When DeDe Lally cut her graduate school journey short to pursue a new dream of opening a dog day care, she envisioned a place that would be welcoming for both dogs and their families.
“There’s a joke that people that work with dogs, we work with dogs because we don’t really like to work with people,” Lally said. “That’s where I was like, ‘Well, I think I could offer this doggy day care experience, but it would be bright and warm and welcoming, and we would focus a lot on the customer experience.’”
How it started
Lally was fresh out of college with a bachelor’s degree in psychology from The University of Texas at Austin and halfway through a graduate program studying family counseling at Texas State University. She put that career on hold and, with her seafoam-colored binder full of pictures of dogs and kennels, searched for a place to open Pups & Pals Pet Lounge.
Lally’s dog at the time, a Hungarian vizsla named Penny, was her inspiration to start building a business plan for a dog day care.
“She was my first dog that I was responsible for as an adult, and my whole world revolved around her. I was obsessed with her,” Lally said. “I brought her to several different doggy day cares in both North and South Austin because I worked, and I was in school … and I became really reliant on it.”
Lally opened Pups & Pals in a small yellow house on South First Street in November 2016. Two years later, she opened a second location in Oak Hill, wanting to stay in the South Austin area where she had built a community of clients.
“We have many [dogs] that have been with us for seven or eight years, and we’re seeing them grow up,” Lally said. “Some of the dogs we’ve had since they were puppies are old men now and they’re all gray, and we’ve had dogs that have passed away and we’ve seen their family get a new dog, and we get the next generation of that family’s pets. That’s been really special.”
The features
Pups & Pals Pet Lounge offers day care and boarding services at both of its locations with separate rooms for small and large dogs. The Oak Hill location sits on over 3 acres of land off Hwy. 290. Lally said it offers a ranch experience for dogs while still being within Austin city limits. The original South Park location underwent upgrades over the summer, including moving into a larger building on the same property as the old yellow house.
The day care now has 61 private suites, 14 crates and a larger yard with custom dog playscapes. Other improvements include the addition of K9Grass by ForeverLawn, a drainable turf made specifically for dogs and a fire sprinkler suppression system.
Lally said the sprinkler system was a major topic of conversation in early planning meetings after a fire at a Georgetown pet resort resulted in the deaths of 75 dogs in 2021.
“This is something that the pet parents are now going to be wanting and asking for to have that peace of mind …” she said. “It was a really big price increase to add, but I didn’t even bat an eye because it was just a no-brainer. We were so lucky about to be under construction at a time when that became such an important issue for dog owners.”
What else?
Lally said she plans to spend the next year building the Pups & Pals client base, staying involved at both locations and focusing on her team. Her goal has always been to create a welcoming environment. The staff is learning sign language, she said, and the majority of her staff are members of the LGBTQ+ community.
She said it’s a “dream come true” that the business has turned out to be the welcoming and inclusive space she envisioned.
“That was kind of the mission,” she said. “To have a transparent, open door policy, bring in any client at any time and really offer them those feelings of security. Knowing that it was a great place to leave their dog from the moment they walked in the door. We want them to feel that.”
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