Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Pets at Home. I'm Peter Pritchard, I'm the Group CEO. Welcome to our home. I think as you probably discovered today, those who arrived on the bus, there's more than one building on this campus. Apologies for your walk from our old building to our new building. Across the road, we also have another building. Actually, we've grown enormously in this position over the 11 years that I've been in. Actually, we've done so well, we've now afforded ourselves windows. For those of us who've been around long enough. Actually those of you who thought you pulled outside an old distribution center, because that's what it was.
We lived in there for many years. The biggest thing we ever did for our colleagues when we moved here two years ago, we gave them light. We're very proud of our home. It's one of two locations for us. Our retail business is mainly based out of here with our support functions. Our Swindon office is the home of our Vet business. I'm delighted we've got a number of our Vet team here today. It's also the home of our latest Pet Care Center, which you'll see is actually just through that window, behind the trees, is our Handforth Pet Care Center. It's our 23rd Pet Care Center. We're really excited to be able to show you that today. There's nothing like seeing it or feeling it.
I'm very conscious, I think for most people, this is probably the first time you've been let out. Yeah. Yeah. Bit weird, isn't it? Yeah. I know. I was in London last week, and I just got incredibly excited the fact I was on a train. It was amazing. The fact you've actually given your time today to come and see us today, we are so appreciative because we know your time is valuable, and the fact that actually you've come out and seen us, and hopefully, we'll make today really worthwhile, and hopefully, you'll get a lot out of the business. We want you to really get underneath the bonnet of our business and understand what we're trying to do.
There's quite a lot of subtleties about our business that I think actually once you see, touch, and feel, it really does bring the whole thing to life. We want to try and help you today understand all those drivers and understand what our business is all about, but more importantly, meet the people who do it. I know many of you get to see Mike and I, but there's an army of 15,000 of us behind this business who make things happen, and I have to say, the really special people in this business aren't Mike and I. Sorry, Mike, it's not you. When you see the people who bring this business to life, that's really what Pets at Home is all about. It's about our people.
It's an opportunity for you to ask as many questions as you want to all the guys you're seeing today, who are going to be around all day, and we're going to do a Q&A at the end of the day for us to answer any of the questions that you may have about our business. Our purpose for the day, we've really tried to focus it down. We're not going to try and bombard you today, but we're going to focus on a few key things that we think are really important in telling our story. To start off with our ambition. Our ambition is to be the best pet care business in the world, and I'm hoping by the end of today, we'll persuade you that actually, we're developing the capabilities and the capacity to do that. We're not there yet.
In fact, actually, we've been on this journey now for the last three and a half years, really building out the capacity and the capability of this organization to make it a business that is truly omnichannel. I hate that set of words, actually, because what the hell does that mean. What it really means is absolutely everything for the customer in a way that they want to access it. The facts of life are customers want to spend time with their pets. That's a thing that they want. They don't want to spend their entire life navigating the world of pet care. We do, but they don't.
Our job is to make pet care really easy, dead convenient, unbelievably supportive, because those of you who are pet owners know pets don't do what you want them to do, and they're going to make you cry at some point in your life, and unbelievably rewarding. That combination of digital, physical, vets, services, product, and most importantly, people, that hang it all together really is what Pets at Home is all about. We're quite simply aligning our business around the total needs of a pet owner. That's what we're trying to do. Which is different to many others who are taking a slither or a slice or a channel. We think the answer sits in the whole. It's delivered through a unique combination of products and services. Nobody quite looks like us. We're a bit of a one-of-a-kind, certainly in the U.K. we are.
Because we recognize that there's a lot of complexity in pet care, and actually what we try and do is we try and knit those things together in a way that are really relevant for our customers. Combining products and services together, which is why we've been able to create things like subscriptions, because we understand the needs of those owners, and we've been able to take our capability of product and insight and knit it into a service which is really easy for pet owners. We've only just started on that journey, and there's a lot more that we expect to do. Because by personalizing it, we make it really easy for customers. They haven't got to navigate us. We try and make it easy for us to navigate them. Now, we absolutely get this.
We've had 30 years of expertise in pet care, we think that gives us an enormous insight. We've also been sat on an incredible, rich asset, which is our data. You've heard us talk an awful lot about this. Today, we're going to spend quite a lot of time really going through what does this mean, because we genuinely have an unparalleled view of the pet-owning population, like nobody else has. One of the secrets, if I've learned one thing in my 35-year history of serving customers, is there's a really important truth. You've got to know your customer better than your competitor knows your customer. For us, that's exactly what we're trying to do. Knowing, however, is not enough. Rob will tell you later, he's got something like 158 billion bits of data. Well, that's helpful. Not.
What's really helpful is how we use that to better serve our customer. We're going to give you some examples of how we're using that data to provide an insight, which allows us to provide a service or a solution, which actually allows us to do the most important thing, is drive share of wallet. That's what our game here is all about, is driving our share of wallet, because that's a big wallet. It's over a GBP 6 billion wallet. Not a slither of it's a GBP 6 billion opportunity. We're slightly greedy. We want all of it. That's where we're focused. We're trying to get as big a share of that wallet as we possibly can do. Because of our unique combination, we think we're in a unique position to be able to do that.
Today, we're hoping that we're going to demonstrate to you the capacity and the capability that we're building inside this business. Hopefully demonstrate what best really means, because we recognize that to be best, you've got to be better. The problem with better is it never stops. What's best today, some bugger comes along and does it better and you've got to move on. In our world, we recognize that the expectations of our customers, whilst we're in pet care, aren't set within pet care. They're set within fashion, they're set within food, they're set within the whole environment in which our customers interact. They see brilliant experiences elsewhere. What we try and do is learn and adapt and bring it to pet care. That will make us the best in pet care, but it means our journey never, ever stops.
I'm hoping what you see today is the capability we're building isn't just about today, it's about really leveraging the capability for tomorrow. We see a big opportunity. We see a GBP 600 million+ opportunity in pet care. We know the pet care market is in an incredible position. You can't help but fall over the headlines regarding the growth we've seen, not just in the U.K., but internationally around the growth in pet. Frankly, if you're in the pet care space today and you're not growing, you've done something really bad, because all ships will rise in this tide. That gives us a great opportunity. However, what we're interested in is growing faster than the market, in growing share. What we've been able to demonstrate for the last three and a half years is we've consistently grown ahead of the market.
What we're going to hopefully share with you today is our plans to continually grow ahead of the market. Our ambitions today really are down to three things. We want to give you an appreciation of not just the what of our plan, but the how we're going to do it and how we are doing it, and more importantly, the who are the people who are doing it for you. Ultimately, I want you to see the people who are delivering this. Actually, do you believe them? Do you think they're capable? Actually, ultimately, that's what you've got to believe in. That actually we've got a great plan, we're executing, and the people we've got are really capable. Hopefully, what you'll also leave with is a huge positivity that we've got for our business.
We're really proud of what we've built, but we're really excited about our future as well, because what a great space to be in. Frankly, what a great place when you can bring your dog to work. We're very lucky. More importantly, how we're going to become the best pet care business in the world. Our agenda today, the first thing we're going to do is we're going to show you, we're going to bring to life what does omnichannel pet care really mean. Jane and David, who run our vet and our retail businesses, are going to come together with probably somebody who's more important than those two, Heather, who runs the Handforth Pet Care Center. We're going to bring to life what omnichannel really means, and we're going to show you it.
We're going to show you that actually that is not a store. Hopefully when you leave, you'll realize why it's a Pet Care Center, but also the capability inside that center for things that we can do. It's really, really exciting. Rob Kent, our Chief Data Officer, he's going to showcase the capability we've built in data. More importantly, we're going to show you how we're leveraging it. We're going to give you a sneak peek of some of the things that we're building, seeing, but more importantly, utilizing in how we're growing our business.
I have to say, that for me is probably one of the most exciting things, no pressure, Rob, the most exciting things that I think we're going to share with you today, because the capability we're building really is just phenomenal, and I think is going to become a true competitive advantage of this business. You've heard us talk about Project Polestar. Polestar is our digital transformation. In some respects, it's very similar to what we've done in data. We're actually building a capability. The team are now live. They're actually building the first releases, and we're going to share with you what you can expect from us over the next 18 months. Actually, what can you expect in the next couple of months as things start to land. We've got Jon and Chris are going to be here today.
