Pet Grooming Towels: Absorbency Is Only Half the Brief

QINGDAO, China — Absorbency is the first thing a buyer tests and the last thing that decides a grooming towel. Every nonwoven in this category takes up water; what separates one from another is how much of that water the towel gives back to a dryer, how it survives a second wring, and whether it leaves fiber on a wet coat. A brief that stops at absorbency buys a towel that passes the test and slows the table.

What Absorbency Does Not Measure

Standard absorbency figures come from a sample laid flat in water and weighed before and after. The test is repeatable, cheap, and almost unrelated to the table, where the towel is pressed against a wet coat, lifted, wrung, and pressed again while a high-velocity dryer runs beside it. The number a salon actually pays for is the water the towel still holds after the wring, because that is the water the dryer no longer has to move.

A towel can score well on uptake and still be slow if the water stays in the sheet rather than moving to the surface, where airflow and evaporation can reach it. That is a structure question rather than a fiber question, and it is why two towels of the same weight can finish a dog minutes apart.

Wet Strength, the Wring and What the Fiber Leaves

Grooming is a wringing business. A towel is folded, pressed, wrung by hand and used again on the same dog or the next one, and the corners are where it fails first. A sheet that tears at the corner on the second wring has become a single-use item at a reusable price, whatever the specification says about weight.

Within the towel range of 40–130 g/m², the heavier end buys wring cycles and the lighter end buys drying speed per gram. Most salons settle in the middle once they count how many times a towel is wrung per dog rather than how many towels are used per dog. That count belongs in the brief, because it turns an argument about softness into a number a mill can quote against.

The third variable is what the towel leaves behind. A wet coat holds everything the towel sheds, and a fiber that breaks down under friction shows up as a haze on a damp dog that the finishing dryer will not remove. Viscose and wood pulp blends behave differently here: the pulp gives fast uptake, the viscose gives strength, and the ratio between them decides how the sheet behaves after the first wring.

Cotton is the reference most groomers carry in their hands, and it is the right comparison to make on a sample, because a nonwoven that imitates the hand of cotton but not its wet behavior will feel correct on the shelf and wrong at the table. The test is simple: wet the towel, wring it, rub it across a wet forearm, and look at what stays on the skin.

Minutes, Not Litres

All of this matters commercially because a grooming salon sells time. Grand View Research put the U.S. pet grooming services market at $2.06 billion in 2024 and projects $2.99 billion by 2030, a compound annual growth rate of 6.7 percent [1]. The American Pet Products Association reports total U.S. pet spending of $158 billion in 2025, an expected $165 billion in 2026, and $14.3 billion in other services that include grooming [2]. Demand of that shape rewards throughput, and throughput in a grooming salon is set at the drying table rather than at the booking desk.

That is the argument for buying a towel on minutes per dog rather than on price per piece, and also the argument against changing specification to save a little per carton. A towel that adds a wring and a pass of the dryer costs more per dog than the gap between two cartons, and the invoice will never show it.

Writing the Brief So a Mill Can Quote It

A workable grooming brief has five lines: size for the body and size for the face, weight in grams per square meter, fiber and blend, pieces per pack, and the number of wrings the salon expects from one piece. Everything else, including absorbency, follows from those five, and a supplier who cannot quote against them is quoting a catalogue rather than a product.

The last line is the one buyers leave out, and it is the one that decides whether a light towel is a bargain or a false economy. A salon that wrings twice per dog and a salon that wrings four times are buying different products from the same sample card.

How Jaroll Briefs a Grooming Towel

Jaroll makes pet grooming towels in the body and face bands on the same spunlace line, in viscose, viscose/polyester, cotton and wood pulp blends at 40–130 g/m², with plain and pearl textures, and produces approximately 50 million towels per month on a 3,000 m² site.

The quote starts from the wring count rather than from weight alone, with a standard MOQ of 40,000 pieces per SKU and a lead time usually about 20 working days from deposit and artwork approval. A buyer who tests the sample wet, wrung and rubbed on a forearm before the first order usually avoids the most expensive mistake in this category, which is a towel that measures well and dries slowly.

Sources

1. Grand View Research, 2025-06-01. US Pet Grooming Services Market. https://www.earthwisepetfranchise.com/market/
2. American Pet Products Association, 2026-03-01. APPA 2026 State of the Industry Report. https://www.earthwisepetfranchise.com/market/