Why Groomers love a Schedule
Welcome to a safe space where I, Elle, will lay down my “wisdoms” for the algorithm and anyone who would like to have the opportunity at learning something new.
Today, a topic dear to my heart, The Grooming Schedule.
If you’ve been a client of mine for a minute, you’ll know that I encourage anyone who owns a dog to hop on a grooming schedule. There are nearly no exceptions to this rule except for those who work in emergency services but would still prebook as soon as their roster is out, or those who can very adequately keep their dog managed from home and have received the nod of approval from me.
What the grooming schedule entails is committing to having your dog groomed on a 2-8 weekly schedule. Some elderly dogs with thinning coats and health conditions we will push to 12 weeks.
A grooming schedule addresses a few points. For one, you can prebook or be prebooked for the year ahead, meaning you always have a spot so you won’t forget to book your dog in and subsequently have to wait for the next available spot. Your dog will always grow hair (barring a health condition), shed skin cells, and will always need and deserve grooming.
So-
We recommend keeping within 6 weeks for full grooming of any dog that needs haircuts.
What if your dog gets cut short and doesn’t need it, in your opinion, at 6 weeks? Great question!
Areas like their eyes, bottom, groin, paw pads, and nails all require regular maintenance. Longer than a month to 5 weeks creates complications like matting - did you know their paw pads can have the hair between them get so matted it forms a boomerang shape? Because it can, and it is very painful for your dog to walk on. For nails to be kept at a comfortable length that doesn’t push back on metacarpal bones in paws and change the way your dog walks to compensate for the pain (gasp for brain breath here), they need to be trimmed, and trimmed back to the quik.
When it isn't maintenance, it becomes a punishment, and the risk of accidents becomes a lot higher as dogs are more likely to not understand what's happening and fight, or be scared for parts or all of the groom.
Our prices and time frames are based on dogs that are on a 4-6 week schedule, once we get outside of this window we're not performing maintenance grooming and are having to do a big reset each time which will need a longer grooming appointment, more product, and ultimately an overdue groom surcharge.
To prevent this and to keep pups feeling happy, we could look at doing a Tidy ideally at the 4 week mark but could push to 5, to address all of the concerns I mentioned above.
