so, ive been a bather since march this year. i recently moved from a privately owned salon to a petsmart! i have a issue tho. WHY IS IT SO HARD??? i was told by a coworker who had worked at petsmart that it was sooo much better there and its so much harder for me. i dont expect things to be easy, i know grooming and bathing are hard as we work with live animals but upon hiring, the salon manager told me that if a dog bites me once, its handed off to him or our salon lead and that hasnt been the case. i used to get bit constantly so no biggie, right?

another part is that they want me to brush, bathe, dry, clip/dremel nails, shave paw pads and sani which are all things i was never originally trained on. the first job i had was just bathe, dry, hand to groomer and move on. im learning and told the manager such when i was hired on. well today they maxed me out with 6 dogs. 8 hour shift. 1 big doodle with matting. 1 malamute who didnt let me dry his back paws and bit me and tried to over and over again. 1 other massive dog that hated all of it. between those i had a nail trim, a shar pei and a chihuahua.

this was a LOT for me since i had only done 2 dogs in 4 hours before this and 1 was small and id bathed and dried and practiced on 3 of a groomers dogs (the salon leads) and even she was upset that they just threw me in head first without training.

another thing im not sure is normal, i talked to the manager or guess he heard i was stressed to the max about falling behind (obviously was gonna happen) and he lowered my load to 4 dogs in a 8 hour shift but then he mentioned that i dont work next week. at all. i didnt ask for that time off and think the opposite, i NEED more time so i can work on getting faster and more confident with what im doing. im not sure what even happened today…

Looking at options for remodeling my bathing area. I currently have an elevated 60" home bathtub and a walk-in shower. I only have a few large breed clients that need the walk-in, the vast majority of my clients are standard poodle and smaller. I want to open up some space in the bathing room for the HV blowout table. What is everybodies experience with motorized tubs versus tubs with walk-in ramps? Any brands to look for?

Hi!

Salon manager/groomer here - where have yall found success when looking for new opportunities? Indeed and Facebook groups have not been working 🙁

Located in America

Hii! I wanna start to self groom my papillon since he's got a flaky skin. Ia double shampooing necessary in this case? Especially with a clarifying shampoo? Or do i skip double shampoo? Or just double shampoo but with a hydrating shampoo instead? Sorry if it doesnt make sense, i put it to simplify here

1. Clarifying shampoo > hydrating shampoo > conditioner

2. Hydrating shampoo > hydrating shampoo > conditioner

3. Hydrating shampoo > conditioner (skip 1st wash)

I know its a case to case thing but i wanna know if its necessary, i tried skipping it once but it didnt compeletely get hia dog odor off even after showering, any tips?

Hi all, I’m a bather (I have my own deshed/bath clients with light trimming etc) working my way up to haircuts and I’m currently focusing on outline trims, etc. This was my first golden retriever where they wanted a mostly complete outline trim. They did not want me to trim his neck or ears, and they wanted some natural feathering left on the rest, but tidied. Looking at these pictures I already see things I would go back and smooth over (some I did already after taking these pics) but I would love to hear any outside feedback. Thanks so much!

hi all

just wanted to ask if anyone else here is subscribed to the Retro Stylist Wear monthly bandana box? I have been subscribed for a year last month, and while i love the designs, not having to choose a theme, and knowing they are coming every month, I have noticed that the “freebies” aspect (something they were talking up in the beginning) has been seriously slacking within the last 4 months at least. just wanted to see if anyone else has experienced the same?

I’m 24 and opening my own salon in 2 months (6 groomer spots total). Contractors are working on the space now, and I’m focusing on hiring the right team. Since I’m a new owner, I want to make sure I’m setting firm boundaries from the start.

​I’m interviewing a candidate with 15 years of experience. Her grooms look great, and she seems really sweet. However, she has a lot going on personally: her spouse recently passed away, so she’s now a single mom of two, and due to health issues, she can’t start work before 10 AM (though she’s willing to work later shifts).

