Skiptown, a dog bar and pet-care facility in South End, has more growth potential than ever. It's adding new services and looking to expand into multiple markets nationwide in the next year or so.
This spring, Skiptown launched grooming services, having built the technology to support it and hired experienced groomers. It's now an integral part of the Skiptown ecosystem, CEO Meggie Williams said.
The startup wants to bring fragmented pet-care services to one place. In addition to grooming, Skiptown offers on-site day care and boarding, dog walking and a park, plus drink options for humans and their pups. It also has a partnership with Petfolk, a local veterinary-care practice offering vaccine clinics. She said the convenience factor is a big value-add for its more than 30,000 clients.
"We're back in full swing on really everything," Williams said. "The core thesis remains the same, which is people love their pets, and they will do anything for their dogs."
Williams and her husband, Sebastian, founded Skiptown as The Waggle Co. in 2016.
Williams said Skiptown is eyeing expansion in at least three markets, potentially up to six. Scouting those options takes up much of her time now. Markets of interest include Austin, Dallas, Washington, D.C., Denver, Atlanta and Raleigh, among others.
Each location needs more than 100 employees at full buildout, including management and administrative roles to support the operation, Williams said. She plans to start hiring about six months prior to launch. She is also still hiring groomers at the Charlotte site, which employs about 120 people, its highest number yet. The headquarters team moved into a 4,000-square-foot office on Mint Street to make room for grooming services.
All of Skiptown's services can be accessed via app — scheduling appointments, pulling up vaccination records and saving preferences on hair styles, as examples.
"It's a big investment to be able to build out the kind of technological platform that integrates all these service lines at once, and it's not just for the client. It's also for the team," Williams said.
Skiptown wants to expand into other services, such as training, pet insurance and retail, with plans to offer those first in Charlotte, Williams said. There is no set timeline for launching those services. It is also looking to add pet-care-only sites across Charlotte. The startup already partners with local apartment complexes to offer memberships and/or day passes to residents.
Williams is close to securing deals with growth partners, which will allow it "to move forward in a big way."
It's a big difference from where Skiptown was in early 2020. The pandemic crushed its primary dog-walking business, with work-from-home arrangements stifling demand. She was forced to lay off most of the team. However, Skiptown gained a lifeline with a $300,000 loan from the Small Business Administration's Paycheck Protection Program. Later in 2020, it rebranded to the current name, moving from a dog-walking service to a physical space that could do much more. That's what it wants to recreate in other cities.
"We ended up having a larger client base to serve coming out of the pandemic, and I think it was the resilience of the team to have to make hard choices initially when there was a lot of uncertainty," Williams said. "Now we see probably even more potential than we did before going into the pandemic."