Unfortunately, William, who is our Chief Information Officer, discovered at the weekend that cycling can be quite a dangerous sport. Having collided with a classic car, breaking a femur and a hip wasn't a good combination. That meant apparently he couldn't be here today, which frankly, I think we do have to test his commitment to the business, but he only got out of hospital yesterday, so Jon and Chris are going to bring that to life for you today. Then we're going to spend a bit of time really focusing on our veterinary model to really help you understand what's different about our model. You're going to see it as well. Across in Handforth, you're going to see something which we are very excited about, and it's called Pathfinder.
I promised Jane I'm not going to steal any thunder, but we're going to bring to life how the future of vet care is incredibly exciting, and how we've got an incredible part of our ecosystem, which really is a jewel in our crown. Mike is going to bring that back together to talk about how does this all knit up together to our GBP 600 million opportunity. We're going to open up for Q&As. We're going to feed you all. Most importantly, I know getting home will be very important because as much as we love Handforth, a weekend stop in Handforth is probably not something on the top of your agenda list. We'll make sure we get you off on time for your journey. Few final points we're going to do now.
What we're going to do is when we get across to the store, we're going to break you into two teams. I was going to try and do it here, but actually when you go outside the store, before you go in, because obviously the store's quite tight, we're going to break you down into Group A and Group B. One's going to go with David, the other one's going to go with Jen. They're going to swap you over seamlessly. The store's obviously trading. You'll get a good view of actually what life looks like now. If you're worrying about availability and freight and all that stuff, you're going to see what life looks like. It's a good point to ask all those questions. Really enjoy it, because actually for us, the real magic is what happens over in that box over there.
The good news is, hopefully the bus is on standby because we are in Manchester, and the potential for rain is high, and even though the store's there, that is at least two showers' worth on the way. We're going to get you across there, and enjoy that visit. We're going to bring you back here, and actually any major questions on the store and the center, probably best taken here, where we can probably do that in a more informal situation than doing it in the store. I'm going to hand over to Chris, and we're going to get you parceled off onto the bus. Thank you very much.
Hi, and welcome to our brand new Handforth Pet Care Center here in Handforth, in Cheshire. It's just a stone's throw away from our support office.
This Pet Care Center contains the very best of Pets at Home. It's got full digital integration, a multi-use event center, and of course, our fantastic services proposition of vets, groomers, self-wash, and a brand-new service desk. The Handforth center is also the first to incorporate our brand new vet operating model, the start of an exciting new initiative. Before we go inside our Pet Care Center, I want to show you our two contactless delivery points. These are dedicated spaces where customers can park up, scan a QR code, and then the colleague will come out and place the items directly into the boot of your car, providing a really convenient solution for customers. Now, let me take you inside. Right away, you're greeted by our pet village, where customers can learn about and interact with pets that we have in our store.
You can also see that this Pet Care Center features both of our primary services, the Groom room and a vet practice. It's really clear and very simple for customers to navigate their way there. Looking around the rest of the Pet Care Center, you can see all of our product range is divided clearly into cat, dog, small animal, and easily signposted for customers. To my right, we've got our brand new service desk. You've noticed we've positioned it right at the front of the store, it's a multi-use desk. Of course, if you're here for a click and collect order, what you want is speed and convenience, with a great storage area behind so colleagues can quickly get your order.
This is also the place that you can sign up for a subscription, have your name tags engraved for your dog, plus engage and consult with one of our experts. You'll notice here and right throughout the Pet Care Center, a digital screen showcasing all our services, food consultation, weight checks, and all the services that we provide in this Pet Care Center. Pets at Home is the home of nutrition. In this Pet Care Center, we've added an additional bank of freezers in the home of nutrition for all our customers' frozen and raw food needs. Let me take you to our aquatic center. This is brand new. You'll see it's a wraparound unit, so customers can walk around, and they can see all the various different species of fish we have, from cold water fish through to tropical fish.
You'll notice that there's a brilliant blue ambient lighting above, so wherever you are in the store, you can see it, and this is a brand new state-of-the-art tank system. It's so sophisticated, it even cleans itself. You probably know that we've got groomers in over 300 of our stores, this one's quite special. I'm going to take you to the new part first, it's called self-wash. In our self-wash, it literally does what it says on the tin. Why destroy your very expensive bathroom when you can come and use ours? It's really simple. You swipe your card, a fully integrated unit, all the water you need, all the soap you need, all the towels you'll need, job done. Our customers absolutely love it. Let me show you the normal groom room. Welcome to our groom room, it's not a normal groom room.
Firstly, welcome to our reception desk, where you're going to be greeted by one of our groom professionals to check your dog in. We can check the coat and make sure we know exactly what you want for your groom. Then into the grooming salon. You can see straight through. Everything we do is on display. We think it's a fantastic area for us to really demonstrate our skills and capabilities from our qualified groomers. Your dog is looking absolutely tip top, and you want to share that image with all your friends and family. What, of course, do you need? You need a selfie spot, and we've given that to you here. You can put your dog, you can choose your background on our digital screen, take your selfie, and share it with all your friends.
Alongside our groom room, we've got our brand new Vets4Pets practice. This is the first practice to include our new operating model, but from the outside, what you see is a brand new look. It's open, and we think it's got a really premium feel. In the reception area, where we've traditionally had a desk, we now have a podium to make our vet partners and our colleagues much more accessible and allow them to have a great conversation with the client. Removing the desk as a barrier also helps integrate the practice into the wider store environment. We've also added a coffee machine, a new digital screen showing a message with our clients, and this really helps us cut down on paper as we work towards our better world pledge.
We've really redesigned our practice from the front outwards, and the starting point are cat and dog waiting areas. The way we've designed them is so actually our vet care advisors can come and sit alongside a client and speak to our clients about their needs. If you're a cat owner, the last thing you want is to be sat next to a dog owner in reception. You don't want a scrap between your cat and a dog, which is why we've got a dedicated cat area. We also understand that cats, when it comes to vet practice, can often be very stressed. To help alleviate that, we've created a cat tower, and that allows you to position your cat at height. That gives a cat real security.
Also, if you've got your cat out the basket, we have some gray blankets here so you can cuddle and give them some comfort before they go and see the vet. The changes aren't just on the front. The changes also take place through behind the scenes and also through the whole of the operating model. Let me take you behind the scenes and show you our brand-new glass see-through operating theater. The heart of a vet practice is the theater. Here, we've created a state-of-the-art see-through operating theater with two tables, which means we can complete two procedures at once. The reason why it's made of glass is because we believe transparency is really important. It's really important that clients can see, if they want to do so, what's going on, and it means everything we do is on display.
It's not just how our vet practices look, it's how they operate that's really important. That's why we've equipped our practice here in Handforth with all of the latest technology to ensure that our vets and nurses can deliver the very best experience to clients. In the consult room, we've introduced a platform which provides interactive videos and models that show the customer a clear visualization of what's happening medically to their pets and how a proposed treatment will work and help manage a particular condition. We also have microscopes linked up to screens in the consult room, so the customer can see exactly what the vet is seeing, which helps bring to life what the vet is describing for the customer, and they can see evidence of any condition.
One of the key changes we've made in this vet practice is when you arrive, you're met by your pet's health advisor. This is a crucial brand-new role. In effect, this is the person who helps interpret exactly what the vets and the nurses are saying into language that you can really understand, and they can spend more time with you really talking about what your pet's needs, understanding your insurance requirements, and talking through exactly what you need to do after you've left the consult room, and explain it in a way that when you go home, you know exactly what you need to do. We think this is a crucial role in breaking down the barriers and helping our customers really understand how they best care for their pets.
Crucially, it also means that the vets can spend their time on clinical matters, and we think this is a really exciting way forward in how we deliver the best pet healthcare to our customers. For our colleagues, we've got one step further to enable our teams to work closely together between the retail team, the groomers, and the vets, with a single shared colleague room where all the colleagues can relax together and build relationships over a cup of coffee.
There you go. That's a really fast fly-through of our brand-new Pet Care Center here in Handforth. I hope you agree, it's absolutely jam-packed full of lots of touches and new initiatives that make pet care so much more rewarding for our customers. We know it's really important that our Pet Care Centers need to be fully integrated into your digital experience.
Above more, when you come here, we want to create an experience which is really easy, convenient, supportive, and really rewarding to visit. This is now the format that we're rolling back through our store refits and of course, into our brand-new stores. I hope you've enjoyed it. I hope you found it informative. We'll see you again soon.
Let's talk about our unique data assets. I get to talk about data for the next 20 minutes, half an hour if I'm fast. Favorite subject, talk about me. I've been working in data for about 30 years now, coming up to 30 years, across a range of sectors. I built my first data warehouse in 1992. I probably worked on the first internet data platform probably in the world in 1997. I did a bit of algorithmic marketing in the early 2000, the dot-com boom, so the people that say, "People who buy this will sometimes go on to buy that." I got involved in that, and then more recently, for eight years, I was the chief data officer at Royal Mail. As Peter's just said, I joined Pets in 2018.
