A Look Inside Yappie Cuttery

There are a lot of things that could be said about Yappie Cuttery and Blooms Crossing Animal Hospital. Going up the drive you can see handlers walking with dogs — not just walking them but talking to them. Inside, groomers carefully and lovingly trim, clip, and pamper the animals.

The entire staff is warm and friendly and the building is bright and welcoming. It's no wonder it's been chosen as Washingtonian's best pet-care facility in Northern Virginia two times in a row. It is an all-inclusive animal care facility, offering veterinary, daycare, training, boarding and rehabilitation services.

However, at the core, it is much more than that.

The business is the brainchild of owner Peter Perretta, 55. But he is quick to downplay what he does.

“I'm sincere about what I do,” he said. “I care about the kids [who work with him], I love the animals. That's it.”

And that is it.

Walking into his office it's easy to see that this is the core. His walls are a mingling of paintings of animals, clippings about the business, framed letters from the community, and photographs of people associated with the business.

A life-long lover of everything furry, even as a child his life was inherently linked to animals. He remembered how neighborhood strays used to follow him home. His life seemed to be leading towards veterinary medicine, but his father took ill. The September when he would have been starting up at the University of Virginia he found himself helping to keep his father's construction company alive.

It took his father three years to get better, but when he did, Perretta decided construction just wasn't for him. He and his wife moved up north where he soon got a job as a regional manager at a pet-care company. As part of his training for the position he went to grooming school, and there the seeds of Yappie Cuttery were planted.

“I realized [the grooming industry] was like an uncut diamond,” he said.

As part of the job he and his managers would often go to grooming parlors to promote the business.

“This was 34 years ago,” he said. “The industry was different. Parlors were nasty dirty places.”

He explained that the proprietors would take the animals in the back and you couldn't see what was happening to them. During his visits to the parlors, Perretta would ask their customers their opinions on how the businesses had been run. By the time he left that job he had stacks of legal pads filled with their opinions and knew he wanted to build a business structured around their likes.

His vision was to create an establishment where customers could see everything that was happening to their pets. While he had a rough start, the banks laughed at him and said he was too much of a maverick to make the idea work. But he was able to secure financing and the Yappie Cuttery has continuously flourished, outgrowing several facilities before it came to its current location six years ago.

Today his vision encompasses a 21,000-square-foot facility that sees roughly 300 to 500 animals a week, and employes 15 to 20 people. Yappie Cuttery and Blooms Crossing Animal Hospital see all sorts of animals from dogs and cats to ferrets, hamsters and birds. A little while ago they even groomed a pot-bellied pig.

“If it has fur we take care of it,” Perretta said.

Blooms Crossing Animal Hospital is a recent addition to the business, opening six years ago when Yappie moved to its current location. It was a welcome addition. “People love our Vets,” Perretta said. They work extended hours and, like the rest of his staff, work to ensure that their customers are treated like they are part of a family. Unlike other hospitals, they have never put down a pet simply because its owner is unable to pay for medication or services.

“We find a way to make it work,” he said.

Perretta loves what he does and says the only downside is that he can't please everyone. But he and his staff tries. “My people are dedicated to what they do,” he said.