Pet grooming is the fastest-growing line in US pet spending. Its towels have not been re-specified.

1.The category is growing, and the ownership base is widening

The American Pet Products Association put total US pet industry expenditure at $158 billion in 2025, up 3.7% on the year, and projected $165 billion for 2026. That is the headline, and it is the least interesting number in the report.

The interesting one is underneath it. 95 million US households own at least one pet. Dog-owning households rose from 51% to 53% of all US households in 2025 — about 71 million homes, roughly four million more than the year before. Cat ownership rose 5% year on year, to 39% of households. Growth is coming from Gen Z, Millennials and, notably, Gen X, whose pet ownership rose 12% year on year across species.

That matters for a consumable, because a consumable is bought per animal per visit. Ownership growth is volume growth with no change in behaviour required.

2.The fastest-growing line is the one that happens in a room

APPA breaks the $158 billion into four lines. Three of them are products. One of them is not.

Services is the smallest line and the fastest-growing one. That is the sentence a pet brand should sit with.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics says the same thing from the employment side. Animal care and service workers — the occupational group that contains pet groomers — stood at 413,000 jobs in 2025, and employment is projected to grow 11% between 2025 and 2035, which BLS classifies as much faster than the average for all occupations. That is 46,100 additional jobs over the decade.

A service cannot be delivered without a room, a table, water and cloth. When the service line grows faster than the product line, the demand growing underneath it is for the things the service consumes.

3.What we could not find, and are not going to invent

We looked for a credible published figure for the size of the disposable pet towel category specifically. We did not find one worth quoting. The market reports that do address adjacent segments — pet wipes, grooming consumables — disagree with each other by factors of four, and none of them publish a method we could check.

So we are not going to put a number on it. If a supplier quotes you a market size for this category, ask which survey it came from and who was sampled. The honest answer in 2026 is that the segment is not yet separately measured, and the demand for it has to be inferred from the service line that drives it.

4.The regulation has already happened in the next-door industry

There is a precedent worth knowing, because it is the argument most brand owners have not heard yet.

In Japan, the health ministry's hygiene guidance for barber and beauty shops requires that cloth coming into contact with a customer's skin be replaced for every customer. Human-facing personal service has had a one-client-one-cloth rule written into it for decades. Pet grooming in most markets has no equivalent instrument.

That gap does not stay open on its own. It closes the way it closed in human services: a chain standardises, insurers and landlords start asking, and the operators who cannot document their process lose the contracts. We are not claiming pet grooming is regulated this way today. We are saying the direction of travel is visible in the industry next to it, and that a brand which specifies single-use cloth now is writing for the standard that is coming rather than the one that exists.

5.What "professional" looks like when you buy this

Pet grooming towels are an existing product line for us, not an adaptation of one. The specification is the same discipline we apply to a salon towel, and it is worth knowing what you are actually buying, because these five variables decide almost everything about the product in the hand:

Three commercial facts, because they are the ones that decide whether a programme is viable: minimum order is 40,000 pieces per SKU, lead time is usually about 20 working days from deposit and final packaging artwork approval, and regular samples are usually free with the buyer covering the courier.

6.The question to ask any supplier, including us

Ask for the substrate and the weight separately, in writing, on the quotation. Then ask what the grammage tolerance is across a production run and how a batch is identified after it leaves.

Then ask what the factory cannot do. A supplier who will tell you that is easier to work with than one who says yes to everything, and in this category the most common failure is not a bad towel — it is a towel specified for a price and then quietly re-specified for a margin.