I had a blank sheet of paper, and part of the attraction of joining the company was that it was a blank sheet of paper. What we did have, as you've heard and you've seen today, is a well-thought-through pet care strategy and lots of data. The VIP loyalty scheme had been running for about six years, and we managed to collect a lot of data about pet owners. Unfortunately, it was all outsourced, so it was all with an agency who helped us with our VIP scheme, and strategically, if you're going to do something with your data, you need to get your hands on it. You need to create an internal capability. Our approach and our strategy was very much about creating an internal capability, and when I talk about capability, it's not just about the people, it's about the platform, it's about the culture.
We had a three-prong attack. one, build a team, two, build a platform, and three, build a culture, create a culture, create an atmosphere, create an environment within the company that was curious, asked lots of questions, knew how to harness the capabilities that we were about to deliver across all 15,000 people in the company. That still remains our ambition. Today, I'm only going to focus on the first two and tell you a little bit about what we've been doing with it, but I'm going to talk a lot about the team and the platform that we've built and how we've been using it. Our ambition remains to try and put artificial intelligence at the point and the crux of every key decision we could take and make around our customers, around our colleagues, around our partners, and across the entire business.
The capability we've created will enable us to do that. However, eyes on the first prize, we wanted to harness the data that we had, the insights we could generate, and bring our VIP data in-house to create value for our customers. We want to become more relevant, more personalized, and know everything we can possibly know about the pet and the pet owner, and hopefully, I'm going to show you how we've done that. Creating the team. I've done this two or three times before, created from a blank sheet of paper to something a little bit substantial. The key is to take your incumbent talent because people clearly know a lot about the business you're in, a lot about the data you've got.
They don't necessarily have the technical skills or the latest technology skills to be able to do what you need to be able to do in the 21st century. The first thing was about centralizing our incumbent data talents, and that amounted, I'll talk in years' experience rather than the number of people we've got. About 60 years of pet care experience, knowing our data, knowing how the business ticks, knowing all the foibles and nuance around our data, bring that into one central capability so that they could ramp up the effectiveness of the people we were about to bring into the organization. We did that. We went on a bit of a shopping spree for talent out in the external market to work alongside these guys across the other three areas. First of all, we created an analytics platform with cloud native.
We went out and built a team that knew how to manage cloud, got about 60 years experience about building and managing cloud platforms, and got 200 years experience in digitally native companies and data functions across some of the brands such as BT, dunnhumby, Microsoft, some of the high street banks. We've managed to attract talent from all those. The Hut Group, particularly in the Northwest. We've managed to attract that sort of talent to us to come and help us build that platform where all our data sits. Data science and insight, so understanding the algorithms, the machine learning, the artificial intelligence. You get a right balance of academic pedigree and commercial knowhow. Nearly everyone we've got has come from industry, but they've got a good pedigree in academia, and it's a stats-based subject, so we have people with big brains.
We've got a professor, we've got three PhDs, we've got four masters, and we've got people who just like to churn out algorithms for the work that we do. I'll come on to talk a little bit more about that. Finally, the CRM team. Loyalty personalization is key. It's at the fulcrum of what we're trying to do. We tried to bring in about 50, 60 years worth of experience of running CRM systems, marketing systems, and people who knew how to select audiences that were optimal for what we were going to try and offer them and have the right conversation with those customers. At the backdrop of all this, we're doing a lot of communicating with our customers. We're dealing with a lot of customer data, a lot of colleague data.
Customer privacy, data privacy and data protection is front of mind always. We make sure we're having the right ethical, and permission-based conversation with our customers at all times. I think we've built strength and depth in the team that we've got. I'm a proud dad today because, for the second year running, we've had Young Talent of the Year award presented to us in the data industry. We've had two years running now, our talent's been recognized against the biggest and the best in the U.K. We're not doing too bad. Once you've created a team, you need to give them something to play with. I'm going to talk about our platform.
When we talk about our pet ecosystem, what we're effectively saying is that we need to know about the pet or pets, the pet owner, and their relationship with each part of our group. Like lots of organizations who've got a legacy platform, who've got lots of systems over many years. They'll know about Rob, and I'll be Rob online, and I'll be Rob as I come into store, and I'll be Robert as I go into vets, and I might be R. Kent as I go into groom. We have to create a single customer view to know that there's one Robert Kent, and in my case, this is my dog, Kenny. There's one Kenny. The first thing we had to do was build the asset that formed a single view of the customer, the pet, and the household.
This basically enables us to have and manage that relationship across each of the different channels and products and services across the business. This is real data. It's my data, I don't mind showing it to you. You won't be able to see, but what this tells you is that in our household, we have a single dog. My wife pays for all the vet bills. I pay for the treats. My wife does a bit of shopping in store as well. We know every store that we've been into, what we've bought, we know what dog treats Kenny likes. We know what dog food Kenny likes. We know what treatments Kenny's had. Kenny's a fussy eater. Well, we thought he was a fussy eater. He's actually allergic to nearly every food you can possibly have.
He's had a lot of treatment for food allergies. We know his blood tests. We know when he's been to see a vet, when he hasn't been to see a vet. We know as much of a 360-degree view about Kenny and a little bit about the pet parents in terms of who we talk to. This is how we really personalize the conversation that we have with VIPs like myself. We can tailor whether we're talking to the pet, and we frequently do. We address mail to the pet. We know if we just want to target the household because we know there's multiple VIPs in that household, but we just have one conversation, then we can do that. We can talk to individual VIPs because we know that one VIP spends a lot in store and one VIP spends a lot in vets.
Gives you the real dynamic to have a different type of conversation depending what the relationship is between us and the pet owner. Okay. Where does that get stored? A little bit about the tech. We've gone cloud native. We've been able to leapfrog directly to cloud native. Everything sits in the cloud. As Peter referred to it earlier, we have about 158 billion data points on pet care stored in the cloud. The power, the scale, and the security that the cloud affords us means that we can rebuild our data platform weekly, and it takes us about an hour. We run about quarter of a million queries every period, and every one of them takes less than four seconds. What does that mean? What does that mean in reality?
If we want to go and search through every single basket that's shopped in the last three years and find every basket that's bought a dog treat and a cat collar, then we can go through every single basket and we'll return that result in less than four seconds. If we want to find out every vet customer that doesn't have a health plan but does have flea and worm in store, then we can make sure that when we're targeting people for health plans or flea and worm, we can either remove them or include them, depending on what we want to try and do.
What we don't know about the customer is just as important as what we do know about them, because by inference, we can start to target them for the subscriptions and products and services that we haven't yet managed them to get them to buy. The real key to this in the world of artificial intelligence is that we're allowed to iterate fast. You never get it right. Sophisticated customer insight and artificial intelligence algorithms are never right first time. You have to go through and train and train and train and over again. The platform is no longer a constraining factor in our ability to be able to do that. Yet we can iterate very fast, on a large volume of datasets. As we see fit.
I think the final point I want to make on this is that it's not a linear relationship between the amount of use that we have of our platform and the cost of running it. The chart in the bottom right-hand side is just an indication that given the cloud experience that we've got, we are managing our costs really tightly. We grow our use of the platform every single day, every hour within every single day. Compared to our peer group, we're keeping our costs flat. Again, we keep more than half an eye on the fact that we're doing things sensibly in the cloud, even though that we've almost got infinite capability in what we can actually generate. Once you've got the data and you've got a single customer view and you've got it on a platform, you then need to enrich it.
We've created something called customer DNA. We've taken a profile of every single pet owner that we know about. We've talked in the past quite a lot about the 6.5 million VIP customers. We actually know about just coming up to 8 million pet owners because there are a number of vet customers and a number of online customers that are yet to become VIP, in itself an opportunity. We've taken this just under 8 million customers, and we've run some machine learning across every single one of them to build a profile of up to 300 attributes of what we could know about them. Some of those are definite. We know that you buy this food. We know that you live in this town. We know that you have this type of pet.
More and more, we've worked out the propensity of their likelihood to like something else. Are they likely to take on a subscription? Are they likely to go from bridging food to advanced nutrition? Are they likely to respond to a campaign? Anything that we want to try and predict that we want the customer behavior to entice is that we can come up with some kind of probabilistic model that tells us what's going on. We have that stored, and we recalculate that on a weekly and monthly basis to make sure that it's dynamically up to date with what we can do. This underpins a lot of what we do. Whether we're marketing people, we're making decisions in store, whether we're running supply campaigns and insight for suppliers, we try and use this DNA to underpin most things that we try and do.
