April 23, 2025
If you adopted a puppy in the first month of the COVID-19 pandemic, you now have a 5-year-old dog as a member of your family. And you weren’t alone — according to the American Pet Products Association, an estimated 11.38 million U.S. households adopted a pet in the months when people stayed close to home.
And that dog — no matter what breed or size — has needed walks to keep it healthy, grooming to keep its coat untangled and, sometimes, a place to stay when its owners are traveling.
According to the American Veterinary Medical Association, 63.4 million households owned at least one dog in 2020, and dog ownership increased by 14 percent in 2022 alone.
That’s why several businesses new to the Sioux Falls area have been established because there is a growing need for services such as grooming, walking and boarding.
According to Jordan Boots, “a large percentage of people in the Sioux Falls area have their own dogs. I’ve heard there are 170,000 pets in Sioux Falls area, and the number definitely increased after COVID.”
Boots and his partner, Bob Lundin, operate the mobile pet grooming service Zoomin Groomin within a 35-mile radius of Sioux Falls. They have traveled to Corson and Canton, to Brandon and Hartford. The Tea men park their three vans in a warehouse there, and by late April they expect to have a fourth van. By year’s end, Boots said, the total number should increase to six.
The men have been partners for about five years, but their previous business, a car-care product, ended when a larger corporation bought out the company and terminated all franchises. Their search for a new business brought the two men to Zoomin Groomin, which opened in 2021. Zoomin Groomin now has 150 franchisees nationwide.
Boots and Lundin have the franchise for Sioux Falls, Omaha, Des Moines and Fargo. The Sioux Falls business started July 15, 2024, and that’s where the partners currently are focusing their attention.
“We will build into the other territories,” said Boots, who manages the Sioux Falls business. “I do all the day-to-day scheduling, the customer service aspects. I take the stress away from groomers, who can hop in the van and do what they do best.”
Zoomin Groomin now has nine groomers on staff and is looking to expand. It has 1,500 customers, who appreciate the convenience of groomers who come to them. The groomers take care of 130 dogs a week. While Zoomin Groomin has the equipment for feline grooming, it currently has no groomers who specialize in cats, Boots said.
Customers like mobile pet services because the groomers focus their attention on one dog at a time, Boots said. Other dogs are not waiting in kennels, their anxiety contributing to other pets’ distress. The same groomer takes the dog all the way from bathing to trimming nails.
“We get a lot of high-anxiety dogs that are stressed out in loud environments,” Boots said. “We get dogs that have never been in a kennel. With us, they’re one-on-one with the groomer all the time. We really pride ourselves on that.”
Zoomin Groomin will leave no stone unturned to provide excellent customer service, Boots said. The groomers provide clients with grooming reports, including before-and-after photos, sharing information on the dog’s behavior.
“If customers are going to pay for a service like us, which is convenient for them, we got to go above-and-beyond customer service as well as grooming,” Boots said. “If we don’t get a five (rating), if we missed a spot or the nails are not quite what you wanted, we’ll do everything in our power to make sure you’re 100 percent satisfied with our grooms.”
The top breed that Zoomin Groomin serves is doodles. Goldendoodles, Aussiedoodles, Bernedoodles — 22 percent of the dogs that the business grooms are doodles, according to Boots’ records.
“It seems like we’re doing a doodle a day,” he said.
Also located in Tea is WagZone Pet Services, which puts a twist on the pet-boarding industry. Peter Thompson and Heather Nearman Thompson live in Sioux Falls but chose to open their business on Venture Street because of its easy access to Interstate 29.
Nearman Thompson started a dog-walking and pet-sitting business about 10 years ago, and she saw a need for expansion, her husband said.
“We thought there was an unmet need,” Thompson said. “We understood that our competitors have a waitlist for day care and are not even taking applications. We knew there was a demand.”
WagZone opened in a new 10,000-square-foot building in mid-January, and clients who walk inside have been impressed with the layout and the building’s clean look, Thompson said.
