Lucy Filipow carries her 13-year-old pug Nelly into the Comfort Clips mobile dog grooming trailer for a bath. The business started in January. (Photo by Michael Kelly)

Bathing and grooming the dog at home in Marietta has become more sophisticated than getting out the garden hose and a bottle of pooch shampoo.

Since January, Comfort Clips has offered to bring the dog salon to you.

Lucy Filipow and Erica Chichester, after working in a local dog grooming operation together for several years, struck out on their own to offer the city’s first mobile dog grooming studio. It apparently was an idea whose time had come – Filipow said after about four months in business, they’re booked solid for the next five weeks.

Filipow, talking over the phone while bathing a pug in Waterford, said they had some anxiety at the start.

“We struggled for a while. For some reason, we thought it would be a good idea to start a business in January,” she said. They bought a 3,500-pound grooming trailer in Memphis, Tenn., making the 650-mile drive in one shot there and back. “It wasn’t, I guess you could say, super-winterized. The water pump and lines froze, it took us a month to figure out how to prevent that.”

Lucy Filipow bathes her dog Nelly, a 13-year-old pug, in the Comfort Clips mobile dog grooming trailer outside her Marietta home. (Photo by Michael Kelly)

After that, the calls kept coming in.

The two, both certified in dog handling and grooming, divide the labor up.

“Typically, Erica does the beautiful hair cuts, like for Shih Tzus and goldendoodles, she’s a perfectionist. I specialize in German shepherds and huskies, Australian shepherds, the big wild hairy things,” Filipow said.

At age 33, she’s had an unusual career trajectory, having taught in the Warren Local Schools system for two years and also gone to law school. Chichester, 25, has been a dog groomer for seven years, having started right out of high school, Filipow said, and she also works at a farm in Caldwell, where her duties include grooming the farm’s seven Great Pyrenees dogs.

“I just love dogs,” Filipow said. “Erica has showed horses, she loves animals, but she really found her calling working with dogs.”

Lucy Filipow (left) and Erica Chichester are shown with one of their customers, retired police dog Quick. (Photo Provided)

They use a Dodge Ram V-8 pickup to haul the 7-by-12-foot mobile dog salon, the company logo painted on three sides, around the county. “I don’t know how many times I’ve been stopped in traffic and I get a phone call from somebody behind me asking how much it would cost to get their dog a bath,” Filipow said. The service, she said, starts at $40 for a basic small-dog treatment.

Bringing the service to their customers has been a hit.

“We’ve found our customers are really grateful; we’ve never had a complaint,” she said. “The dogs are much happier being close to their home – this pug just came out the door and hopped right into the trailer – and it’s especially good for people who work from home or older people who don’t drive anymore.”

Young people, she said, are tending to have fewer children and many of them choose to have dogs instead earlier in their lives.

Getting the mobile rig to the customer can be challenging, she said, particularly on the steep gravel roads in rural areas and even inside Marietta, with its hills and narrow streets. They’ll sometimes arrange to meet people in locations like a parking lot if the home is inaccessible.

“I really spend a lot of time talking to dogs, earning their trust,” she said. “This business is a dream come true.”

Erica Chichester was working in a rural area Wednesday and could not be reached by telephone.

More information on Comfort Clips can be found on the business’s Facebook page.