Talk about some of our bread and butter. Our campaigns and our marketing throughout the whole life of VIP has been special. It's been rich. It's bread and butter to us and generates a fair bit of return for us. Since we've introduced this new platform, we've been able to increase the velocity of the communications to our pet owners. The communication could be anything. It's not just about offers. We offer advice. We point them to information they should read about, point them to YouTube to look at our pet care channel. We have a regular level of engagement across a range of subjects with each of our pet owners. We've been able to increase the velocity of that. You can see in the last 6 months, we've done over 300 campaigns, over 90 million emails, 10 millions of direct mail.
There's two examples here. One on the left is a direct mail that we personalized to the pet, and it's our plus one. I think we've talked about our plus one model in the ecosystem, trying to nudge customers to take on more services. This is something that we ran to try and encourage people who've just shopped in store to shop online as well. They would've got a 20% discount, and we would've targeted a specific audience for them to try and take on that offer. On the left is what you'd see on an app. In the old world, you'd see one offer, one voucher, and you probably have a stream of six of them. Now we can layer on the offers that are all personalized to your pet, are all relevant to who you are and what you spend.
Again, when you're in store, you're on your phone, you can use the voucher directly when you're at the till. We've seen a significant uplift on some of our campaigns, some of our bread and butter campaigns. We've seen a significant uplift in the response rates. Our more focused targeting has been enable us to get a bigger return from the campaigns we've been sending out, particularly voucher redemption. One of the first things we did to underpin the marketing we send out is to come up with a new level of segmentation of our customers. We've run two types of segmentation. One we call life stage, and one based on transaction. The diagram on the right is very much on the transactional side.
We looked at recency, frequency, monetary segment, we've got much more precision than we used to have in understanding where people sit in each segment and where customers sit in each segment. What we do is we monitor who's moving up and down segments because obviously the growth, we want everyone to be in the top right. We need to move people up the spend levels, and to Peter's point earlier, increase the share of wallet that they spend. The tone of voice we use, the imagery we use, the nature of the communication we use can all be tailored according to which segment we think you sit in. Again, we calculate this dynamically on a regular basis. This isn't static. Our life stage, if you take something like our Puppy and Kitten Scheme, that's a journey.
From the point of signing up, we have a level of engagement with you throughout that puppy and kitten journey, offer you discounts, offer you advice, offer you communications. Our Puppy and Kitten signups, we'll look at the life stage we think you're at. It's purely demographic, geographic and demographic. We'll know whether you're an empty nester, whether you're a young family, whether you live in a particular area of town, whether you live in the country, whether you're a pensioner. Again, it starts to drive the types of decisions we could make around the type of customer you are. Again, we've done that for all of our customer base. I just wanted to dig into a bit of detail about something more specifically done in optimization, and forgive the granular charts here, but I'll try and explain what they are.
One of our bread and butter campaigns is, depending on how much you spend with us on a regular basis, is that we will issue a set of vouchers that will give you some money off and some discounts. We send these about four to six times a year, and each campaign will be about 2 million customers. What we do using AI is that we calculate and we predict what we think you're likely to spend in the next four months. Based on that prediction, we try and stretch your spend with the incentive of the voucher to go to that next level up. What this table tells you to say, we predict that you're going to spend GBP 24 next month. We'll give you GBP 3 off if you spend GBP 30.
The same, we give you GBP 4.50 off if you spend GBP 40. We're trying to nudge you up to that next level of spend. We've run this a couple of times now at a decent scale, what we've found is that for those people that we say receive the voucher and push this threshold, are typically spending twice the basket that someone who should have got the campaign, who didn't, our control group, who didn't get the voucher, they will spend pretty much what we predict. We're managing to double that amount for those people that respond with the voucher. We're particularly excited by this campaign because it's early signs, but it seems to be bearing real fruit. It's a real indication of the type of power that machine learning can have when we put all this data to the test.
Because we're using about 450 different features of customer and pet to try and understand what that looks like. Churn. Sadly, some customers leave us, or look like leaving us, and we try to do something about it. In our world, sometimes churn is sadly the death of a pet, and there's not much we can do about that. We do try and find out which customers are looking like leaving us before they actually leave us. Again, we've done some leading-edge modeling on trying to predict a slight downward trend, a downward tick on customers who've been spending quite a bit with us, and it's started to slow down. Again, on a weekly and monthly basis, we're trying to anticipate who they are, build an audience, send them out an incentive to try and set.
Again, we've run this a couple of times now, decent scale, and the signs are really, really positive, in terms of people responding. More importantly, getting them to buy once with a discount voucher could argue is the easy bit. Getting them to come back a second time and a third time is the real test, and we're seeing up to 2/3 of those customers that respond return for a second and third time. We're now moving that because we think I won't go as far as to say we've cracked it. Well, I will say the early signs are really positive, so we're going to put that onto an always-on campaign. Lifetime value is a big deal for us. In most retail organizations, obviously the lifetime of a customer is trying to base how long are they going to spend some money with you.
To some degree, we're no different. The beauty of what we've got is that we've got a living animal that we need to try and understand how long that pet might be alive for. I think we've talked previously, and the industry and the profession talks broadly that a dog will live between 12 and 15 years. As a rule, that's fine. We've gone far more precise. Our lifetime model looks at breed and looks at age, at the likelihood of how long that pet will be alive for. We can even introduce our understanding of anticipated ailments for that breed to see if that's going to be any shorter. All research to date has been based on samples of 4,000, 5,000 dogs. We've done it on 4 million. What we've got is a lot more precision.
We'll say as an example, labrador, some research would say that a labrador will live for 11.5 years to 12 years. We anticipate they'll live for about 13.5, 14 years. And we can do that by breed, we can do that by practice, we can do that by age, and we know the spend at each one of those granularity. The opportunity here is that for a particular practice, we can almost understand what their likely spend is, given their profile of breed that are actually the clients within that practice. And we've got to test that, but that's the opportunity that we've got with this.
We use it as a blend of what we know about the clinical side of a pet's life with the retail side of a pet's life, and we've got an upper and lower range of how long a pet might live for or how long someone might be a customer for. Clearly our opportunity there is to maximize that for the life of the pet. I just want to move off algorithms slightly. I'm coming to the end. I'm doing all right for time. Same data, same platform, different audience. We're trying to push out as much insight to our stores and to our vets' practices in time, so that they've got enough information and enough insight to make decisions locally and quickly. The two examples I've got up here, and I know you can't read them, that might just be deliberate.
The reason, on the left-hand side, you've seen the contactless delivery. People come up and pull up in their cars. Our store manager will be able to monitor the average wait time that the customer's waiting, and again, take action when that starts to get too long, if it does get too long. On the left-hand side is something we're just starting to roll out into the practices around best pet consult. We're able to see the best preventative measures that we should be taking around the pet. We tell the practice how much of that they've done for the clients that they see, and then we also make recommendations of where there's opportunity of where we're not applying too much preventative treatment to other types of pet or dogs in this case.
There's two examples of where we've generated using the same platform to generate insight out locally to our frontline. Another example we've got, again, it's not necessarily customer-related, is around availability and ranging in store. We've done a lot of work, algorithmic work, around looking at each of the SKUs that we sell and looking at those that have got compliments and those that have got substitutes. Where we can do is that we can, again, be a little bit more precise on the range that we have in each store, and we've even been able to cluster stores. We're not going to have 450 different versions of ranges, but what we've been able to do is cluster stores into like-minded store groups that serve certain populations. They over-index in certain types of product, like own brand, advanced nutrition.
What we can do is we can be a lot smarter about the ranging that we put into store. These are two examples here. Something like puppy chicken food, it has one substitute and 43 complements. People typically spend on 43 other products when they buy this product. Clearly, it's not a great candidate for range optimization because it's such a winner for us. Conversely, something like the dog lead, it's got 16 substitutes. There's many different dog leads. It's got one complement. People don't buy anything else with it, so therefore it makes it a high candidate for optimization, and maybe even removal in certain stores. Again, we've got a lot more focus in what we should or shouldn't have in stores, depending on the population they serve and how successful those SKUs are in terms of being purchased. Okay, last slide.
I've talked a lot about some of the green shoots that we've seen. These are material green shoots. Some of the audience we've gone out to are tens and hundreds of thousands of customers. We've not tested this on 100 customers and said we've declared victory. These have been significant success. We've got to continually refine. Artificial intelligence is about continually training the data and training the model to come up with the right answer. Consumer behavior does sometimes change. You need to be able to react to that. We've got a lot of work to do in terms of refining and establishing a more industrial method to the model so that it's always on everywhere, and then we can move on to the next set of opportunities. Enhancing personalization and enabling the right conversation at the right time.