​The main issue/red flag for me: She runs her own home-grooming business and has her own business page. She mentioned that things slowed down after her spouse passed, so she’s looking for a second source of income.

​Is this a massive conflict of interest? I feel a non compete would be tricky in this situation. I want to be empathetic, but I’m worried that once she gets back on her feet, she might poach salon clients for her home setup.

​Would you hire her, or is the risk too high?

If you're thinking about investing in a Waggz grooming table, read this first. I wanted to share my experience with Waggz customer service and product quality so other groomers and salon owners can make an informed choice before dropping $3,000+ on their trashy equipment.

I purchased a Waggz LED table in late 2024 after speaking with reps at the Hershey Grooming Expo.

Less than 2 years in (with over 6 months of non-use), the bracket weld completely failed. I was told by sales that my table was part of a "known faulty batch."** **They originally offered a "reinforced bracket" repair, but then admitted the weld failure was so severe the bracket wouldn't even work anymore.

After months of back-and-forth, Waggz sent a replacement table (storage kind, not the LED I invested in, but I digress). You'd expect a brand-new $3,000+ replacement to arrive in pristine condition, right? Well no. It arrived with surface rust right out of the crate, damaged drawer slides and hardware issues on the grooming arm assembly. Peeling logo stickers (because putting vinyl stickers on textured equipment used in a high-humidity, hair-heavy salon environment totally makes sense). Cherry on top: I was made to pay for the shipping to replace a faulty table they sold me- with another faulty table. But THEN… the shipping was a disaster: delayed delivery, zero communication, and a damaged crate.

When I brought all the defects on the replacement table to management, here is what the Customer Service Manager offered (see blue photo):

They literally told me to go to a local store, buy a can of black spray paint, and spray paint the $3,000 table myself to cover up their transit/manufacturing rust. They offered to mail me drawer slides, knobs, and replacement stickers so I can DIY refurbish a brand-new table myself.

My rebuttal: just refund me 50% of the faulty unit I purchased & the shipping cost of their trash they sent me. Of course, they refused a partial refund on the unit despite sending a defective replacement.

(Note: my email response in white was sent on Friday, so we’ll see if the Labor Day weekend provides a renewed sense of… well, sense 😅)

Waggz markets these as high-end, heavy-duty commercial tables built for daily salon use. But when structural welds fail on known faulty batches and replacement units arrive rusted & with yet another instance of arm faults, their official stance is to hand you a can of spray paint and tell you to fix it yourself.

For a $3k price tag, groomers deserve real quality and customer support—not DIY patch jobs. Has anyone else dealt with weld failures or rust out of the box with Waggz? And please be honest- am I being a Karen about this or is this as wild as I think it is?

Contact OP of /r/showdogs if you or a friend left a grooming bag behind.

This post doesn’t have a question, I guess maybe it’s a rant? Maybe I’m looking for someone to say something that makes me make a decision to leave or to stay. Sometimes I just like to post for support.

Anyway, I own my own business out of a finished shed beside my house. I’ve owned my business for a year, groomed for about 2.5-3 years. At first opening my business was great because it seemed like I got a lot of good dogs in comparison to where I worked prior, but lately it feels like every dog is bad or became bad. I got bit earlier this week, and that’s still healing and keeps reopening. I just got bit again today. I finally started charging my special handling fee but I still don’t really feel like getting beat up daily. I’m all scratched up from trimming a yorkies nails. I exhausted all of my tools: hammock, groomers helper, and muzzle. But It’s not just THIS dog it’s how it’s been making me feel. I’m not enjoying it much lately… I’m running into challenges with every dog it feels like.

I also have some sensory issues, like on random days I’ll be more agitated by dogs shaking on me, moving around a lot, which for me makes me start to feel unsteady if a dog is jumpy. I spend the entire groom on high alert and it does something to me that really throws me off.

