Clean Happy Dogs
Grooming Salon Fairfax, CA
Naming, market research, brand strategy, copy, identity, illustration, website, booking system, and print.
Client
Michael Lagau and Devin Snyder
Year
2025
Two people to get right.
Michael reached out first. He's a co-owner and he was the one thinking about the business, the numbers, and what this thing needed to be.
But Devin is the one who would actually be standing in the shop every day. He's spent twenty-six years with dogs, in vet clinics and shelters and boarding facilities, and Clean Happy Dogs was the lifelong dream finally happening. He needed two things that had nothing to do with each other: an operating system he could run without me, and a brand that felt like his.
That second one is the part people forget. You can build somebody a beautiful business and hand it over and watch them feel like a guest in it. So a lot of what I did on this project was really about making sure Devin recognized himself in the thing when it was finished.
True story: Market Research is fun for me.
Before any of the fun parts, I did the research. Who else is grooming dogs in Marin, what they charge, how they package it, what they call themselves, and where the gaps were.
The most useful thing it turned up was about money. Devin had been grooming in the East Bay, and he'd priced this shop the way he was used to pricing there, which is a completely reasonable thing to do and was also leaving real money on the table. Marin charges more. Not a little more. So we brought his prices up, across every tier, before he opened a single day.
The rest of what I found shaped the way we packaged it. Grooming is a category with a lot of noise in it and not much clarity. Prices are usually hidden until you call, service names are puns stacked on puns, and nobody tells you how long anything is going to take.
The name and the mark.
Clean Happy Dogs.
Clean Happy Dogs says exactly what you get and it says it in the order you care about. Clean is why you booked. Happy is what you were worried about. Dogs is who it's for. A person driving down Center Boulevard understands the entire business in three words and never has to decode anything.
Which meant the wordmark could be plain on the surface and hide all the personality inside the letters, which is my favorite kind of thing to draw.
There are bubbles sitting in the counters of the e and the a, so they're doing double duty as suds without ever announcing themselves. A few more drift up and off the top of the word. And the g has a small tail coming off it, mid-wag.
None of it is loud. You can look at the logo, register a friendly dog groomer, and move on without consciously noticing any of it, which is exactly right. But the tail is the part I'd defend hardest, because a nervous dog doesn't wag. A wagging tail is the actual outcome Devin sells. It's the thing you're hoping for when you hand your dog over to a stranger, and it's sitting right there in the name.
Three offers, priced so nobody has to call.
I built the service architecture from the research: three tiers, each priced across four dog sizes, with what's included and how long it takes stated plainly on the page.
Wash and Wag Express. A brush out and a warm sudsy wash. In and out in just over an hour.
Billy's Bath, Brush and Beyond. The wash, plus nails and a sanitary trim if it's needed.
The Pawsh Pup Package. The full spa version. Bath, blow dry, breed-specific cut, nails, ears, teeth. Weekends only.
Every tier lists its price, its contents, and its duration before anyone books, which sounds obvious but is rare. Most grooming sites make you call for a quote, which is a small friction that costs a business real bookings from people who are just trying to sort out their Saturday.
I illustrated each one, too, rather than reaching for stock photos of wet dogs, which is what everyone else in this category is using.
They're playful, they're all clearly from the same hand, and they mean you can tell the three services apart from across a room. (They also double as wall art! Because I am nothing if not efficient.)
Billy.
Billy was Devin's dog for nearly seventeen years. A furry, joyful pup who loved bath time and belly rubs and making new friends, and he had died not long before the shop opened.
knew Devin was grieving him, and I knew this shop was the dream Billy had been around for the whole time it was still just an idea, so I brought it up: what if Billy is the mascot, and what if the middle service is named after him?
Devin said yes immediately.
I illustrated Billy for the site, along with Devin and the rest of the team, so that the whole thing looks like the people who are actually in the room.
Then I built it.
I set up their online booking through Square, wrote and configured the client contracts, wired all of it into a custom Squarespace site, and connected the whole system so that a booking made at eleven at night on somebody's phone lands correctly on the shop's schedule the next morning.
Then I sat down with Devin and taught him how to run it. Not a handover document. An actual walkthrough, so that the person standing in the shop can change his hours, adjust a price, block out a day, and add a service without needing to call me about it.
That was always the point. A system somebody else has to maintain isn't a system, it's a dependency.
"Thank you for going above and beyond. You did an amazing job."
—Michael Lagau, Clean Happy Dogs
And everything you can hold.
Signage for the shop. Flyers and postcards for the neighborhood, because Fairfax is a town where paper on a bulletin board still works. Wall art for the space itself, so that walking in feels like the website you were just looking at.
Plus all the copy. Every service description, every FAQ, the team bios, the line about going from trail to tail, and the bit at the bottom that says You Woof Great.
What I'd tell you about it.
This one is the clearest example of what I actually mean when I say I do all of it.
There was no strategist handing a deck to a designer handing a file to a developer handing a login to a confused business owner. There was a name, and then a set of offers built from research, and then a look, and then a website, and then a booking system, and then an afternoon of handing it all off.
Two years later and the business is still going strong, and the memory of Billy (the goodest good boy) lives on.