Check Out Stefan Schuch Kevin Tiell’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Stefan Schuch Kevin Tiell.

Hi Stefan Schuch, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?

SH*T Bag by Smolotov is a premium pet waste bag company, combining political satire and pet care. Designed for responsible pet owners who care about democracy, quality, and sustainability, these pet waste bags help make the world a little less shitty.
SH*T Bag is a critique disguised as convenience; performance art carried in your pocket. This product is not subtle. The brand name itself, a portmanteau of “small” and “molotov,” reflects a philosophy that small actions can create meaningful impact.
Our premium pet waste bags are made of PBAT + PLA + Cornstarch at a certified fair-trade and BSCI-compliant manufacturer in China to TÜV AUSTRIA’s OK HOME COMPOST standards. Our bags are thick, leak-proof, and large enough for any breed.
Created by two veteran designers who believe all dogs are natural anarchists, SH*T Bag provides a platform for daily acts of resistance. We’ve taken the worst part of pet ownership and made it great again. The revolution will not be stepped on!

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Ha ha ha… Stefan and I have been working for premium brands our whole lives, but this is the first time we’ve had our own brand. The learning curve is steep but we give ourselves grace to make mistakes, and pivot when we’re not realizing the outcome we expected. We’re not going to be good at everything the first time we do it, but we expect to improve and get better.

This year, one of our goals has been to improve our website’s conversion, turning more shoppers into buyers. We’ve done it by building new landing pages, adding a bundle builder to increase cart value, and following up with email marketing via Klaviyo workflows.

To support our retail partner network and direct customers to shop locally, we added a map to our homepage listing all 60+ retail stores who carry our brand. We’ve implemented Verified Reviews to lend confidence in purchasing our product. With 500+ 5-Star Reviews, customers love our products. Our bags are not the cheapest option, but they are the highest quality, and the reverse printing is a unique feature.

Keeping counterfeits off Amazon has been our biggest challenge. Amazon’s Brand Registry is set up to be a resource, but it’s Ai agents are not good enough to catch or remove all the fraudulent sellers. We report them, and escalate cases that are not initially approved, but it doesn’t help. If the search term is Trump Poop Bags, there will be 15+ foreign sellers using our imagery or similar product photos to sell alongside our brand. They use the same copy, colors, and characters as ours, but produce a thin plastic film and sell an inferior product. They infringe on our Smolotov Trademark and Copyright on file with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and U.S. Copyright Office. Lawyers in New York and China work to file DMCA notices on the sellers we report, but they respawn under different names faster than we can get them removed from the platform. Amazon knows there is a problem, but makes money on every sale and is in no hurry to keep them out of the U.S. Marketplace. There are 30+ counterfeit sellers on U.S. TikTok. All of them can sell for less than us because they are not paying to trademark and copyright their products and protect their intellectual property (IP), or for photo and video shoots. They are data driven, using Helium 10 and Jungle Scout to see what is trending on Amazon, then copy and undercut rights holders. They use ai to generate imagery that is just different enough to pass Amazon’s ai moderators. People talk about the enshitification of America, and we see it is being perpetrated on the all the platforms by allowing counterfeit goods to penetrate the market.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Stefan and I had lucrative freelance careers before Trump took office in January, 2025. We thought SH*T Bag by Smolotov would be a fun side-project, because we knew his administration would be a sh*t show and these bags would be popular! Associating “Stable Genius” with pet waste bags…chef’s kiss.
When he came into power, his first move was to pardon the January 6th combatants. After that, he instituted higher tariffs, raising domestic prices, which were ultimately adjudicated as illegal. That uncertainty around tariffs convinced our biggest customers to sell their brands to larger companies, or take creative production in-house. One of the biggest ironies, is that Smolotov would not be as successful if we still worked for other brands.

Stefan is a classically-trained 2D and 3D artist, having graduated from San Francisco Art Institute with Bachelors in Fine Arts, specifically, painting. Immediately after graduation, he landed a job at Apple in Cupertino, California, where he worked as a designer within MARCOM on global ad campaigns. 4 years later, he went to Google, in Mountain View, crafting illustrations and illustrations for Ads in Commerce. Stefan has also worked as head of brand design for startups Open Door and Pipe.

Kevin is a commercial photographer and post-production artist, who began his career in San Francisco as a freelance photo assistant and digital tech, assisting commercial photographers on catalog productions for Restoration Hardware and Pottery Barn. He taught himself how to retouch photos while working on his pinball series, “The Game, Reflected,” then went on to manage post-production for Pottery Barn in Brisbane, California,

Stefan and Kevin met at Apple in 2013, working on a 30-person team illustrating hardware and UI, Apple Maps, and retouching lifestyle imagery. They briefly reconnected at Google in 2018, and stayed friends. The opportunity to collaborate on SH*T Bag came last year, and a business was born! As co-founders, they’ve built their own brand and are already expanding throughout the US and Internationally, with distributors in Australia and Canada.

Honestly, this has been one of the best decisions we’ve ever made. We have so much fun working together, we could not imagine doing anything else. …and hope we never have to! We’ve taken the worst part of pet ownership, and made it great again.

What makes you happy?
The best part of this job is meeting talented people who love what they do. Meeting business owners supporting their pet communities, helping bring joy and comfort through new products and services, is the fun part.

Every day is a new experience, and we are living at the edge of serendipity, in the moment. We work a lot because there is so much to do, but it is the most fun we’ve ever had. There are so many highs and lows, but it is never boring. There is momentum to activity, solving problems, and being creative. Not knowing what’s next keeps us on ever ready.

When our dog, Bailey, comes home from the groomer, smelling so good, looking fluffy and energetic, we get excited. Roger Caras said, “Dogs are not our whole life, but they make our lives whole.”

Pricing:

• $17.47/unit (In honor of the 47th president)

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.smolotov.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smolotovhq/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/smolotovhq
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stefan-schuch-8b3b546 and www.linkedin.com/in/ktiell
• Twitter: https://x.com/SmolotovHQ
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@SmolotovHQ
• Other: https://kevin.tiell.com, https://herocollective.com, https://stefanschuch.webflow.io

Image Credits
All images © Smolotov LLC. Kevin Tiell, Photographer. Stefan Schuch, Illustrator.