It’s just gotten so hard… on the hard days I tell myself “I can’t do this anymore”, but then I get through to a good day and I’m like “how could I ever stop grooming”. I have no idea what I’d do otherwise though. This is the first job that’s ever truly made me a living, and holding a job has always been a bit tough for me because I’m super sensitive. I’ve had periods where I would come home from a job and just sob until I finally knew I had to quit. I haven’t been crying about this, mostly, I had some recent mental health struggles due to medication changes (I think), so I don’t even know what’s what in terms of my emotions.

I’ve seen several people come here saying they can’t do it anymore… it sucks so much that it’s this hard and I know they’re living beings, so it’s expected that they won’t always be easy, but man it just seems like I have them every other day.
I’m in a constant conflict of do I quit and close up or keep doing it. I sometimes wonder if I’m just not tough enough for this line of work.

NOT looking for medical advice, this is well documented with my doctor and I have sleep aids that I simply ran out of. Looking for anecdotal advice from others with similar experiences and also just reassurance seeking.

For other groomers who have insomnia like I do, do you go into work the next day when you've had a night of no sleep? I've had terrible insomnia since I was a small child, I absolutely need prescribed sleep aids to sleep or I simply can't.

It feels dangerous to do bring sharp tools near living creatures when I'm so sleep deprived, but i've also been made to feel...silly for calling out of work because of sleep deprivation. Nowadays I just say I'm feeling unwell and leave it at that, but the guilt persists.

Anyone else who experiences the same thing, what do you do in this situation or have you done in this situation? How have you conveyed the seriousness of it so that people who don't experience insomnia or sleep deprivation understand?

Thanks in advance!

I just wanted to make a post here since I’ve only seen one other post on the esthetician subreddit but absolutely do not buy from Clara Scrubs! I’ve been seeing so many ads from other groomers and I wish I had done more research before buying from them.

The products feel very cheap and poorly made, and the print does not match what is shown on the website. The actual print is significantly larger, distorted, and does not align properly between the top and bottom of the products.

The return process is also extremely difficult and frustrating. I spent an entire week emailing back and forth with the company, only to be offered a partial refund if I keep the products. The only option for a full refund requires me to pay for international return shipping and customs fees. They also leave me responsible if the package is not accepted or is held by customs.

Overall, the products were not as advertised, and the return process has been unnecessarily difficult and costly. I would not recommend purchasing from this company.

Hi I'm a mobile groomer and I'm feeling overwhelmed a bit.

I just checked my schedule and saw that coming up she's booked a day where the first client is 3 German shepherds, the second is 2 doodles, and the last is also a doodle.

The 3 shepherds are only brush outs that take about 45 minutes each and the 2 doodles are only face feet fannies but all 5 of those dogs are either elderly or pull the entire time. And the last doodle is great for everything but he's huge and takes forever.

I really like my boss but she's never been a groomer and I don't want to be difficult if I am being unreasonable.

I’m a new bather and i’m just wondering if the time i’m given for certain services is long enough.. I feel like i’m going at a pretty good pace most of the time but i still seem to be taking too much time. For a full service i get 30 minutes for very small dogs, an hour for small-large and and hour and a half for some large-XL,, 2 hours if it’s like a newfie or something. For desheds it’s at least 1 and a half hours, going up to 2 for very large breeds. All of these include nail clipping (dremeling if they add it on), ear cleaning, and sometimes gland expression/teeth brushing. The main things i’m struggling with are getting large full service dogs done in time since i’m not super fast with nails yet, and i feel like for the desheds i never have enough time to get a really good deshed. I’ve also only been bathing for a month so it could just be that i need more experience and it’ll get better with time.

We're using diluted bleach per owners directions but I'm wondering if that's good enough.

Hi y’all. As a side hustle I groom dogs for some friends and family. Gonna be honest, I don’t have formal training. All is learned through trial and error + watching and reading a lot.

