumi was sitting there one afternoon in July 2025, completely absorbed in demolishing an apple slice, and the crunching was so aggressively loud that I turned to my boyfriend and said we should genuinely buy one of those tiny fluffy microphones and start making ASMR videos of her. We both laughed. And then we actually did it — him buying immediately the microphone and me opening a new TikTok account. Just for fun, just to post videos of this ridiculous silly little dog and see what happened.

For a few months it was just videos — some did well, some didn’t, most were just me figuring out what I was even doing. I even applied to a collab program with a pet brand when I had about 700 followers on TikTok, very confidently, and heard absolutely nothing back. Which is funny to think about now.

The shift happened in October, when I started planning Christmas content and took an entrepreneurship course at the same time. Something clicked. I was sitting there trying to find Westie-themed Christmas things — decorations, products, anything — and coming up almost completely empty. Everything was dachshunds. It’s always dachshunds. And I remember thinking, I do this every single year. I look for Westie stuff, and it barely exists, and I just accept it and move on.

That year I didn’t move on. Instead I started thinking about what it would mean to actually build something around this gap — not just post videos for fun, but create a real space for Westies and the people who love them. I already had the dog. I already had the content. I just needed to take it seriously.

So in November I opened the Instagram account, then Pinterest, then started planning the website. And because the name I wanted was already taken on Instagram, I had to get creative — which led me to Little Lumiverse, a little Lumi universe, a name that could live consistently across every platform, every account, the domain, all of it. Sometimes the constraints give you the better answer.

For a few months it was just videos — some did well, some didn’t, most were just me figuring out what I was even doing. I even applied to a collab program with a pet brand when I had about 700 followers on TikTok, very confidently, and heard absolutely nothing back. Which is funny to think about now.

The shift happened in October, when I started planning Christmas content and took an entrepreneurship course at the same time. Something clicked. I was sitting there trying to find Westie-themed Christmas things — decorations, products, anything — and coming up almost completely empty. Everything was dachshunds. It’s always dachshunds. And I remember thinking, I do this every single year. I look for Westie stuff, and it barely exists, and I just accept it and move on.

That year I didn’t move on. Instead I started thinking about what it would mean to actually build something around this gap — not just post videos for fun, but create a real space for Westies and the people who love them. I already had the dog. I already had the content. I just needed to take it seriously.

So in November I opened the Instagram account, then Pinterest, then started planning the website. And because the name I wanted was already taken on Instagram, I had to get creative — which led me to Little Lumiverse, a little Lumi universe, a name that could live consistently across every platform, every account, the domain, all of it. Sometimes the constraints give you the better answer.

The honest version: I want Westies to be as mainstream and recognisable as dachshunds. I want to walk into a random shop somewhere and find a Westie mug, a Westie ornament, a Westie anything — and not have to dig through seventeen dachshund options first. I want people who have never thought about the breed to become curious about it, and I want people who already love Westies to feel like they’ve finally found their place.

Little Lumiverse is for the person who has been the only Westie owner in every room they’ve ever been in. For the person who googles Westie content and finds the same five things. For the future owner who’s quietly researching the breed and wants something that feels real rather than generic. And for anyone who just appreciates a very small, very opinionated, extremely photogenic white dog living her best life.

I expected there to be some Westie community out there, but I didn’t expect quite how many people were waiting for something like this. There are so many Westie owners and lovers on Instagram, so many people who light up when they see Lumi’s content, so many messages from people who just want to talk about their dog with someone who gets it. I love when people DM me and send pictures of their dogs, telling me about their dogs’ quirks and names. It’s so cute and I’ll always respond to those!

There are also Facebook groups, but most of them are the engagement-farming kind — not really a place where people feel genuinely connected, so I moved on from that…

However, what surprised me most wasn’t the numbers, though the growth has been faster than I imagined. It was the quality of the connection. People reaching out to share their Westie’s story, asking questions, saying they felt seen. That told me something real was happening, and that this community exists and is just scattered everywhere with nowhere to actually come together.

Pinterest was its own kind of wild — the existing Westie content there is mostly a mess, not particularly beautiful or useful, and it turned out there was a lot of room to do something that actually looked good. That account grew faster than almost anything else, which surprised me the most.

Little Lumiverse is run by Nettie, a content creator and Westie mum based in Tallinn, Estonia. Lumi supervises operations from the sofa and occasionally the windowsill.