The paper calendar was full. The card reader was plugged into her phone. And every time a client checked out, the same awkward moment played out — payment processed, receipt handed over, and the tip conversation that almost never happened.
Fernanda had left a stable retail career to open Paws Petland in 2019, right as the world was shutting down. Friends told her she was crazy. She opened anyway. After years of earning a good living in a job she didn’t love, she wanted a career that offered both financial stability and personal joy. “I love dogs. I love what I do,” she says. “I wanted something that I’ll make both.”
By the time she found Cuddles, the business was functioning but it was held together with workarounds. The scheduling lived on paper. The payments went through a small reader that came with no predictability on fees. And tips, the income groomers depend on but clients rarely think to offer, were almost nonexistent. The core tension wasn’t whether Paws Petland could survive. It was whether the system underneath it could keep up.
Here is how Fernanda fixed it and what changed when she did.
Growth Snapshot — Paws Petland
- Active Clients: 500+
- Years in Business: 4
- Tip Increase After CuddlesPay: ~80%
- Time on Cuddles: 2+ years
The Problem Wasn’t the Card Reader. It Was Everything Around It
Fernanda wasn’t losing clients. She was losing margin, losing tip income, and losing time to a payment system that created friction at every step. The card reader worked. But working isn’t the same as working well.
- Every payment processor she spoke to offered different rates and complex contracts; she could never get a straight answer on her actual costs.
- Without a predictable fee structure, she couldn’t know what she’d actually keep after each transaction.
- Tips happened only when clients thought to ask, and most didn’t, because grooming isn’t a category where people instinctively tip the way they do at a restaurant.
- Booking multiple dogs for one client required manual entry, adding time to every scheduling conversation.
- There was no centralized way to follow up with clients or confirm upcoming appointments.
“A lot of people were offering me the payment machines and banks,” Fernanda recalls, “but it was a huge amount and percentage that it was taking.”
— Fernanda
The real issue wasn’t the fees, it was a checkout process that felt awkward and transactional, making tipping feel like an afterthought.
How a Client’s Flyer Changed Everything
Fernanda wasn’t looking for software the day it found her. A pet parent who had recently started using Cuddles for her own business came in for a grooming appointment. Fernanda wasn’t there but the client left a flyer. When Fernanda called back and heard how CuddlesPay handled processing rates, one thing stood out immediately.
“When he told me all the percentages would be the same, the percentage for every credit card, that was a big relief.”
That predictability, flat across Visa, Amex, Apple Pay, and everything else, was the first thing that made sense in the payment conversation she’d been having for months. She signed up. That was over 2 years ago.
What happened next wasn’t just a fee structure change. It was a full reset of how checkout worked at Paws Petland, and the results showed up in a place Fernanda hadn’t expected: her tips.
The Part Nobody Talks About: What Card-On File Does to Tip Income
Once Fernanda turned on the card on file through CuddlesPay, the checkout dynamic changed. Clients’ cards were stored at booking. At the end of the day, she ran through the charges from the back, no terminal to pass, no card to request, no moment of friction at the door. And the tip prompt, built into the checkout flow, appeared at exactly the right moment: when the client had just picked up a happy, freshly groomed dog.
“A lot of customers, they don’t know; they think it’s only restaurants with a tip,” Fernanda says. The card-on-file flow didn’t pressure anyone; it just made the option visible and easy at a moment when clients were already in a generous mood.
Tips at Paws Petland went up approximately 80%.
That number matters because grooming tip income isn’t a bonus, it’s a meaningful part of what groomers actually take home. “For me, it was easier to have credit cards on file,” Fernanda says. “That was a really, really big tool that they have now that I love.” The fee savings were real. But the tip increase was the outcome she hadn’t seen coming.
While CuddlesPay fixed the end of the appointment, Fernanda used the same ‘frictionless’ approach to fix the beginning: the booking process. She can now book multiple dogs from the same household in a single appointment flow, no duplicate entries, no back-and-forth. “I can do more than one dog at the same time when I’m making an appointment,” she says. “This is very, very easy to do.” For a solo operation running a full calendar, that ease compounds across every booking week.
And when something does go wrong, the support is fast. Fernanda describes a team she can reach by chat, phone, WhatsApp, or video, and a response that actually resolves the issue. “I don’t have problems. If I have a problem, I have a chat right away so that they can fix anything for me.” For a business owner with no virtual front desk behind her, that access matters more than any single feature.
What Fernanda’s Story Can Teach Any Independent Groomer
Paws Petland didn’t grow to 500 clients because Fernanda found a secret. It grew because she removed friction from the parts of the business that were quietly working against her, and the tip income increase was proof that checkout experience affects far more than just fees.
☑️ Switch on card on file before your next full booking week. The tip increase at Paws Petland didn’t come from asking clients to tip more, it came from making tipping visible and easy at the right moment. If your current checkout flow doesn’t surface a tip prompt naturally, you’re likely leaving income behind after every single appointment.
☑️ Get one month of payment receipts and sort by card type. If you’re on a variable-rate processor, you may not know what you actually paid on your last 100 transactions. Add it up by card type. The difference between what you expected and what you kept is the real cost of unpredictable processing.
☑️ Book one multi-pet household as a single appointment this week. If you have clients with 2 or more dogs, test what it looks like to add them both to one flow. The time savings per booking are small, but across a full week of scheduling, they add up to real minutes you get back.
Four years in, Fernanda is still building. The business that started during a pandemic, the one her friends said she was crazy to open, now has over 500 clients and a checkout system that finally rewards the work behind every groom.