As I've described, up to 8 million pet owners that we could be talking to across any of our channels at any point in time, they come to us, we go to them. We should be using our intelligence to have the right type of conversation. Could we offer the next best action knowing what type of pet you have, what type of customer you are? We know that when you come online, and Chris is about to talk about our digital opportunity, if you marry the digital opportunities that Chris has just described with the intelligence of what we're doing with the data, you have a real powerful method of having the right conversation with a pet owner at the right time.
I think this is where it offers us a significant runway of what we could be doing, because that's a huge population and a huge knowledge about the pets, that we could be driving a different type of nuance, in the level of engagement that we have with them. Lifetime value, I talked briefly about. That's really exciting for us. We've established what we think the lifetime value is across our customer base. We now need to apply it. We need to find the lookalike customers that we know are typically high spenders and find other people that look like them, then we can either go through our digital channels and make sure the Facebooks and the Googles of the world are either giving us similar customers or excluding people who are customers already for us.
We can start to do our own internal audience segmentation based on lifetime value and what we think we're going to do with them. That's a really important area for us over the coming months and into next year. As I said from the beginning, we've designed a capability to do lots for our colleagues, our partners, our customers. Our cost base is no different in terms of our opportunities, whether it be our supply chain, workforce management, store location, property management. There are lots of different examples where we could be being smarter and applying the data that we have to drive in more optimized decisions in each of those areas. Again, that's an untapped area for us at the moment, but I think there's plenty of opportunity.
Talking of untapped areas, we just wanted to put a couple of blue sky on here that are actually very real in the market, again, just demonstrates where we can play in this space. One telemedicine proposition. Again, in the triaging and the conversation you have with a customer and a pet owner over the phone or online, is that you can use the data that we have, the clinical data we have, married with the retail data that we have, to have a more sensible triage conversation to route them in the right direction. Sometimes that will result in going to see the vet, sometimes that will just put them at ease, that it's not too bad. We think we can play in that space.
Finally, I think this is one I joined on the back of this because I think this is one of the real ethical things that we can do, preventative action that we could take. I know you'll hear from Tania briefly, if we can complement all the brilliance of our vets with some of the artificial intelligence we can generate in terms of identifying and preventing disease, in particular, species or breeds of animal, then again, there's no reason why we shouldn't be playing in that space, sort of thing that Mars have been doing and been looking at, and I think we've got every opportunity to be doing something similar. I hope that makes sense. I'm going to hand over to Chris, who's going to talk to you a little bit about Polestar.
Really, if you're a pet owner like myself, our digital transformation makes it really easy for you to do the things you need to do with us. Whether that's coming in to get an appointment in the vets, or whether you're going to go and take your dog to get a groom, or get the products and service solutions that you need through the shopping channels, our transformation is about bringing all of those things together. Polestar is really the glue that brings this together from a digital perspective for the pet owner, and we're going to bring that to life as we go through the presentation. I think there's two bits just before we start. One is that only we can really do this.
We've got all the unique ingredients to be able to bring this to life and really play to our omni-channel strengths and really dial this up as we go forward. The second point is that this is really a big unlock and enabler for us to take our share of the GBP 600 million opportunity that we're working towards. All of the work that we're doing on the customer experience, the joining the dots for the pet owner, and building out our omni-channel capability, is really all driving towards those things. Introduce Jon.
Hello to everybody again. My name's Jon Carson. I'm Director of Change here, so I have the responsibility for all of our technology and our business change delivery. Background for me is 25 years of change delivery. I come to change both inside organizations and delivering as a kind of consultancy. Most recently, I joined here in 2019, coming from United Utilities, where I led digital strategy planning and change delivery for them. I'll share through this section with Chris.
Brilliant. Thanks, Jon. I'm Chris Holyland. I'm Group Digital Director here at Pets at Home. I've been here for just over six years actually. I've spent the last 20 years in retail, and I've been fortunate enough to have sort of 17 years of that in digital roles. I worked for Dixons Carphone, worked for Walgreens Boots Alliance, more recently at Pets at Home. Really, I'm accountable for the end-to-end user experience. All of the digital touchpoints and how it shows up for customers sits within my team's accountability. Together, Jon and I are going to take you through this session. Polestar is a really big investment for us. We're investing over GBP 20 million in the digital experience. It is about transforming what we've got today, the really important thing is we're building from a really strong position today.
Polestar gives us lots of new capabilities and enablements. That really moves us towards being really pet owner-centric. The good news is we're starting from a really strong position. Polestar, when we first started this initiative, we really focused in on what is the experience we want to create. What does joined up pet care really mean for our customers? How can we make it really easy, really convenient? How can we be there to serve more of their pet care needs and bring everything together under one place? That's really where we started from. We didn't go looking at technology. We didn't go looking at what platform should we look and build and buy and partner with. We started with the experience.
That was really, really important, and very quickly we realized, for us to do this really well, we need to actually look at really bringing together more of a hybrid-build approach with this initiative. We didn't want to go to a big platform. We didn't want to be at the mercy. We wanted the destiny to be in our hands as we went through how we're going to do some of this. You can sort of see today, we move from where we are, focusing on the channels and the experiences, and we really get lots of new capabilities with Polestar. We're going to create this new joined-up pet care experience. We're going to play a short film in a moment that will bring that to life.
We're actually, and most importantly, going to be building our new experiences with an in-house digital capability. Jon will come on and cover that later on. That's really, really important. Coming out of this over the next 18 months, we're going to have a new eCom and subscriptions engine. Really, really important to power a lot of the transactional elements of our experience. We're going to have a new product and content management capability. What's really important as well, we're going to develop a new pet care app experience. Today, you'll know we've got multiple apps. We're going to be bringing those together to create a really strong pet care app that has the pet owner at the center. All of our unique pet care assets all around it. That's a really, really important thing.
Also, by the way, we're going to make it really easy for you to register and sign on. We're going to create new identity experiences for you as a customer. You can register with us once, you can log in once, and you can access all of our pet care services in one way and in one place. That's going to really take us on a journey to become this pet owner-centric organization, and at the heart of that, we want to have a connected ecosystem of products and services. It's really important that we focus in on that. It's not just about the single transaction. It's not just about a subscription. It's about bringing together the whole pet care needs in a joined-up ecosystem. Our customer journeys are going to be really seamless, and they're also going to be really consistently joined up.
That's really, really important. The platform that we're building, to Rob's point earlier, we're going to really have the capability to build lifelong relationships so that we can be there for the customer at the very beginning. We can work with them all the way through their pet ownership, and we can be there to look after them, to give them advice, to give them information, and to serve them all the way through their pet ownership journey. As we go forward as well, using the data at the heart of this, we're going to be able to personalize and have pet-specific conversations. For example, I've got a boxer dog. He's called Charlie. Charlie's actually quite an old boxer dog now. He's 10 .5.
When I first joined, he was obviously a lot younger. Charlie does this really strange thing where he does four little turns on himself before he sits down and lays down. He does it every single day, every single time. I thought, that's really unique. When I sort of Googled it, apparently lots of other pet owners have the same experience as me, where Charlie will do this thing, and apparently it's from historic reasons when they used to be in the snow and they would create a little hole in the snow before they'd lay down. Going forward, knowing all of these things, that what does a 10-year-old boxer need? What does it do? We can actually have a really pet-specific Charlie boxer breed conversation with Chris as the pet owner, and the capability we're going to create is going to give us that.
At the end of this, we will have a pet care platform. We are on the journey of changing over around about 18 months. You'll see things come to life as we go through this transition phase. That gives you a little bit of a flavor of where we're going from and where we're coming to. Now, the next bit, I'm just going to play a short film that aims to bring to life some of the aspects. When we describe what we mean by a joined-up pet care experience, the video that we'll play will bring to life some of those elements. It's not everything we're going to be doing. It will give you a really good indication. I'll just play this. Brilliant.
I hope that sort of brings it to life when we talk about what we mean by a joined-up pet care experience. The interesting thing in all of this is technology and digital plays a really important part, but you can see there it's brought to life by people and customers obviously experiencing it. At the heart of any good user journey or any good experience is UX. User experience is an area that we're really building capability internally on, and every single part of our journey, when we're looking at whether a customer is going to get their first shop, whether they're going to join and sign up to register, or they're going to join one of our clubs like the Puppy and Kitten Club, the user experience sits at the heart.
