The industry's biggest room, once a year
Groom Expo, held September 10-13 in Hershey, Pennsylvania, is the largest grooming trade show in the world, and this year's edition kept that reputation: thousands of professionals moved through 87 seminars totaling 124 hours of education, a full competition floor, and more than 120 exhibitors over four days. For anyone who doesn't get to attend, it's worth knowing what the show actually tells you about where the trade is headed, because the competition results and seminar lineup are a decent proxy for what's rewarded in the field right now.
A small-salon win that says something bigger
One of the standout results this year came from Alaina LeBlanc, owner of Pawfections Pet Salon in Kennebunk, Maine, a single-location, independently owned business, who took first place in the EZ Groom Abstract Creative Runway with a Standard Poodle named Sam, owned by one of her own clients. It's a small detail, but it matters: the top result in a marquee creative category didn't come from a chain or an academy team, it came from a neighborhood salon competing on skill alone.
That's the quiet message Groom Expo sends every year, underneath the vendor booths and the sponsorships: this is still a trade where an independent operator with real technical ability can go head-to-head with anyone in the industry and win. Certification and competition results aren't corporate marketing exercises here, they're a genuine measure of craft.
What to do with it if you weren't there
You don't need to have walked the show floor to act on what it represents:
Certification still moves the needle. With 124 hours of seminar content and structured certification tracks on offer, the show is a reminder that formal credentials in de-matting, handling, breed standards, and safety are still a real differentiator with clients, not just a box to check.
Creative and competition-grade work is a marketing asset, not a hobby. A client who sees your work win, or even just place, at a national competition is a client who stops shopping on price. If you or your staff compete regionally, that's worth featuring on your booking page, not burying in a photo album.
The trade show calendar is also a hiring pipeline. Events like this are where groomers scout new techniques, new employers, and new tools all at once, worth keeping on your radar even as an attendee rather than an exhibitor, both for what you learn and who you might meet.
Groom Expo happens once a year, but the standard it sets, that independent, well-trained groomers can out-compete anyone, is worth carrying into the other 361 days.
Building your own version of the show
Not every salon can send staff to Pennsylvania for a week, and that's fine — the underlying habits that make Groom Expo valuable can be built locally. Regional grooming associations and state-level competitions exist in most areas specifically because national shows can't reach everyone, and they run on the same logic: structured seminars, judged competition, and a room full of people whose whole job is the thing you do every day.
If a national trip isn't realistic this year, a reasonable substitute is picking one or two seminar topics from the Groom Expo lineup — de-matting technique, breed-standard trims, anxious-dog handling — and finding the regional equivalent training, then treating the result the way LeBlanc's win was treated here: as something to put in front of clients, not just a certificate in a drawer.