Peter Pritchard

Former CEO, Pets at Home, Chairman of Arca Planet, NED at AO.com

Peter Pritchard

Peter Pritchard

Transformation is the most common word used in business, but few are successful. At Pets at Home, Peter led the transformation of a much-loved but failing pet shop business to the UK’s leading pet care business, building a proposition that combined retail and services and underpinned by digital and data. Peter is an enthusiastic speaker who believes that great businesses have two things engrained through them; people and purpose. He fundamentally believes the best businesses and leaders create a purpose which unites colleagues, customers, and stakeholders.

Themes

Culture
Customer Centricity
Innovation and Disruption
Purpose

Biography

Having built the UK’s largest pet database of over 7.3m active customers, Pets at Home transformed itself to become one of the most advanced users of data to drive decision making and customer engagement but more importantly focused on using “data to better serve its customers” and transforming its digital capabilities “to free colleagues to serve” the needs of pets and their owners.

Peter talks about how businesses need to find their clear purpose and building capability using data and digital to ensure they “know their customer better than their competitors know their customers.”

Peter is a lifelong retailer. Since the age of sixteen he has been serving the needs of customers having progressed from the shop floor to become Group CEO of Pets at Home plc, the UK’s largest and most successful pet care business. His career spans many great retailers including M&S, Sainsbury, Iceland, ASDA, and Wilko.

Pets at Home is recognised as one of the UK’s most successful businesses. Under Peter’s leadership the business won many accolades including, Retail Week Best Place to Work, PLC Awards Transformation of the Year, Retail Week Best UK Retailer and Customer Service Institute Best Customer Service.

When Peter stepped down as CEO in May 2022, he had doubled the revenue and profit of the business under his tenure.

Today Peter is Chairman of Arca Planet, Italy’s leading pet business and non-executive director of Motability Operations.