When they log in, they need to have the kind of anytime, anywhere feeling, so the single sign-on, the capability that we create. When we look at the pricing or the proposition, it has to be affordable and predictable. Also, it has to bring to life things like holistic care when we're thinking about the types of food that you're going to be feeding your pet. The nine principles, every time our team in the background, our UX capability, is building new journeys, they're running everything through the nine design principles to make sure everything matches back. We shouldn't end up creating anything that doesn't really adhere to this. This is really, really important for us. Just an example. The first impressions really count, don't they?
When you're a new pet owner for the first time and you come into one of our Pet Care Centers and you experience the amazing expertise from our colleagues in our retail, our Groom Room, and our Vets, it's really important. That sets the tone for the journey that you're going to then go on as a pet owner. If we're there to help you find the products, to give you the advice, to really nurture and tell you how you can do things, but also be there to sort of support when you want to ask us questions, we can really take you on that journey. When you get a new pet for the first time, there's quite a big, long list of first pet shop that you need to do.
There's also lots of advice you need around a flea treatment or a worming treatment for a cat or a dog. I guess what I'm sort of saying on this is that our user journeys are going to be there to sort of really help you and take you along the journey. Whether you're a new pet owner or an expert pet owner, we'll be able to cater for your pet care needs. Essentially, we're going to be bringing everything together into these experiences. Now, what will customers see over the next 18 months? We're starting with building the foundations at the moment. We've got a lot of work going on in the background. Jon will bring to life the number of people that are working on Polestar for us at the moment.
We've also got lots of really good stuff that's going to be coming to customers soon. New sign-on and registration experiences, creating a single sign-on that will then allow you to access all of our services in one place, in one way. We're also working on an iteration of our current app to bring to life shopping and loyalty and bring all of that together. Really, over the next 18 months, you'll see how our experiences and our journeys make it really easy, really convenient for pet owners to do the things that they need and want to do for their pet. At the heart of this is really the evolution of this experience as opposed to waiting 18 months, and then there's a big reveal. You'll start to see things as customers over the next 18 months as we step towards this.
It's really, really important. We didn't want to have a big bang, kind of the old experience and then the new experience. We wanted to evolve and move towards it. Hopefully that gives you a bit of a flavor. I'm now going to hand over to Jon, who's going to take us through the last part of the presentation. Okay, thanks everyone. Jon?
This is about trying to bring that convenience together. Hopefully, some of these things you'll have seen in the visit across the pet care, just about the convenience for the customer. Things like our click and collect in less than an hour. That is about making sure the customer can get what they want when they need it and in the way that they expect it. Making sure that when I've ordered something, I can go and collect it's there, and it's available for me. Next day and same day delivery from store. Again, accessing what I want when I need it. Joining up that experience so that it's a true kind of omnichannel experience. It doesn't matter. I don't have to just do the store and online. Really powerful, the click and collect. I know everyone's mentioned it.
I'm sure you've seen it when you were over there, but that truly ability to be able to go and drive up, park up, open the boot, have the order delivered into my car. That brings, again, the accessibility to be able to go and the convenience for the customer within our entire omnichannel experience. Really, really important to make sure we join that digital, use that power store network, and give that convenience to our customers. Allowing our colleagues as well to be able to go and do that and be able to give that best experience to our customers. It's about giving them the right information. Robert's talked about the data and the insights and availability of that information that we can really give value to our customers.
Things like our Pet Expert Live, which is in cooperation with Go Instore, which means I can go on the website if I'm struggling through some sort of complex purchase, I want to get a bit of advice and guidance, I can go on, I can talk to those colleagues in store. I can get that information. I can get help through that journey, making sure that I can get what I need, how I need it to be. That's really important, therefore, that we give the right technology to our colleagues in store so that they have access to that information, they can access that in the way that they need to go and access when they need to do that.
Hopefully, again, you've seen in the visit some of the technology that's going into the store and that technology enhancement that is just giving our colleagues that ability to be able to give our customers what they need and what they experience and really joining up that true omnichannel experience. Going a little bit further, actually developing that kind of in-house app development, working alongside our colleagues in store. This one here, I don't know whether you can see the photograph, but this is Blue. He's our store manager in our Liverpool Edge Lane store. We've got a development hub directly in that store. Our developers are there. They're placed in that store. They can go and create the apps, they can test the apps, they can iterate the content there.
What we're doing is we're developing what's needed, what works, and then when we roll it out more broadly, we have it tested, and we can land it really, really well right across our site. Really bringing that kind of digital and that kind of store and that center experience all coming in together. What's really important is actually what we can do is build the ability and the capability to make that a long-lasting capability. We can sustain it. We can build out. We can iterate. We can go from where we are today and continue to sustain it and grow that out. Where are we and the team that we've been building? Over on the left-hand side as you look there, some of the senior leaders, some of the people you've met today, kind of steering and guiding.
Kind of giving those guiding principles, knowing the right direction, knowing where we're heading, being really, really clear about what it is we want to achieve, how we want to go achieve it. In the center there, we've kind of got core delivery leaders. They're a leadership team focused on delivering this. This is their role. This is their focus. They have that core delivery leadership, and that team has been brought together, bringing experiences from where other organizations have done those digital investments, the digital pure plays. There's multi-year experience in there, places coming from boots.com, from Next, from JD Sports, from Boohoo, from bet365. You're getting that experience that's coming together, different sectors, different teams to really be able to go and lead and make sure the way we're set up and continue to set up continues to deliver this and be able to go enhance it.
The scale and the capability to continue to go on delivery. Our delivery squads there built out to be able to go and build this capability, build this capability at scale, build this capability at pace, and build it in a sustainable way. Over 100 colleagues working in the in-house digital capabilities, being able to really bring this true kind of omnichannel capability together, a really lasting platform and power for us. Hopefully what you've heard and what we've run through there, Polestar guiding us towards our kind of digital journey, bringing our true omnichannel experience together, building a long-lasting in-house capability, building that team, building the experiences, building in the right way so it is not just build it for today. It's something that we can sustain, we can scale, and we can work from. It's a new, unique, joined-up pet care experience.
The whole journeys that we can bring our customers through, the convenience that we can buy, the various different channels we join together means that actually that is a truly kind of joined-up pet care experience. It supports all those plans for growth. You've heard the plans for growth. You've seen the plans for growth. This is about having that lasting team, that lasting setup, which means we can support that. All built on best-of-breed technology, which brings those platforms and those stores together. Technology which means we can be agile, we can scale, we can flex, we can develop out, and we can sustain and continue to respond by having those kind of joined-up journeys. I'm going to talk to you about our unique vet model
Why we're so excited really about the headroom for growth that we see there, and how we're going to actually try and grab the opportunity that's in front of us for our jewel in the crown, as Peter's described it. You met Jane Balmain earlier this morning, and hopefully you got to know a little bit about her. What you wouldn't necessarily know is that she actually established the first, the original joint venture partnership model back in 2001, and actually then led the merger of Vets4Pets, or the acquisition rather, of Vets4Pets back in 2013. I met Jane in 2019 when I joined the business, having spent about 20 years of my career in FMCG. In one respect, I'm relatively new to the vet business.
In another respect, I'm married to a vet, so I've sort of lived vicariously through the profession in the last 20+ years. As I say, I'm really excited to talk to you about the growth opportunities that we see in the sector, in our business in particular. To do that, I wanted to provide a bit of context. I think sort of starting from a level playing field so we all understand the same thing is a really good place to start. If we look at our track record, we've got a track record of taking share, and we think that obviously there's a number of reasons that drive that performance over such a long period of time.
Actually, some of the things that really stand out to us are the fact that we've got a unique owner-managed business model, where our joint venture partners really have skin in the game, and that truly came to the fore during the recent pandemic. In addition to that, we're also very aware that, and you've heard it a lot today, about our ecosystem, the joined-up way we work. The vet part of the business really benefits from having a national brand, Pets at Home, Vets4Pets, and also the interaction through an omni-channel shopping experience for our customers and clients. That really helps our model and differentiates us. Importantly, we're the only group that consistently opens from greenfield, and that, we believe, gives us the most headroom for growth in our business. We've built scale.
We currently have over 440 practices across the U.K., and that compares really well whether we're looking at our clinical excellence, our customer revenue, or just the market share across the business. We think that compares really well and stacks up very well against our competitive set. We really expect the maturity profile of our business to continue. We think there's a lot of headroom for us to keep taking market share and to see that take up more than our fair share in that growing segment. Our unique joint venture model, what makes it different? Well, we create a relationship where all parties benefit. It's a capital-light model for us, but actually we share equitably with our joint venture partner throughout the life of our normal practice life cycle.
