Meet the Paul Mitchell of Poodles

To trim an unruly shrub into topiary requires only an artful eye, a steady hand, and some clippers, but to perform similar sculpting to prepare a poodle for a dog show is exponentially more complicated. For starters, a poodle must be washed twice—once in the morning, to provide a blank canvas, and again at the end of the day, so that it doesn't have to sleep with a coat that is lousy with products. The evening wash is easy, relatively. After that, a poodle handler need only blow-dry the dog and put its numerous puffs and poofs into tiny rubber bands, so that the hair doesn't tangle overnight. Depending on the size of the poodle, that might take only half an hour.

To get ready for the show, on the other hand, the handler will need at least an hour. He'll need to blow-dry the dog, carefully misting in some texturizer or bodifier or texturizing bodifier (mind you, it's not hair spray, because that would be against the rules) to distribute it evenly throughout the hair; then brush out any tangles; powder in some chalk; brush the hair again with a finer-bristled brush; and then touch up the pompons with some shears. He might finish with some coat spray to add shine, and if necessary dab out any discolorations on the nose with special makeup, and must then keep the poodle from sitting or bumping into any person or thing that could disrupt a poof until it's time to assemble in the ring for the judging.

If this is the first time you've considered the process required to turn a poodle into a show dog, then the whole rigmarole surely seems ridiculous. But if you are the kind of person who views the world through the prism of opportunity, you might also think: That handler needs a lot of products to do his job!

Which explains how it is that Chris Christensen has built a $4 million-and-growing business out of making and selling beauty products for show dogs.

Chris Christensen Systems, of Fairfield, Texas (population 2,951), manufactures products for every stage of show-dog renovation. Just a quick tally of what our theoretical poodle handler might need would include: Clean Start Clarifying Shampoo ($10 for 16 ounces), White on White Whitening Treatment Shampoo ($12 for 16 ounces), Thick N Thicker Texturizing Bodifier Spray ($10 for 10 ounces), White Ice Chalk ($12 for 8 ounces), a black ChrisStix touchup stick ($4), a Kool Dry Dryer ($375), and some combination of brushes, most likely including a 27 mm Fusion Pin Brush ($55), a 20 mm Large Wood Pin Brush ($35), and a 16 mm T-Brush ($24), as well as Trimming Shears ($140) and Texturizing Shears ($195).

And that's just for one poodle. As Christensen said, "The dog-show industry can make a person a pretty good living."

Chris Christensen is the 800-pound gorilla of high-end products for show dogs. He is, you could say, the Paul Mitchell of poodles or the Vidal Sassoon of vizslas, except that he is more like both combined and then some, because his is a business without rivals.

Christensen, a thin, ponytailed man in his early 70s, lives on a shady central Texas ranch with his wife, Lisa, who is the company's vice president and chief financial officer; an elderly rottweiler named Bear; a papillon named Classique Lynndsey Cabernets (Lynndsey for short); and June Matthews, a.k.a. the Bird Lady of Box Canyon, the couple's 93-year-old friend/"aunt," who, until the Christensens rescued her in late 2010, was living alone with more than 300 exotic birds in a California house so ramshackle that when a tree crashed through the roof and into her bedroom, Matthews just readjusted her life around it. ("I didn't have any money," she told me when I visited the ranch in August, during the hottest spell in Texas history. "What else was I going to do? Sleep on the moon?")

For the first eight years of their life in Fairfield, Chris and Lisa ran the business from the ranch—initially from a small casita that doubled as office and warehouse, and then later from a building they put up next door. In August 2010, they cut the ribbon on the brand-new, 13,000-square-foot world headquarters of Chris Christensen Systems, flagship tenant of the Fairfield Industrial Park, just off Interstate 45. The company now has 17 employees.

The fact that a vigorous 73-year-old is the Vidal Sassoon of the dog-show world is a bit of a happy accident, Christensen explained from behind the heavy wood desk in his comfortably chilled office. For the first 35 years of his career, he was a successful rep for beauty products (the human variety) in Southern California, selling expensive shampoos and hair sprays. Then one day, in the mid-1990s, he ventured out to a local dog show, where, instead of looking at show dogs, Christensen spent most of his time perusing the vendor booths. In particular, a shampoo advertised as a whitener for white dogs caught his eye. He unscrewed the cap, poured a little on his fingers, and had a revelation. That night, he told his wife he had an idea: They should use their knowledge of cutting-edge beauty-product technology to produce a shampoo to make white dogs whiter. "And that's how we started—with one product," Christensen told me.

That product was White on White shampoo. Christensen made just one size at first, a pint, and at his first dog show with the product he sought out nine handlers of white dogs. He handed out the pints gratis, and within 30 days, all nine handlers had called to buy more.

Christensen led me out of his office, apologizing for a limp caused by a Zumba injury, and into the icy-cold conference room, where he plucked a bottle of White on White from a display along one wall. He unscrewed the cap and poured a little onto a paper towel. The syrup that flowed out was a deep blue, almost purple. "Remember bluing laundry?" he asked. I didn't, but I nodded anyway. "It made clothing white, not yellow. That's called 'grabbing' in the beauty industry. It 'grabs' the yellow cast and makes hair whiter." It does this by replacing the pigment in a hair's cortex with a blue tint, which nullifies the yellow. (Overuse will cause a blue cast, which is how elegant old ladies become "blue-hairs.")

The success of White on White prompted Christensen to look further into the products sold at dog shows. He determined that most of the liquids were just modifications of the same basic formula, tweaked slightly (by adding dye or fragrance or even just a new label) and alternately marketed as products for dogs or cats or whitening or conditioning or treating harsh coats or soft coats. Christensen (who wasn't a scientist but knew the guys who were) figured that if he just made products that actually worked, he would have no problem winning over customers. In the ensuing 15 years, Christensen has attacked product category after product category, expanding his line to 201 SKUs and counting. He has nine U.S. distributors and 42 overseas. "If they have dogs," he said, "they have dog shows."