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By SUSIE OUDERKIRK
Las Cruces Bulletin
Imagine your favorite spa coming to your house, parking in your driveway, and pampering you just outside your front door. While this may not be available for you, it is for your dog.
Wet Dog Mobile Pet Grooming, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in August, has made pampering pets as stress-free as possible from its fully stocked van which parks right in the owner’s driveway.
David Garcia, who owns the runs the business with this wife, Juliana, started the mobile grooming business is 2006 to tap into both his passion for animals and his entrepreneurship.
“The most rewarding part of having my business has always been making pets feel comfortable with grooming,” Garcia said.
Garcia’s employees drive the Wet Dog vans right to a customer’s front door, where they fire up a generator and bathe, dry, clip, groom and generally pamper dogs and cats almost in the comfort of home. They don’t even require an outlet or access to water: it’s all self-contained in each truck.
“Some dogs will never like grooming, but at least we gave them the most stressfree experience as possible. It is really nice to have dogs love you afterwards,” Garcia said. The Wet Dog website states the mobile system is particularly beneficial because it “eliminates car transportation…no car sickness or accidents in your vehicle,” and “eliminates exposure to other animals and their diseases and parasites.”
Perhaps most important, Garcia points out, customers’ pets never get put in a crate.
He has two employees and two fully equipped vans, which travel around Las Cruces offering everything you’d get from a walk-in grooming establishment.
“The most challenging is pleasing 100 percent of our two-legged clients,” Garcia said. But, he admits, that’s probably true for any pet service— or customer service in general. “If only dogs could speak.”
After 10 years of running Wet Dog, Garcia has some changes in store.
“What I can tell you is that we plan on focusing even more on pampering our furclients,” he said. Exactly how, he added, “is top secret.”
He and Juliana run the business with the help of their two daughters, Juliana Isabela and Camila, who are 7 and 9, and the unconditional love of five dogs, three chicks, two birds, one cat and countless fish. “And we love our job!” he said.
Rates for mobile grooming vary from pet to pet, and are based on breed, size and current coat condition of each individual animal.
For example, Garcia said, “A Yorkie —small dog, not matted, usually needs a haircut —would be about $40 to $50,” which includes driving cost, haircut, massage sprayer bath, hand-blown dry, nail trim, ear cleaning, anal glands “and free belly rubs.”
Wet Dog’s motto is: “You bark, we park!”
Garcia offers basic and deluxe grooming packages, and extras such as nail polish, flea and tick removal, skunk odor removal and dematting. For cats, cuts with and without a bath are available. A complete warm-weather clip for a large breed such as a Great Pyrenees, which can take four hours, runs about $125, and it’s customary to offer your groomer a tip.
Wet Dog Mobile Pet Grooming is available for appointments 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday by calling 575-993-0379 or wetdogmobilepetgrooming@yahoo.com.
Matthew Barraza shaves Mama, a Great Pyrenees, in the Wet Dog Mobile Pet Grooming truck. The summer shave is a necessity for a dog bred to live and work in the mountains of France.
BULLETIN PHOTO BY SUSIE OUDERKIRK