And they’re impressed with WagZone’s attitude toward its four-legged clientele. The Thompsons, who own three large dogs and three cats, didn’t want a facility where the animals would spend much of the day in a kennel. Instead, WagZone allows dogs to mingle with other animals in three large rooms.
WagZone does have 13 kennels for dogs that prefer to be alone or are in heat. It also has 8,000 square feet of turf outside.
“Our dogs that are boarded play with the day care dogs, and they’re running and playing and socializing all day long,” Thompson said. “It gives the owners peace of mind. We try to size the dogs appropriately as littles, mediums and bigs, but a lot of times the littles mix up with the big ones and love it. Our staff is really good at understanding dogs and their personalities and temperaments and know what will work.”
WagZone also offers extended hours to cater to the work shifts of medical personnel. Owners can drop off day care dogs after 6 a.m. and pick them up past 7 p.m. The Orthopedic Institute is located near WagZone, and the city of Tea is expanding Sundowner Avenue and will pave 85th Street from Heritage Parkway to Sundowner.
“A lot of our new clients are coming from the Tea area and the west side of Sioux Falls,” Thompson said.
WagZone also treats its boarding dogs to what Thompson describes as a vacation to an all-inclusive spa. The business provides goodies such as treats, lick mats and peanut butter Kongs at no extra charge. Think of it as “slumber-party boarding,” he said.
The number of staff that Nearman Thompson employs has increased with the opening of WagZone. Staff members are there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Two rooms are furnished with Murphy beds and televisions. The dogs’ sleep rooms also offer access to the play rooms for dogs that have overnight energy.
“They feel a lot more at home,” Thompson said. “Heather had seen the slumber-party style in Minneapolis 10 or 15 years ago, and she wanted to bring that to the Siouxland area. She’s such a dog lover. She hates to see them kenneled all day.”
Thompson is looking to hire groomers to expand the business to include that service. The WagZone building has a room for washing and drying and another for clipping. It already has increased its staff to provide the round-the-clock boarding and day care.
“Our staff’s amazing. If you look at WagZone on Facebook, they post pictures all the time, and the clients really love it. We had a picture-taking room for Valentine’s Day and St. Paddy’s and put the dogs in gear and sent the pictures home with the client.”
In Harrisburg, best friends of 15 years opened a grooming salon, Moody Mutts, on Oct. 7, 2024, along Cliff Avenue. Kenydie Hyde has been a dog groomer for 10 years, Jasmine Weiler for five.
“We seem to be getting a ton of really great feedback from the community,” Hyde said. “There is one other grooming salon here in Harrisburg, so it is nice to be able to add to a very quickly growing community.”
The friends want to change what they describe as the narrative of groomers. They’re distressed by the “horror stories” they hear about uncaring groomers and the perception too many people have about their line of work.
“Here at Moody Mutts, we work with your pet, your pet doesn’t work with us,” Hyde said. “We are about quality, not quantity. Yes, I am talking about the pets that enter our salon, but we want to take it a step further.”
Pets are just like people with emotions and attitudes, she said. They pick up on people’s life changes. If they’re having a difficult day, she and Weiler want to know why, she said.
And the pet owners are important too. The Moody Mutts owners want to establish close relationships with their human clients, celebrating the highs and mourning the lows in people’s lives. Death in a family, long work trips, children returning to school — those events can play a role in a dog’s emotions, Hyde said.
Moody Mutts is a one-on-one grooming salon, working with one pet from start to finish rather than cycling through three to four dogs at a time.
“We give them all of our attention for the entirety of the appointment,” Hyde said. “I know if I went to my hair dresser and they were working on a handful of people at once, I would feel some type of way.”
As an all-inclusive salon, Moody Mutts’ services include bathing with shampoo and conditioner best suited to the dog’s skin and coat. A specialized bath bomb formula added to the water exfoliates and cleanses dirt and grime. After the haircut or trim, the groomers cut and file nails and remove the hair between paw pads.
“Finally, we will spritz the pet with our top-of-the-line pet perfume and give the dog a scarf,” Hyde said.
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