Jennifer Bishop-Jenkins, author of "The Groomers Guide To The 15 Coat Types" poster and coming book, award-winning speaker, and Master Groomer & career Teacher, leads seminars on dogs rich in canine science and coat type expertise.
06/12/2025
Very excited to announce that I will be speaking at Groom'd, formerly Atlanta Pet Fair in Atlanta in early 2026! Doing three GREAT classes that groomers will love including a live demo and class on grooming Australian Shepherds! I will also be debuting a brand new class for the great folks at called "Client vs Science" https://www.groomd.org/ Hope to see lots of you there!
Wondering what GROOM'D 2026 is all about? Get the scoop on pet products, education sessions, grooming contests and more right here.
05/12/2025
01/10/2025
Winning Honors 2025! Here is the post event interview on the award-winning groomer podcast I am at approximately minute 15:45
Welcome to a VERY special episode of Another Grooming Podcast. Join us on the chocolate carpet as we interview the winners of this year’s Barkleigh Honors Aw...
09/09/2025
With Barkleigh – I just got recognized as one of their top fans! 🎉
03/09/2025
So honored to win Barkleigh Honors at this week - Journalist of the Year - very great company to be in with other nominees! Here is this month's GroomerToGroomer column :
We all know that the pet grooming industry is largely and infamously unregulated.
04/07/2025
Its public now! I am excited to announce that, by popular request, I will be teaching again the highly recommended, "must-take" class for all dog groomers: the Groomers Guide to the Fifteen Coat Types, a four hour seminar at the world's largest grooming trade show and education event Hershey in September 2025. The class is fun, inspiring, and helps explain the WHY of what we do differently for each coat type. The first time I did the class there a few years ago there was a standing room only and people sitting on the floor.
Sign up is already underway at this link:
While there has never been an official list of dog coat types for the grooming industry, maybe there ought to be! Jennifer has compiled a list that is helping to change the industry and standardize what specific and separate grooming strategies are required for each of the 15 Coat Types. Each one ha...
29/03/2025
My latest article in magazine on the importance of obeying the law in all we do.
The pet industry has been emerging in recent decades to become a major economic presence. Groomers have grown from being somewhat of an underground economy to being a mainstream, high-profile, valued business and service.
10/03/2025
Looking forward to speaking in Culpepper, VA very soon!
🕖 7:00 - 8:00 AM - Education, Contest, and Vendor Setup 🚪 7:45 AM - Doors Open for General Admission 🎤 8:00 AM - Show Starts
10/03/2025
Very proud of my first column being published in magazine by - this on Dog Science!
We should also share it with our clients and use it to train our employees and co-workers—for it is surely the dogs themselves that stand to benefit the most from the research being done about them.
07/03/2025
The religions that arose in the arid and ancient Middle East—Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam—all share some negative and ancient scriptural pronouncements regarding dogs and human interaction with them.
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Why Groomers Guide Seminars?
I have been a Certified Master Groomer for 35 years and professionally grooming, at least part time, for 40 years. But all my adult life I have mostly been a Teacher. I taught High School and Junior High full time, and Community College as an adjunct, for the better part of three decades. I love teaching and my thousands of alums tell me that I am good at it.
I started showing dogs the same year I started teaching full time. Some of my earliest breeds required serious grooming, so I had to learn. At first, grooming was just for my show dogs, but soon I figured out that grooming professionally was a great side gig for a teacher who had summers and long holidays off, and who are notoriously underpaid. So I have only groomed full time since 2014, but by then I knew enough about the industry to be fully committed to do it right. I was only going to open a grooming shop if I could do everything Best Practices, no cutting corners, always the best for my beloved Dog and Cat clients.
So it felt very good when just a year after I opened Love Fur Dogs, my “retirement project” grooming shop in Glencoe, Illinois in May of 2014, that I was named Best Groomer in Chicagoland by Chicago Magazine and the Chicago Tribune. I have gone on to win numerous other awards and to found the Illinois Professional Pet Groomers Association (www.ippga.com). The national Hulu network television program Small Business Revolution on Season Three featured me as the “Grooming Expert”. I started speaking at grooming conferences, first locally then nationally, to great reviews. I have only met one other Certified Master Groomer in the USA who is also a Masters Degree educated career teaching professional. The groomer who can teach. . . the Teacher Groomer.
I had combined the teaching and grooming from the start as early as the mid-1980’s when I was also teaching part time in vocational grooming schools. When I opened Love Fur Dogs in 2014, I also ran a vocational school for grooming students inside my shop. But within two years of huge growth in both the grooming shop and the grooming school, I had to choose only one to go forward with - both were incredibly demanding. I chose to just keep the shop open because that is what was best for my clients. But I have continued to teach individually many wanna-be groomers, some of whom are very competent and successful groomers out there now. I had developed some PowerPoint training programs for those people, and over the last five years they became richer and more in-depth. I came to speak at the All American conference in Chicago at the invitation of its founder and old friend Jerry Schinberg (the man who invented grooming conferences and contests, as well as Creative Grooming). By then the PowerPoint I had created as staff training had evolved into the most in-depth programming many of my workshop attendees had yet seen at a grooming conference. I was excited by the encouragement and developed more.
One real difference in my seminars, compared to the amazing array of incredible grooming talents featuring famous star speakers around the world in our professional pet grooming industry, is my more academic approach. My programs are compelling PowerPoints and are visually heavy, content-rich, enthusiastically delivered, and well-documented. They have been particularly valuable to new and young groomers, to groomers who haven’t been raised in the Dog Show world, to those who love “theory”, and to visual learners. The fact that I have dabbled in showing and breeding dogs (and cats) for decades infused my seminars with a focus on Breed expertise. And my science and history training really went to town.
I don’t do things half way. When I wasn’t teaching over the last 30 years, I have been a fierce advocate on issues that I came to care about after my sister was murdered. I fought for victims rights and against violence, for criminal justice reform and against insanely liberal gun laws. I learned in all that to find my voice. After that family tragedy, I found that there was very little that frightened me. I learned that sharing our stories and our knowledge and our experiences can make a real difference. In that work I met my husband (and fellow dog lover) Bill Jenkins who already had a speaking and author career on top of his full time work as a college professor . His son had been murdered. We met sharing the power of our stories to the advocacy community waging the fight to reduce violence in our society. He has done a great deal to support and encourage my speaking and teaching career, as I have his. We are kind of a “power couple”, we are told by some friends.
I have come to care about my adopted “second career” grooming industry very much. Because of a lack of regulation and licensing in the grooming profession, where Groomer Certification is entirely voluntary, offered only by three small organizations, and requires real effort to obtain, there is a shortage of educated groomers. The dearth of skilled groomers is only more painful these days as we live in an epoch where pet ownership numbers are exploding while the number of skilled groomers to groom them only grows at a crawl.
With the dawn of the new decade in 2020 , after being asked to write a book (a work in progress now) I made finding Groomers Guide Seminars easier on their own page, www.groomersguide.com. The teacher in me loved the alliteration of Groomers Guide and I branded it. My talented husband Bill made my great logo. And I have committed to take these seminars to even the smallest towns where there is interest. Being in Chicago is very centralized for travel, which I enjoy. You can reach me at 847-LUV-DOGS at my grooming shop most of the time, or at [email protected] anytime. Bring my seminar to your shop or community or vocational program. You will learn more about dogs than you ever thought possible in one short seminar!
