Pittsburgh is a hard city to route. Three rivers, 446 bridges, and tunnels that turn a four-mile hop into forty minutes at the wrong time of day. Kindred Co. ran two grooming vans across all of it, and in early 2025 they were about to add a third.
Avery Szabo, who runs operations, was not sure the third van would help. “We were already passing each other on the Fort Pitt Bridge,” Avery says.
One side of the water each
Before the new van arrived, Avery drew two lines on a map: the Allegheny and the Monongahela. Each van got one piece of the city, and Bramble’s crew routes did the rest.
- Every client was assigned to the van that owns their side. Bramble moved 212 households in one afternoon and texted each of them their new groomer’s name.
- The booking link only offers a client the days their own van is nearby, so the lines hold without anyone policing them.
- Families who asked to keep their groomer kept them. There were eleven. Those stops are pinned, and the route bends around them.
What the dispatcher stopped doing
Avery used to spend the first hour of each day on the phone, trading stops between vans by hand. With routes split by area and ordered by drive time overnight, that hour is now about ten minutes: a look at the three loops, and a call to anyone who has not confirmed.
Tips changed too. Kindred pays groomers a share of tips, and working it out from card slips took most of a Friday. Bramble’s tip report breaks it out by groomer and by day, ready for payroll.
The year in numbers
With three vans, Kindred drove 31% fewer total miles in 2025 than they had with two in 2024. Each van fits about four more grooms a week into the same hours. Nobody has waved at their own van on a bridge since April.
I’d see our own van going the other way on the bridge and think, one of us is in the wrong place. That hasn’t happened since April.
Avery Szabo
Operations lead, Kindred Co.
