Pets at Home to roll out 30 new format stores next year

Peter Pritchard told Retail Week that after a successful trial of three of its new pet care centre store formats in the first half of the year, it plans to open a further 14 by the end of the current financial year, with another 30 in the next financial year.

The new stores, which feature a number of integrated services including vet practices, the RSPCA and an onsite dog groomer, will be how Pets at Home “breathes new life into our store estate”, said Pritchard.

“We’re learning loads, we’re very pleased with what we’ve seen so far, but we’re still learning. But our ambition is that we have a retail estate, a very well invested retail estate, and for us the pet care centre is how we’ll continue to breathe new life into our estate.

“We see this as a rollout programme over a number of years as our stores come up to the point where they need investment, we have a model that we see as a good return.”

The integrated services aspect of the new stores fit into Pritchard’s vision for the retailer, which he says will be a “very different business in the next three to five years” from what it is now.

“Our ambition in five years’ time is that 50% of our business will come from our services,” he said. In order to achieve this, Pritchard said Pets at Home was using customer data in a way that its major competitors, including Amazon, simply are not.

“Data is where our future growth is going to be. What we do is fuelled by knowing our customers. The likes of Amazon are collecting data, but only at a customer level. We know that’s not enough. We collect data at a pet level, that’s our gamechanger,” he added.

The retailer posted another strong set of financial accounts for the 28 weeks to October 10 today. Pre-tax profits surged to £24m from £8m, while group revenue advanced 9.4% to £546.3m.