Tampa Bay’s Favorite Place to Pamper Your Pet
Like his four-legged clientele and the humans who “own” them, Bill Leuck sees walking into The Bow Wow Barber in St. Petersburg as a real treat.
“We’re extremely pet friendly,” the owner says of his grooming business. “We like to play with the dogs and they love coming here.” Still, being the Bow Wow Barber wasn’t always Leuck’s plan. “It all started as a fluke,” he muses. “A friend of mine owned a grooming shop and I worked in their doggy treat bakery. One day a groomer of his didn’t show up and he asked if I wanted to learn how to do his job. I’ve been grooming ever since.”
Leuck, who now has over 15 years of experience beneath his barber belt, has maintained his 900 square-foot St. Pete storefront with the help of two bathers for nearly three years. The facility is crate free, relying on spacious pens to welcome five dogs at once with a maximum of 10. “A lot of them get to run the shop by themselves,” he adds.
“We don’t take a lot of dogs at a time so that our focus is really on the current dog we’re working with,” Leuck continues. “I keep up with all of the latest equipment to make things more efficient and easier for the dogs, but we’re not a factory groomer and we don’t have speed grooming.”
“We enjoy what we do and we have fun,” he says. “This is my life. I love doing it.”