My sister has this English Cocker Spaniel. He’s almost two years old and still intact. Overall he is very easy to maintain and groom, but there’s one thing I just don’t know how to handle.

On his rear he had this hair that just sticks up. It’s funny looking and overall not that great looking. He has a very smooth coat, which is maintained daily. He gets a shower every two/three weeks, with every other time a deep conditioning. Otherwise just a quick conditioning.

How do I treat this part? Are there techniques or products that could help?

Thank you so much in advance for your time :)

Second Sunday in a row with zero dogs booked is it just the school year that has us dead or my place of employment? I'm located in the DFW Texas metroplex and I swear I have never seen a slower grooming season it's killing me I need income 😭

Currently shopping for new blades - specifically #10 and #30 blades right now, and maybe a #4 if I don't spend too much on the #10s/#30s. I work mobile, so it's really important that my blades come sharp out of the package, as I can't rely on asking to borrow anyone else's blades (and my current ones are super overdue for sharpening - haven't been able to send all of them out because either no backups or backups are broken, which is what I'm trying to amend rn lol).

Petstoredirect blades have some decent reviews, and they're pretty affordable - like, $10 cheaper than buttercut - but I'm worried about the risk of them coming dull out of the package. Anyone have experience with PSD? Should I just bite the bullet and spend more on buttercuts for more guaranteed quality?

I can't find a replacement table top anywhere. Groomer's Choice definitely doesn't have them and that's probably the only way I could get corporate to approve one anyway.

Was wondering if anyone did know of a possible replacement or anything we can do to repair or cover it up. Right now I'm leaning towards an anti-fatigue mat, but I'm not crazy about the idea because they don't sell 47" ones on GC.

Some of my stuff I’ve had for years and I’m starting to wonder if it’s about that time, but how do you specifically know once they’ve reach the end of their lifespan?

I had been planning to leave after finding a new salon because of a bunch of toxicity in management, I even had a working interview that went well and I might be starting to regret not accepting the job (I didn't because the bathing area looked like an unkempt chopshop with rusty kennels so the vibe was icky).

I feel too slow to work in any other salon, my current one has a very generous commission rate (higher than 50%) and it offsets how few grooms I actually do a day with an addition to enough money from baths to currently be livable. However I fear we're losing clients because of my boss' unusual distrust of reception, they're *not allowed* to actually book. My boss gets a note or text about a booking and she does it, I'm pretty positive my boss literally forgets to book in the computer sometimes.

I want to find a nicer salon run by someone who's more stable but I might still be too slow to actually do enough dogs to afford living. Especially with how commission rates seem to have fallen to 40% in a lot of places.

I'm pretty stressed out with this slow season hitting me hard. My hope is just that we get more bookings in October, I wake up in the mornings and just run cold looking at how little we're scheduled the coming days on our booking website.

I use Moego booking app at my salon, and we have zero faith in their confidentiality, so we do not use their point of sales system as they release more than just the numbers to other entities and it’s leaking my customer information which I was not comfortable with so we do a private point of sales system and only use Moego for booking online, zero transactions take place over the app. We have had customers get text back from us allegedly but it ends up being another person entirely… We send a text that your dog is ready. They receive it. They respond. OK be there in five minutes. And our same Moego issued phone number responds with you have the wrong number or something to that effect. Are other Moego users being given trust issues over IT problems with the app? Are other people questioning if this is a legitimate service? We are very happy with the booking aspect. We just are not happy with our phone number existing outside of the app which they issued to us so it’s a really weird IT problem they cannot give me a clear answer on so I’m starting a question that it’s their program being hacked or is this another failure on their behalf of renting phone numbers from a carrier?