For the joint venture partner, they take a competitive salary from day one, and of course, when their practice becomes debt-free, they're able to take dividends and take any equity value on exit. Vets4Pets or the Vet Group brings the leverage, the business leverage to the relationship and all of the support services that we provide, whether it be marketing, our people team, our finance team, IT, and we allow then the vet to go on and do what they do best, which is run their vet practice with complete operational and clinical freedom. Vets4Pets receive fees from day 1, so that sort of de-risks us from the early part of the business startup and protects us as the vet partner is building their client base.
Our expectation is that a vet practice will become debt-free within 10 years. All of our financing facilities are set up around that. When we talk about maturity, what we're really talking about is when that practice becomes debt-free. We've got lots and lots of examples where practices have accelerated really quickly through that journey and become debt-free in a much shorter timeframe than our model would suggest. The other thing that's worth calling out is that our company-managed or group-owned practices represent about 10% of our overall first opinion practice footprint. That gives us a really, really good environment to test, develop and learn, and then ultimately roll out those initiatives that are successful into our joint venture business. If we look at the unit economics of our practices versus the competitive set, we think that our model is superior.
If you're a vet that's entrepreneurially minded, then this is a really, really attractive model to you. Of course, the other thing that the model does, because of our long-term relationship with our partners, it actually creates a scenario where the vet is more locked in. Of course, because the vet is the main revenue generator for the overall business model, that gives us more security of income going forward. It also allows the vet to become locally established. It's their business in their local community, and that's really important as you're going to see in a little while when we talk about the long-term relationships that exist between vets and their clients. The other thing that's worth noting is that a vet that opens in one store or even in a standalone practice isn't restricted to staying in that practice.
There's plenty of opportunities for that vet to expand. We refer to it as taking the town, but really what we're talking about is giving the vet the opportunity to establish their business, grow it, and then move outside of their original premises. We have about a 1/3 of our practice base as a standalone premises, and about 2/3 are in-store. The economics of both are pretty equal for us, so we don't really see material outputs different between the two models. They do offer different things, and they do allow us, especially with our standalone practices, to fill in gaps around the country where we don't have a Pet Care Center. I wanted just to set that context, because I think that's really important before we move forward and look at the growth opportunities that we see that exist.
Before I do that, I'm really, really pleased to say that we've actually got a real-life joint venture partner to talk to you here today. I think it'd be really nice for you to hear her journey and her story.
Lovely. Hi, everybody. Thank you for my introduction, thank you guys for inviting me today. This is not my usual forum, not my usual workplace. I'm normally in scrubs, I very rarely wear a dress, let alone heels these days. Thank you for having me. As Jason said, I qualified 20 years ago, I've pretty much worked as a vet all the way through. I've been a joint venture partner for 11 years now. Back in 2010, I got to the point of my career where I'd worked in a fair few different settings, I had worked as an employed vet and also as a self-employed locum. You get to the point where you think, "Well, what next? What's my next career move?" That's when I met Jane, the rest is history.
At the time, Jane also gave me the reassurance that if, for any reason, it just wasn't for me, that there would be a way of removing me from that situation safely, without too much damage to me or to the clinic or to the wider group. For me, it really felt like quite a low-risk, no-brainer, really. I had a young family then, a lovely, very supportive husband, who I still have. Actually, it really felt like it was the right thing to have a go and to see. Again, for me, it was about being taught and mentored and coached and learning all things business that I needed to learn to be a successful partner in the clinic. I really believe it's a very true partnership. It's truly symbiotic, it's synergistic, and it's one based on mutual trust and respect both ways.
If I do my job well, the support office benefits. If the support office do their job well, I benefit, as you've seen from the slide. It's very exciting, by the way. I've been party to all sorts of things today. Partnership, as everyone will know, is not always plain sailing, but I feel always that my opinion is welcomed, heard, and valued, which is really important to me and also reflects my own values in my own clinic. It's very much like being on the London Eye. You've got the support office at the hub supporting all the practices, but we're all in different practices on this same wheel, but all having our own little parties.
We all are part of the same banner, we all are actually quite different in what we might offer, that's, again, something really nice for me as a vet to be able to play to my strengths within my role, as a vet. This picture, it's been edited, I will warn you, I'm actually quite glad because being that we're now on at basically, all the gory pictures have been removed. If any of you want to see the unedited version or any number of photos that live on my phone, I'm more than happy to share. This is basically a reflection of literally a day in the clinic. As a vet, I wear multiple hats.
I can be the geriatrician, the pediatrician, the soft tissue surgeon, the orthopedic surgeon, the dentist, the behaviorist, the counselor, the grief counselor, the undertaker, sadly, as part of the job, all in a day. Clinic life is very fast-paced, very challenging. Not very glamorous. As I say, I spend most of my day in scrubs, with various animals. It can go from what feels very much like a doctor's surgery, and it's all very calm and serene, to what feels more like an accident and emergency center in a heartbeat. Just one phone call, one emergency, and the day can change. I can be consulting and then in theater within half an hour.
It's a very varied pace, and our ethos in our clinic is that we're able to provide excellent cradle-to-grave care for every single one of our patients and their owners, and to support them through the whole journey of the life of their pet. Fixing them, obviously hoping that we keep them happy and healthy most of the time, but fixing them when they're sick and certainly, as I say, saving lives as and when we need to. Some dogs particularly are more prone to being a bit kamikaze than others. The clinic itself, we have multiple consult rooms. We have a dedicated laboratory, a dedicated pharmacy. We have a diagnostics suite where we're able to perform X-rays, ultrasound, endoscopy. We have a sterile surgical theater. We have a non-sterile area to work in.
We have full dentistry, surgical dentistry facilities, separate dog, cat, and rabbit wards, which is super important for their welfare while they're in with us. We have the facilities to isolate any patients that might be infectious and therefore might pose a threat to other pets or to ourselves. The team itself is a very close-knit team. I really think we're in quite a unique position as vets. As I say, we work in a very fast-paced environment that's ever-changing, and we work physically and emotionally very closely as a team. We, being in store, have the real benefit of being able to work with our Pets at Home colleagues as well.
For example, if the grooming parlor, for example, have a dog that they're concerned about, for whatever reason they think something's not quite right with the dog, they'll come and give us a shout, and we can arrange for a consultation to take place for that owner. In the same way, the Pets at Home colleagues, if they're asked anything that they feel is outside of their area of expertise, they'll pop over, and they will also bring people to register at the clinic. In the same way, we will absolutely refer dogs to the grooming parlor. It's not necessarily for fun. Dogs don't choose to go to the hairdresser. They do need to be groomed. Many breeds need to be groomed from a welfare point of view. In the same way, the Pets at Home team are really well-versed in nutrition. They know an awful lot there.
I actually went on the course out of sheer nosiness, and they really do learn a heck of a lot, and it's great to be able to refer the right owners back to them. We work really well with them, and it's just nice to be in a team where there's always somebody, even if you feel like you're on your own. I am really blessed with knowing that there's a whole load of JVPs like me out there that I can just pick the phone up to, I can email, I can meet for a coffee, and we can share experiences, whether that be clinical or business. Then, of course, I've got the support office behind me every step of the way.
I do just want to say that this last two years, as you all know, has been really hellish, and we've been on the frontline from day dot. None of us, as a clinical team, have had a break. Most people haven't had proper holidays this year. It's been incessant and relentless. These guys have led from the top. They have supported us every step of the way. They've put people head and shoulders above profit, and they have made sure that we have felt safe and secure in our workplaces for the entire 18 months, and I'm really grateful for that. Alongside all of that, they've also been doing all this amazing background work, and there are so many other exciting initiatives coming through. There's more work with inclusion and diversity that needs to happen.
There's a lot about becoming greener as a business, and I'm really proud to be part of a company that I genuinely feel leads, it doesn't follow, and that has a really strong moral compass.
Thank you, Tania. I think that's really powerful to hear your perspective. I suppose as Tania's just brought to life, we know that our vets are hugely valuable to the group as a whole. Given that clients and vets form long-term relationships, that creates a really significant cash flow opportunity for us out into the future. Our vets form a really key part of our overall ecosystem as well, because importantly, what they do is they move us away from being a single-service operator. We know that customers or clients that shop across multiple channels become stickier, and they tend to spend more per channel, when they shop across more than one channel. Also, the potential for long-term customer value, as Rob was alluding to earlier on, is significant because remember, we've got 6.6 million VIPs and 1.6 million active vets.
