Woman Hits $20,000 Vegas Jackpot In Grooming Contest

by Steve Friess (Subscribe to Steve Friess's posts): Sep 23rd 2009 @ 3:00PM Filed Under: Dogs, Pet Grooming

Tammy Colbert with Cece moments after winning $20K in a grooming competition on Thursday at SuperZoo in Las Vegas. Photo: Steve Friess/Paw Nation

Forget the slot machines! Tammy Colbert hit the jackpot by perfectly grooming a miniature schnauzer named Cece. The California resident bested 35 other expert groomers in the two-hour competition at the pet goods trade show SuperZoo, taking home $20,000 -- the world's largest prize in the history of dog grooming contests.

Colbert, who runs Wildwynd, a mobile grooming business in Huntington Beach, Calif., told Paw Nation, "They kept reading off the names and when they got down to fifth, [I] started crying. And then I won and it was just surreal that it even happened."

The prize money, furnished by the World Wide Pet Industry Association, is a long way from Colbert's first grooming competitions back in the mid-1980s. Back then, she said, winners received prizes like a gallon of shampoo and a plaque.

"People could hardly believe it that there was going to be this much money," event coordinator Janice Fehn told Paw Nation. "This is the biggest money ever, ever, ever offered."

Colbert's victory was especially sweet because the previous day, she had walked out of a poodle grooming competition (she was having vision problems and felt dissatisfied with her results). Come Thursday, she wasn't even sure if she was going to finish Cece, whom she borrowed from a client, within the two-hour allotment. "I was scrambling there at the end, I still had 15 minutes to finish a head," she said.

Colbert, whose business in California is so robust she's booked through October, felt overwhelmed by the honor. She grew up without dogs and got into grooming when a groomer friend gave her some scissors and a brush one day and told her to give it a try on a Cocker Spaniel. She was a natural.

"You have to have a passion for it. You can't say 'I'm a groomer and it's just a job,'" said Colbert. "There's an artistic thing to it, too. I enjoy after I'm done and the dog is clean and pretty. The client's happy and they don't want anyone else to touch it because it has to look a certain way."

Tags: dog grooming, dog grooming competition, DogGrooming, DogGroomingCompetition, superzoo

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