The teddy bear cut is Australia’s most popular dog haircut. Across 18,376 photos published by Australian grooming salons, 4,783 show a finished, identifiable style — and 1,845 of those, 38.6%, are teddy bear cuts. No other named haircut comes close. The next two entries aren’t haircuts at all: bath-and-dry at 31.0% and an unspecified full groom at 27.8%.
That headline hides the more interesting findings. The teddy bear cut’s dominance is wildly uneven by breed — it’s 73% of poodle grooms and literally 0% of french bulldog grooms — and there is one Australian state where it isn’t the most photographed service at all.
This is a first-party dataset, not a survey. Every number below comes from photos Australian salons published of their own work, classified one photo at a time by breed, service and style. Journalists, researchers and groomers are welcome to cite or reproduce any figure on this page with a link back to Groomably. Method and caveats are at the bottom, including the ones that count against us.
The national picture
| Rank | Service or style | Photos | Share of styled photos |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Teddy bear cut | 1,845 | 38.6% |
| 2 | Bath and dry | 1,481 | 31.0% |
| 3 | Full groom (unspecified style) | 1,328 | 27.8% |
| 4 | Nail trimming | 424 | 8.9% |
| 5 | De-shedding treatment | 407 | 8.5% |
| 6 | Creative grooming | 325 | 6.8% |
| 7 | Scissor cut | 225 | 4.7% |
| 8 | Breed-specific trim | 124 | 2.6% |
| 9 | Show grooming | 32 | 0.7% |
Shares total more than 100% because 1,468 photos legitimately show more than one service — a dog that was bathed, dried and given a teddy bear cut counts in all three.
Two things stand out. First, the show clip is effectively extinct in Australian pet salons: 32 photos out of 18,376. The pom-pommed continental trim that everyone pictures when they hear “poodle” is a competition style, not a service most salons sell. Second, de-shedding has quietly become a mainstream service at 407 photos — more common than scissor work, and the practical answer to the double-coated dogs that owners keep asking to have shaved.
The teddy bear cut is a coat story, not a fashion story
Sorted by how often each breed’s grooms are teddy bear cuts, the pattern is unmistakable: it tracks coat type almost perfectly.
| Breed | Styled photos | Teddy bear cuts | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Poodle | 1,141 | 832 | 73% |
| Pomeranian | 147 | 91 | 62% |
| Cavoodle (cavapoo) | 325 | 181 | 56% |
| Groodle (goldendoodle) | 243 | 125 | 51% |
| Maltese | 162 | 80 | 49% |
| Cavalier King Charles | 335 | 130 | 39% |
| Shih tzu | 305 | 107 | 35% |
| Yorkshire terrier | 131 | 44 | 34% |
| Chihuahua | 58 | 14 | 24% |
| West Highland terrier | 103 | 21 | 20% |
| Schnauzer | 194 | 37 | 19% |
| Cocker spaniel | 92 | 13 | 14% |
| Border collie | 109 | 9 | 8% |
| Dachshund | 46 | 3 | 7% |
| Golden retriever | 150 | 8 | 5% |
| French bulldog | 40 | 0 | 0% |
Curly and wool-coated breeds sit at the top. Double-coated and smooth-coated breeds sit at the bottom, and the french bulldog registers a clean zero — there is no length of coat there to round. The style is a physical property of the hair, not a trend that spread evenly.
The schnauzer is the interesting outlier. At 19% it’s far below the doodles despite having a coat that could technically carry the cut, because the schnauzer has its own well-defined breed trim that groomers and owners still prefer: 39 of its 194 styled photos are breed-specific trims, the highest share of any breed we classified.
What double-coated dogs actually get
The most useful thing in this dataset for owners is what happens to dogs that shouldn’t be clipped. The answer is de-shedding, and the heavier the coat, the more clearly it shows:
| Breed | Styled photos | De-shedding | Teddy bear cut |
|---|---|---|---|
| Husky | 96 | 52 (52%) | 1 (1%) |
| Samoyed | 51 | 25 (49%) | 9 (18%) |
| German shepherd | 42 | 14 (33%) | 0 (0%) |
| Border collie | 109 | 27 (25%) | 9 (8%) |
| Golden retriever | 150 | 14 (9%) | 8 (5%) |
| Labrador | 54 | 5 (9%) | 0 (0%) |
Half of all husky grooms in the dataset are de-shedding treatments. Australian groomers are, in aggregate, doing exactly what the profession advises: strip the loose undercoat, leave the protective topcoat alone. If you’ve been told a summer shave will keep your husky cool, the industry’s own published work disagrees — we’ve written up why shaving a double-coated dog backfires in detail.
