Woof Gang CEO Ricardo Azevedo shares how passionate store owners plus the web traffic of a national brand helps keep the pet groomer and retail store growing. 

Pet grooming business Woof Gang is growing at a decent clip; combined sales from its retail store, bakery and grooming services are on track to grow 25% year over year, said CEO Ricardo Azevedo. Plus, the brand will finish 2025 with 300 locations nationwide, up from 260 in 2024.

Woof Gang has several initiatives that have helped drive the business forward, including a steady cadence of store-level events, investing in private-label products and overhauling its backend web structure to improve its SEO rankings and visibility from generative artificial intelligence platforms.

But behind all these efforts, Azevedo attributes a large part of Woof Gang’s growth to the fragmentation in the pet grooming industry and the void Woof Gang fills. Many dog groomers are either big box stores or independently owned. Woof Gang falls in the middle, as it has a “boutique feel” and a franchise model. The retail store is not trying to be a one-stop-shop, and it sells many impulse purchases, such as baked goods for dogs that look appetizing to humans. Overall, about 75% of Woof Gang’s sales are from grooming services and 25% of sales are from store products.

Woof Gang Invests in Website Architecture

In August, Woof Gang relaunched its website with a refreshed marketing stack, modernized store pages and a streamlined user experience. Another key driver for the brand to relaunch its website  was to improve the backend architecture, with the ultimate goal of increasing Woof Gang’s ranking in organic search results, and allowing generative AI platforms to more easily read and source its website.

Consumers on organic search are a major part of Woof Gang’s web traffic. In November, 58% of Woof Gang’s traffic originated on organic search, according to web analysis vendor SimilarWeb.

Previously, the brand’s web developers did not give the backend architecture the attention it needed to, Azevedo said. For example, if a business uploads a picture to its website, the brand should name the picture with details to emphasize the web content, instead of a generic name like “Picture 1.”

“Even that level of detail really has a big impact on how people understand,” he said.

Other examples of improvements the brand made to increase its ranking include adding more links within its website and continually updating its own website blog with content that focuses on Woof Gang’s differentiators, such as personalized service. Plus, the retailer has made a push to have more outside websites talking about Woof Gang, such as earned media tactics. Together, these initiatives will help AI platforms to understand Woof Gang’s brand value, he said.

Woof Gang Improves Website Visibility in Traditional and AI Search

Woof Gang hired two outside firms to improve the website: one to create a plan and the other to execute it.

The initiative worked as Woof Gang on average now ranks No. 4 or No. 5 for non-branded search terms on Google, compared with No. 8 on average before the relaunch. Some of its local pages are now in the top three, Azevedo adds.

This is the benefit of having a national brand, as consumers across the country are visiting the Woof Gang website, which helps it rank highly in the dog grooming category. An independent owner with a website that only caters to one market likely only generates a fraction of that web traffic, and thus makes it harder for that website to rank higher in organic search.

“It works both ways because not only do we have a central page, but also every store has their own page that works together,” he said. “We basically get all the traffic of everybody in the Wolf Gang ecosystem. The searching tools understand us as a local neighborhood store, but also our authority domain is much higher than any other independent pet store will be able to produce.”

Local Marketing at the Store

The brand uses a mixture of local marketing tactics to get the word out about its brand, such as store events, social media accounts specific to each store and community involvement.

“What we do is that local marketing that you traditionally would see in the past but is extremely effective,” Azevedo said. “That is the owner being involved in their community, being in the Chamber of Commerce, promoting their business close to the other businesses and getting to know the customers on another level.”

On social media, store owners often post before-and-after pictures of the groomed dog. These posts typically receive a lot of engagement, as consumers like to see their dog, or their neighbor’s dog, proudly featured, he said.

For in-store events, the Woof Gang central office provides its franchisees a calendar of ideas, themes, instructions and marketing materials needed to execute an activation. Store events can be simple, such as a seasonal backdrop for a photo, or larger, such as a workshop to make a dog charcuterie board.

For the holidays, a few recent store events included a photo day where shoppers brought in their dogs for a photo with “Santa Paws.” A number of boutiques also hosted an angel tree, in which shoppers could donate a dog toy for a dog that was in a local shelter. For Halloween, many stores coordinate a costume parade for the dogs.

“They don’t have to do it, but most stores do it, because [events] generate business, they generate engagement, they generate positive reviews for the store, which is another tactic for how to get traction into our stores,” Azevedo said.

Events Boost Traffic, Sales and Appointments

Woof Gang said during days with events, stores typically have a 20%-40% lift in retail sales on that day, and a “meaningful boost” in grooming appointments scheduled, both for the same day and in the weeks that follow.

While it doesn’t specifically track comparative growth metrics, anecdotally, stores that execute these events typically are growing faster than stores that don’t regularly host events, Azevedo said.

“We see the stores that are always performing, always growing sales, the common factor is that they are extremely more involved in their  communities,” he said. “Of stores that are not doing so well, the owners are not so present; The owners are not so connected.”

Overall, for the holiday season, sales increase about 15%. This is mostly because more consumers want their dogs groomed during the holidays, Azevedo said. This is a material increase but nothing as significant as many retailers experience during this time, he said.