In March 2020, Brian Taylor watched roughly ninety percent of his business evaporate in a matter of days. He runs Harlem Doggie Day Spa, a grooming and boarding shop that had spent more than a decade becoming a neighborhood fixture, and the city had just closed.
Taylor, who is originally from Sierra Leone and is known around Harlem as the Dogfather, has described the moment as a fork with two options: sit with it, or do something for somebody else. He had a van he had bought the year before and no particular use for. He cleaned it out.
What followed became the Pup Relief Tour, and by the summer of 2021 it had put free grooming on the books for 1,461 dogs whose owners were broke, housing-insecure, or unhoused.
It started as a pop-up and became a convoy
The first version was local: pop-up salons around New York City, aimed at dogs who had gone months without a trim because their people had lost work. Anyone who has met an overgrown doodle in August understands that this is not a cosmetic issue. Matted coats trap heat, hide skin infections, and hurt.
Coverage followed, then donations, then something Taylor had not planned on. He put a call out through a Black grooming network on Facebook asking whether anyone wanted to volunteer, and got back an enthusiastic yes from dozens of groomers, all of them Black pet-business owners, scattered across the country.
The tour stopped being a New York project. It expanded to Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Dallas, and Los Angeles. After hurricanes tore through Louisiana, Taylor organized a holiday run to Lafayette, where the crew groomed another two hundred dogs.
The number under the number
Here is the statistic that explains why Taylor kept insisting the tour was about the groomers as much as the dogs.
Roughly 4.2 percent of groomers in the United States are Black. About 15.8 percent are Hispanic or Latino. This is a very large industry, tens of billions of dollars, and its professional class does not remotely resemble the country it serves. Taylor’s read on it is blunt: these are business owners the big pet brands mostly do not see, do not sponsor, and do not put in the catalog.
That the 2021 tour ran during August, which is Black Business Month, was not a coincidence.
The people who showed up
The 2021 crew came together loosely, groomers driving or flying in to meet the van at each stop, working under strict Covid protocols.
Rahanna Gray of Stylish Pooch, who had become recognizable to a national audience after appearing in the fifth season of Queer Eye, hosted the opening stop in Philadelphia.
In Alabama, Octavian Walls of Beautiful Barks joined in. Walls has spent more than a decade as a visible advocate for the local LGBTQ community.
Candace Lewis brought in Kandi Kutz, which she runs in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and which was the first female- and Black-owned grooming salon in the state.
The final stop belonged to Brandy Glasgow, a semi-retired groomer in Las Vegas who spends most of her time running Street Dogz of Las Vegas, a nonprofit that brings pet food, supplies, and grooming to people experiencing homelessness through monthly events with the Nevada Homeless Alliance. She turned up with a dozen groomers behind her.
Taylor has said the model for all of it was something he saw in Los Angeles the year before: two groomers who went down to Skid Row with clippers and simply started working on the sidewalk. When Glasgow got in touch and described doing exactly the same thing in Vegas, the fit was obvious.
What free grooming is actually for
It would be easy to file this under feel-good and move on. That would miss the point.
For a dog living in a car, or in a shelter bed, or in a household that lost its income, grooming is one of the first things to go and one of the least visible things to lose. The consequences are not aesthetic. Mats pull the skin and hide hot spots. Overgrown nails change how a dog walks. Ear and skin infections go unnoticed under a coat nobody has been able to get through in six months.
A groomer with their hands on a dog for forty-five minutes is also, functionally, the first line of a health exam. They find the lumps. They find the fleas. They find the ear that smells wrong. That is the service being delivered on those sidewalks, underneath the rainbow dye jobs and the summer cuts that got all the photographs.
What’s new since this was written
The tour did not stop. Taylor took it out again in 2022, adding Chicago, Cincinnati, and Detroit to the map, and Harlem Doggie Day Spa has continued running free grooming through partnerships with local organizations, including work with clients of PAWS NY, which supports pet owners who are elderly, ill, or disabled.
The structural problem the tour was pointing at has not moved much. Black groomers remain a small minority of a large and growing profession, and the sponsorship money in the pet industry still tends to flow toward the same places it always has. Taylor’s argument, made mostly by driving a van across the country rather than by writing op-eds, is that the talent was never the missing ingredient.
If you want to do something with this article besides feel briefly warm: the model is copyable. Every city has groomers, and every city has people who cannot afford one. The van is optional.