A de-shed, not a clip — the standard treatment for a double coat. Photo: Dashing Designer Dogs, Mornington VIC — via Groomably
South Australia is the outlier state
Break the styled photos down by state and seven of eight look broadly alike. One doesn’t.
| State | Styled photos | #1 service | #2 | #3 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| VIC | 1,079 | Teddy bear cut 41% | Full groom 33% | Bath and dry 28% |
| NSW | 1,027 | Teddy bear cut 43% | Full groom 31% | Bath and dry 27% |
| QLD | 1,005 | Teddy bear cut 40% | Bath and dry 33% | Full groom 25% |
| WA | 359 | Teddy bear cut 38% | Bath and dry 34% | Full groom 24% |
| SA | 269 | Bath and dry 37% | Teddy bear cut 35% | Full groom 21% |
| TAS | 101 | Teddy bear cut 41% | Full groom 32% | Bath and dry 31% |
| ACT | 85 | Teddy bear cut 38% | Full groom 22% | Bath and dry 21% |
South Australia is the only state where the teddy bear cut is not the most photographed service — bath and dry edges it out, 37% to 35%. Queensland and Western Australia lean the same way without crossing over, both showing bath-and-dry at a third of grooms against the eastern states’ high-20s.
We’d treat this as a real but modest signal rather than a finding to build a theory on: SA’s 269 styled photos is the second-smallest sample in the table, and a warm-climate, wash-focused mix in QLD and WA points the same direction for reasons that are easy to guess at and hard to prove from photographs.
Creative grooming is bigger than you’d think
Coloured, sculpted and accessorised grooms — pet-safe dye, Asian-fusion faces, seasonal styling — account for 325 photos, 6.8% of styled grooms. That’s more than scissor work as a named service. It clusters exactly where you’d expect, on small dogs with hair rather than fur:
- Yorkshire terrier — 13% of grooms
- Poodle — 11%
- Shih tzu — 11%
- Pomeranian — 11%
- Maltese — 9%
- Cavoodle — 4%
Photo: Couture Canine, West Perth WA — via Groomably
And the cats
Cats are a small but distinct slice: 708 cat photos, 106 with an identifiable service. Of those, 67 — 63% — are nail trims. Cat grooming in Australia is overwhelmingly a claw-and-comb service rather than a haircut service, with full cat grooming appointments and lion cuts a specialist minority.
Method, and what’s wrong with it
What we did. 18,376 photos published by Australian pet grooming businesses — 2,157 business profiles at the time of classification, 1,857 of which are groomers listed on Groomably today — were each classified by a vision model for breed, service, grooming style, subject type and image quality, then spot-checked by hand. 4,783 photos carried at least one identifiable service or style; the rest are storefronts, signage, interiors, products and photos too ambiguous to tag. All percentages above use the 4,783 as the denominator unless a breed is named, in which case the denominator is that breed’s own styled photos.
Four honest caveats.
- This measures what salons photograph, not what they perform. Salons post their prettiest work. A teddy bear cut is far more photogenic than a nail trim, so nail trims are certainly under-counted here relative to reality. Read the whole dataset as “the grooming Australia shows off”, which is a genuinely useful thing to know but is not an appointment book.
- Breed is inferred from images. Doodle crosses in particular are hard to separate visually; some cavoodle/groodle/maltipoo attributions will be wrong in both directions. 3,130 photos show a dog we couldn’t confidently assign a breed to, and they’re excluded from every breed table.
- Style vocabulary overlaps in real life. “Puppy cut”, “summer cut” and “kennel cut” are used interchangeably by different salons, and a photo can honestly carry more than one tag — hence shares summing over 100%.
- Geographic coverage follows population, not evenly. VIC, NSW and QLD supply 74% of the styled photos. NT, with 15, is too small to report and has been left out of the state table.
Citing this. Every figure here is free to quote, chart or reproduce with attribution to Groomably and a link to this page. The underlying photo library, tagged by style and breed, is browsable at groomably.com/au/gallery — the teddy bear cut collection is the largest. If you need a cut of the data we haven’t published — a specific breed, style, city or state — get in touch and we’ll pull it.
Related reading
- Teddy bear cut: lengths, face, real photos — the style behind 38.6% of the dataset
- How much does dog grooming cost in Australia? — price bands by service and size
- How often should you groom your dog? — frequency by coat type
- Poodle haircuts · Cavoodle haircuts · Goldendoodle haircuts · Pomeranian haircuts · Shih tzu haircuts
