Join the cool auntie table. We have chardonnay and iced tea.

Written By Anna Harch

Pull up a chair. We're Anna and Nat, and we've been in this industry long enough to have seen most of it twice. The photo is at least 10 years and 10 kilos ago. We are not from the selfie generation and we're not sorry about it.

Between us we have about 40 years of doing this job and watching grooming grow from something nobody really talked about into a full profession with its own educators, certifications, events, and increasingly switched-on clients. We're Gen X. Born somewhere between 1965 and 1980 (don’t ask for specifics plz), raised without the internet, and equipped with a coping mechanism that mostly involves dry humour and pretending everything is fine. Standard.

As Gen X right now, in this industry, at this moment: we are sitting in the middle of every generation that is shaping it. And we've been thinking about what that means.

Our parents taught us the trade

(Not literally. Nor do we share the same parents.)

The generation that built grooming as a profession - the ones who were doing it before there were courses, before there were certifications, before anyone was calling it an industry - are Boomers. A lot of us learned from them. We inherited their knowledge, their standards, and quite frankly some of their stubbornness, and we've spent the last decades figuring out what to keep and what to leave behind.

We’ve kind of realised that that foundation matters. Every trade starts the same way - someone with a skill realises it has value and decides to make something of it. Plumbers, electricians, landscapers - they all got there the same way. Grooming is no different. It just happened a little later, and with more poodles. There is a level of practical, hard-won knowledge in the Boomer generation of groomers that doesn't exist anywhere else, and if you were lucky enough to learn from someone who had it, you know exactly what we mean.

Our staff are Gen Z and Millennials

We're talking about our salon here - a real, working grooming salon that has been running alongside everything else we've built. The people coming into grooming now are different in the best possible ways. They're more likely to question why things are done a certain way. They're more tuned into dog behaviour and welfare. They've grown up with more access to education and information than any previous generation of groomers, and they expect the industry to meet them at that level.

You can't just say "that's how it's done" to someone who will immediately ask why, and that's a good thing. It makes the knowledge sharper.

Every generation books a groom

You're servicing every generation and they all need something different. Boomers want straightforward value - don't oversell them, don't overcomplicate it, just do good work and tell them what it costs. Gen Z clients, bless them, will want a full written report after every groom. Transparency, documentation, grades.

But the dominant demographic right now - mid-forties to early sixties, at peak dog ownership, with disposable income and strong opinions - are Gen X. They raised Gen Z, widely regarded as the most opinionated generation in human history, and we say that with love because we are responsible for them. And the only thing they love more than their kids is their dog.

The dog is not a pet. The dog is a family member with a standing appointment, home delivered pre-cooked meals, and nutritional supplements.

Gen X clients value knowledge. They're not looking for someone to make the dog look nice and hand it back. They want to understand what's going on - the coat condition, the skin health, what they can do at home. They'll ask questions and they'll remember what you told them last time. Groomers who can actually educate their clients will build a depth of loyalty with this demographic that goes well beyond just liking the haircut.

This is not a burden. This is the opportunity. Grooming education has come far enough in the last decade that groomers now have the knowledge base to actually have these conversations. When we started out, that wasn't really the case. Right now, for the first time, what groomers know and what clients want to know are properly aligned.

Which is where we come in

We didn't build igroomhub and igroomschool from the sidelines. We built them while running a salon, running hands-on training, and watching this industry find its feet in real time. igroomhub launched in 2017 and we're coming up on 10 years - which means we were investing in groomer education and community well before it was the obvious thing to do.

"And then Dog Diversity and igroomhub had a baby, and that baby is igroomschool."

igroomschool came from two established operations - a hands-on training school and an industry content platform - deciding to build something together. It's not a startup. It's the result of a lot of accumulated knowledge from a lot of years, shaped by every generation we've worked with, learned from, employed, and educated.

Being Gen X means we learned from Boomers, we work alongside Millennials and Gen Z, and we understand our clients because we are them. That's not a coincidence. That's actually a pretty useful place to be standing.

So what does that actually look like?

Because we understand every person in this ecosystem - the client, the groomer, the salon owner, the student - we've built something for all of them. Here's just a handful of what we've built - and yes, there's more:

And sitting at the front of all of it, almost about to launch: a full course built around the modern principles of behaviour-informed grooming. Giving dogs agency. Giving dogs choice. Caring deeply about what the dog is telling you. Learning to listen. From dip and snip to this - we have watched this industry go from zero to 100, and that course is the proof.

We don't have all the answers

We want to be extremely clear about that. We've built a lot, we know, well, maybe a chunk, and we've been in this long enough to have seen most of it twice - but we don't preach, and we're not interested in pretending this is a finished thing.

There are comment sections on igroomhub now. Come and use them. Join the conversation in the igroomroom at igroomschool - its like the lunchbreak area minus the monkey bars (are they even legal anymore?). Tell us what you think, what you need, what we've missed. This has always been an organic thing - built by groomers, for groomers, shaped by the conversations we have along the way.

The cool auntie table has a seat for you. We have chardonnay, iced tea, and even some of those Monster drinks. Come and pull up a chair.

Anna Harch
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