Business Changes for 2024

Please read any category that may even remotely apply to you. There is a lot of information here, and we don't want you to miss anything! If you have any questions, send us a message!

An explanation of the events of 2023

This section is specifically from our owner, Taylor. The remainder of the article applies to the rest of the Taylored staff and events.

I want to issue a formal apology and explanation to my clients about our service and communication throughout the past year. Clients may have experienced communication delays or other issues. While I am not excusing this lack of consistent communication, I feel that my clients deserve to know WHY this was happening.

I became isolated in an unsafe domestic situation and didn't know the right way to get myself out. Even the closest people in my life would look at the physical results of what happened and tell me they must be fake. I didn't like the idea of letting clients see through the cracks, either. These issues were especially bad closer to the end of the year, and hit their peak while I was battling chronic illnesses at the same time. I lost many client contacts when my phone was destroyed. To add to the situation, Rosie (our lovely, fluffy poster child) ended up obtaining a few injuries of her own throughout the year. Thankfully, NONE of the Taylored Team has to experience these things again.

While these things did deeply affect me (and continue to do so to an extent), I don't feel like my clients deserve any less transparency as a result. As I move forward from these experiences, I am implementing similar policies within my business and my own life: Complete honesty and transparency, stronger community ties, and helping those who need a hand.

The hardest parts of this process are already done, all that is left now is to grow and move forward! We would love to share this growth with our community, which is why we have many positive changes (listed below) to our training courses and structure! One of our biggest changes is in our service animal program. Check out those changes below!

Changes to Service Animal clients

This category has the most change. Service animal clients will have a longer, more in-depth interview process. There will be a short waiting period for in-person training to begin because of this. The dog presented must either pass our obedience, handling, and public access testing, or take these courses with us to prove they meet our standards and are ready for specialized training to begin.

Service animal clients keep all of their equipment (similar to agility clients). Tasks will be trained individually and only when appropriate for your particular service dog.

Clients will have free or reduced training costs depending on availability and program support. In other words, the more fundraising our community does, the more dogs we can fully train with their handlers for free!

Fund info ( here )

Other information ( here )

Changes to Basic Obedience classes

Basic Obedience courses will be taught in a slightly different format this year. Your first few sessions will still be private, one-on-one interactions in the comfort of your home. However, your final lessons, exam, and graduation will be group classes! We are raising graduation standards for socialization, and want to provide students with adequate opportunities to practice their skills in order to pass! We are altering this format because we believe your pups will benefit more from gaining real-world experiences in a safe, structured group!

All students still receive the same great benefits as before (1 free lesson for anything you'd like, as well as a personal discount code for our shop), but now you earn so much more as a Taylored Training graduate! In addition to these benefits, you and your pup will also earn free entries into our new events and Pack Walks!

Basic skills can still be booked as a completely private class (no group lessons), though your pup may miss out on valuable learning experiences. Your pup's final exam / graduation will also be a smaller, private event.

( schedule )

Changes to Agility classes

What's old:

- Clients can still choose to keep at-home equipment set after graduation.

What's new:

- Clients who graduate gain 2 free trial entries in our Puppy Olympics event. Test your skills and earn awards!

- Clients also gain 1 free event entry as well!

Events

We will be hosting multiple fun AND educational events throughout the year! We will have seasonal events geared towards safety available to everyone and their pups. Topics will include door safety, socialization, desensitization to loud sounds, emergency safety, and more!

Clients will gain 1-2 entries to any of our events upon graduation. We'd love for you to have a fun, safe place to practice your skills!

You don't have to be a current client to attend any event! While clients earn a few free entries as a bonus for completing training courses, we otherwise ask that they (and everyone else) pay an entry fee for most of our events. Fees and discount packages will be posted alongside their events.

( full year calendar here )

New service - Pack Walks!

We would like to offer more social, relaxed services to our community. In a perfect world, we would all be able to go for a peaceful walk in the park (or hike!) with our dog at our side. Well, this is what we would like to help you accomplish with our new drop-in pack walks!

What it is:

- Great exercise for you and your dog!

- Structured engagement time with your pet. You're bonding through exercise and exploration of the world around you!

-Passivity training : teaching your dog to accept - but not react to - other dogs around them. This will do wonders for a dog that is timid around new friends, ones with BIG personalities to share, and everybody in-between!

What it is not:

- A race. This is still a lesson time to many of you. If you need to leave early, stop, etc., that's okay!

- Social hour. We are not having our dogs greet or play with each other during these walks. Face-to-face greetings will only be facilitated at very specific times, and only under direct supervision and instruction of your trainer. Anyone who can not respect other's personal space will be asked not to return for future walks.

We will be meeting at a pre-determined park, trail, or other path.

We will not visit dog parks during these walks.

We will establish walking order and review pack walk rules before we begin.

The Pack walk will last about an hour.

We will typically walk around 1 mile.

Pack walks will not be held during major holidays. With the increased traffic that comes around holidays, we want to express caution about the safety of you and your pets. As many more people and pets will be out and about at these times, we can not guarantee that everyone we may meet will be friendly/safe. For this reason, we are only hosting our safety events during these times. We encourage you to attend!

( start here )

Product releases

Over the past year, we have kept certain products of ours exclusive to training clients whose care would benefit from their use. We did not share much about these products publicly, as there was a lot of chaos surrounding sales when we first tried to launch them. We limited any new orders back to active clients only until we could support the demand for these products appropriately.

We are excited to officially relaunch our calming aid and coat supplement for 2024! Through a decade's worth of combined medical and behavioral research and experience, medicinal trials, and allergy studies, we have created two natural, bioavailable formulas designed to assist with anxiety and coat health (respectively).

While these items are in our shop, we will be internally limiting sales for a while. We are not yet offering private wholesale of these products, so only a limited quantity will be present in the store/checkout. If you are a retailer and would like our products on your shelves too, please send us an email to begin that conversation.

The Medusa program

Personal Protection training program for victims of violence. More information to come on this program later, as it is still in early stages.

(More info to be added as this program develops!)