The dog on your grooming table is ready to be styled. Its coat has been washed, conditioned, dried, brushed, and combed. Its ears have been cleaned, and its claws trimmed and buffed. Now,you will clip and scissor to the best of your ability. Here is a question for you: have you applied coat spray? If this is a product you are not familiar with or currently using, maybe you should try some.
If you want to stir up some arguments among a group of groomers, bring up the topic of offering “shedless treatments” as an add-on service. The three most significant points that groomers argue about when it comes to this discussion are:
I do a lot of thinking when I am blow-drying dogs. Last week, as I was (endlessly) drying a Cocker Spaniel, I began to ponder some "do's and don'ts" that apply to our industry. Here arethree of each that I came up with.
If someone is said to be “sitting down on the job,” it tends to describe a person who is not working diligently. The phrase probably came about during the industrial revolution when many people worked in factories, standing for hours at a time while they worked.
Jodi is a blond cocker/poodle mix that has graced my table every three weeks for many years. She gets a full groom on one session, a bath, fluff, and brush on the next. She's a good and pretty girl, and her signature look involves long, flowing ears.
Maybe the person who taught you how to groom told you to do it. Perhaps you saw dogs that groomers had done this on a breed you were not very familiar with grooming, so you started doing it, too, thinking it was acceptable. It's possible you did it by mistake once and then continued to do it because you didn't know how to fix it.
What is "skimming," and why should a groomer know about it? Skimming is a grooming technique in which a clipper is used to shorten the animal's hair, but not in the typical manner. Regular clipping requires us to lay the clipper blade flat against the dog's skin. The size and shape of the blade determine how much hair is removed as the blade follows the contours of the animal's body.
Pippy, a Wire Fox Terrier, came in a few weeks ago. We do what we call a "pet strip" on this dog. We card and strip her jacket to retain as much color and texture as possible but clip her head and scissor her furnishing. I thought there was something odd about her appearance when she walked in, but it wasn't until I began to dry her that I realized that her eyebrows were almost non-existent.
Oliver is a little Havanese who comes in to be groomed every eight weeks. I can't say it makes me happy to see his name on the schedule; Oliver annoys me. He almost always poops on the floor the moment he enters my studio. I have asked his humans to walk him before he comes in, but Ollie has an uncanny ability to hold it until he is in the door. And he whines.
Learning how to shape the eyebrows on commonly groomed pets, such as Scottish Terriers and Schnauzers, took a lot of practice. I'm pretty proud of how these breeds look when they trot out of my grooming studio, and many customers comment on how much they like how I groom these breeds. But sometimes, it pays to get a little creative.
