Knit Your Dog

If you have a double-coated dog, I highly recommend you watch this video.
Girl With The Dogs is a groomer in Ontario who posts amazing videos of many of the dogs she grooms. She fills her videos with a lot of useful information, and this one stands out for me as you can see a number of critical factors with your own eyes.
Note how she literally blows the dog’s coat out before anything else. The hair is far more compacted than matted, though if not taken care of, the compacted hair would soon mat. Also — very important — bathing compacted hair will mat it. Once mats form, they cannot be undone.
When she blows out that coat, notice all the dander all over her coveralls and even beneath the netting on her face. Just like compacted hair can become matted, so can dander. It causes more matting, it attracts all kinds of pests, and it can form gluey clumps around the undercoat that cannot be dissolved, not without destroying the hair. Hair that gets that dander clumping on it has to be discarded.
Regular grooming is so critical for the quality of a dog’s life, and it makes a huge difference in your life as well — mats and dander stink. Dander gets all over everything. Rodents love dander.
And for me and my team, regular grooming is a game changer. Hair from a dog that is well groomed is much easier to process (and much cheaper when we invoice).