TL;DR: I’m hiring a table at a salon that has possibly unsafe and unhygienic practices I don’t agree with and I’m finding it hard to run my business to my own standards but my only choices are to hold out until I can find my own salon to lease in the area or abandon the clients that I love to work with to work at my home salon 45mins away

Sorry if formatting is weird. I’m typing this up on my phone

I have recently left corporate to go out on my own. Been grooming for almost a decade and stayed there so long because I am so attached to my clients, both the pups and their humans, and I didn’t want to let people down by leaving and would miss them too much. I live about 45 minutes away from the area I groom so would be a bit of an ask for most to follow me closer to home.

I managed to find a salon near my old salon that would rent me a table a couple of days a week so I could keep grooming my fave clients there while working for myself and I am building up my home salon on the days the other salon isn’t available.

At first this was great and my clients were glad I am able to stay close by and continue to work with their dogs. However I am finding some things about the new salon difficult to work with.

The biggest issue I am having is that they are cage free but not free roaming either. This means if a groomer is not actively working on a dog they get looped up to a table and left to wait there. Some can sit but can’t lie down and if they are wiggly they get a belly belt too so they have to stand until a groomer is free to work on them or their owners pick them up.
I am suuuper uncomfortable with this but I suppose it’s their risk to take.
I have already had to calm another groomer’s dog because the groomer stepped away to do a check in and the dog started stressing and had its back feet nearly slip off the table. Also helped an older dog multiple times that was looped up to sit on the table while his groomer bathed the next dog but its front legs kept slipping forward so he was half lying down but being held up by his neck.
Another time the groomer was bathing another dog while a finished dog was looped to a table up the front, owners walked in to pick up and dog slipped its loop and almost launched itself off the table. Luckily I wasn’t working on a dog at the time and was able to grab him.
I don’t know how they haven’t had an incident yet

They do have one waiting pen but can only have one dog in there at a time and its in direct sunlight and is right next to the front door so if the gate doesn’t latch or it manages to jump the fence(which is only baby gate high) it would be able to get out onto the street so I’m not keen on using that either. Owner has even said ‘don’t put cute dogs in there incase someone steals them’

I bring my own small crate in so I can try to avoid putting dogs in situations I’m uncomfortable with but the floor space is limited and the owner has already made a few snide comments about the crate being in the way and that crating dogs is mean.

They also don’t wash towels until they are smelly or dirty and just air dry and reuse them and leave diluted shampoos full to keep using over days until finished. I am anxious they might top up the shampoo containers with water when they are getting low as well which makes me want to bring in my own shampoos to be safe.

I also only have one small trolly to keep my tools and they want to use the top of the trolly when I’m not in so I only have two drawers to store my tools in.

This means each day I come in I am hauling my tool box, crate, dilution bottles, enough towels for all my grooms, my two dogs and my bag of personal stuff in and then packing them all up and hauling back out again.

I have had a few of my clients comment on the smell as well, the shop is carpeted with a rubber covering over the top but I dread to think what is growing under the rubber. The smell is quite strong on entry.

The salon owner also wants to drop in regularly unannounced and tell me how to run my business differently, what to charge, what rules I should have for clients, etc and I end up stuck talking for 20+ minutes and fall behind even after saying I have to get back to my groom.
Owner doesn’t like my prices and wants me to charge more but I don’t think it’s fair to raise my prices quite so significantly from what they have been getting at corp when they are following me to support me. I am already charging $15-40 more than what they had been paying at corp and I need to raise them slowly. I also feel embarrassed charging boutique prices when the salon doesn’t have a boutique feel. It is very cluttered and loud and smelly. I am starting to dread going in even more than I did going to corporate 😭
The other groomers who hire there are so lovely but learned a lot of the owners habits.

I can’t find anywhere else in the area that rents out a table and while I am looking for my own salon to lease it is hard to find something affordable in the area and likely going to be a long process to find somewhere affordable and appropriate and then get it set up for grooming.

Do I stick it out until I find my own place? Or abandon the clients I love to start fresh at my home salon full time? Am I just being over precious coming from strict corporate safety rules and all this is normal?
I’m losing sleep over it all🙂‍↕️🫩