There's a lot of space between those two numbers. It really does provide us a great opportunity to grow into that space. The relationship that hopefully you saw this morning over in Handforth between our vet team on the ground, our retail team, and our grooming team pretty much creates a virtuous circle in terms of offering customers and clients a way to interact with us on a more dynamic basis. I wanted to demonstrate the opportunity for customer lifetime value in a slightly different way. The chart on the left really relates to that recurring revenue that exists between a vet and a client. Of course, it's not only about the same type of treatment year-on- year.
In the early years of owning a pet, you probably will pay for more preventative interventions. Obviously, as the pet matures, you're more likely to have curative interventions required by the vet. The way that the revenue curve changes over time is interesting. The constant is that relationship between the vet and the client. A good indicator of future growth, we think, is the chart on the right. If you look at the average age profile for our clients, we significantly over-index on younger customers and clients in our Vet Group business. That obviously provides a much clearer runway for growth into the future. Interestingly, we know that clients who are under 45 are approximately twice as likely to shop multiple channels, which actually brings us back full circle, effectively, to the virtuous circle across our different parts of our business.
Maturity, I've told you earlier on that actually maturity equals when a practice becomes debt-free, and we've talked previously about the long-term free cash flow opportunity for the business linked to the maturity profile of our practices. Obviously, this is not only driven by adding active clients to each practice, but it's also back to that point I made about the effective curve of the type of spend a client will have. As a pet matures, typically we'll need more curative interventions. They are typically more challenging, more advanced, and therefore typically will be higher revenue drivers. That affects the shape of the revenue curve for each of the practices as well. What's important to say is that we've made really great progress over the last year to 18 months in terms of our long-term targets here.
That's primarily down to the amazing work that our frontline colleagues, both in the vet business, but also our retail teams have done as well. The support officers Tania refers to, our ability to navigate and guide the vets through that last period of time. It demonstrates the resilience, I think, of our model. We're really very much on track to deliver our targeted GBP 60 million free cash flow when our vet estate becomes mature or debt-free. I wanted to very quickly talk about some of the future opportunities that we see out there, and the first one is linked to the client experience. You'll have seen our Project Pathfinder over in the Pet Care Center earlier on today, and clearly Pathfinder is designed to deploy our clinical teams more effectively, more efficiently.
One of the consequences of that is the way that our customers and our teams are interacting, both digitally and in person, and that is becoming really effective. The vets' trusted status gives us the opportunity to point customers and clients to other services and products right there in arm's reach of the client and customer. Tania alluded to the groomer relationship with nutrition. If a vet notices a problem with an animal which requires regular grooming, the groomer is there on site. If one of the solutions to managing that condition is better nutrition or other products in the retail environment, then the retail team are there on site to support the vet. This is this virtuous circle, and we really see that the Pathfinder experience is actually unlocking more and value as we are bringing it to life.
The other thing that we're very conscious of is that clients are now obviously wanting to interact with us pretty much on a 24/7 basis, whether it's in person or digitally. To tackle that, we've integrated our business, The Vet Connection, into our group managed practices. Remember I said we can test and learn in that environment. We've integrated them into our group managed practices and our out-of-hours service as well. We think that there are other opportunities for growth there. Online pharmacy, for example. There's a massive opportunity of clients and customers that don't shop in our shops or visit our vets today, but who are accessing medicines online. That's something that we're really keen to investigate further. The profession and clinical talent. The challenges around recruitment are quite well written in terms of the vet profession at the moment.
There's more going on than that. I think there's a recognition of work-life balance for vets. We're working really hard with the British Veterinary Association to try and understand and tackle the challenges and needs of the modern-day clinician in more detail. We're also investing really heavily in our graduate recruitment program. We're also looking to improve our benefits packages, our remuneration packages, to make sure that we're the employer of choice and the partner of choice. We're also trying to disrupt the employment market as well, trying new ways to attract vets and clinical teams to our businesses, so that whether they be U.K. based or overseas based. We're really focused on our green agenda as well, both in practice and as a group as a whole, obviously.
Actually the way that plays out in practice is about making sure we are reducing our energy consumption by either using air-sourced heating or collecting rainwater, etc. We're also looking at waste management as well, recycling, backhauling waste to DCs, zero to landfill. We're also focused very much on the client, of course. Actually, our partnership with the Woodland Trust for the Pet Memory Scheme, where we're planting trees when clients are bereaved from losing a pet, is a really positive way to help the environment and also have a long-term connection with the client. There's another piece that's pertinent to practices. We're working hard to see how we can unlock some of the challenges around harmful gases like anesthetic gases, reduce the reliance on those without impacting the sort of the level of pet care that we provide.
In summary, I'd say that we really believe that our joined up pet care ecosystem provides significant headroom for growth and long-term customer value. We can see lots of new connection points that exist, and will either enhance or underpin our ecosystem. We're investing in a digital future to be able to mobilize our business so that we can provide clients with the convenience, the speed, the interaction that they want when they want it, without obviously impacting the clinical standards that we hold really dear and the best care for their pets. The final point I'd make is that we are absolutely on track to deliver our target of unlocking GBP 60 million free cash flow from our estate as it matures.
That's it from me, and I'm going to hand over to Mike now, who's going to talk to us about our GBP 600 million opportunity.
Then I'll hand over to Peter to wrap up, and then we'll do Q&A. It's a pretty important slide, and one we shared before, which is how we see a really strong runway of sustainable, high quality growth ahead of us. Hopefully today, what you've heard and what you've seen in the store will help you understand why we are so convinced this is our opportunity ahead. We shared this slide originally back in May, and it shows how we go from GBP 1.4 billion of customer revenue and grow that by GBP 600 million+ to a GBP 2 billion customer revenue business. If we look back over the last five years, we've consistently outgrown the market in terms of market growth. You see the market grown about 3%-4%.
We've grown about 2x that over the last five years, and that's taken us to the GBP 1.4 billion we reported back in May. We have seen a step up in the market. If you like, the market's become supercharged because of the number of new households acquiring a pet, in addition to what we'd normally see as renewal in the market. That 3%-4% market growth rate, we believe will step up between 4% and 5% going forward. Us taking our share of that market will give us that first green bar there. We think 55% of our growth will come from taking our share of a market growing between 4% and 5%.
In addition to that, what we're building in terms of capability, in terms of our digital capability, and how we think about our vet business, you can see we're still planning to outgrow the market by about what we've outgrown in the past. That will take us to GBP 600 million additional customer revenue, but underpinned by a lot of the things you've seen today. We're convinced this is our opportunity. We've got the plans behind it to support it. We're laying in the capability and the capital to deliver that, whether it's our new DC that's going in in Stafford, or the digitization that Chris and Jon talked to you today, or the capability we're unlocking through data and through what we're doing in our vet business. At that point, I'll stop.
I'm sure you've got loads of questions, but Peter will wrap up, and then we're going to go into Q&A.
Firstly, I hope you found today just really insightful to try and bring who Pets at Home is and what we're trying to do and bring it to life. It starts off with, we can't avoid the fact, actually, we're in a market which is a really buoyant, dynamic, exciting market because it's being driven by a structural change of pet ownership. We have to remind ourselves that that's not a one-year bounce. It's here now for the next 12-15 years of an enlarged pet ownership market. The dynamics are incredibly favorable. What we're doing is building a scalable omni-channel platform. Hopefully today you've got some examples of how we're doing that. You've seen it in practice, and you can hear how we're going to continue to build that out.
I think most importantly, what we're trying to do, as I said, is right at the very beginning, we're trying to make pet care really easy and really convenient, because actually by doing so, we remove points of friction. It allows us to grow our share of wallet with customers, quite simply. You've heard today about our vet services business, and it is truly differentiated because it's the way that we do it that really makes a difference. I thought, Tania, you really brought that to life amazingly well. Our business, it's really hard, by the way, being in partnership with 400 people. It's really hard, but it's incredibly rewarding because you can see the dynamics that we build, and it's a real win-win for us, and for the vets, and for our consumers.
I still believe the data capability we're building is probably one of the most exciting things. The level of insight we're building around our customers, and then our ability to leverage an action that I think is truly going to differentiate us because it brings, as a pet owner, and knowing me, and knowing Oscar my cat, and talking to me about Oscar, is the most powerful thing in the world. Our ability to bring that and drive our business, I think puts us up against some of the best in class. We know Oscar. He's five years old. It's his birthday, actually, this month. I know that because Pets at Home sent me a birthday card and a treat for Oscar.
I think we're in such unique place that as we build that out, that just becomes incredibly exciting. The best is still yet to come in this space. Today we've demonstrated how we're transforming our business. We've made enormous inroads in the last three years. Actually, we're going to that next stage now, which is truly moving to best in class by building something which is built for our business in the way that our pet owners want to integrate with us. Again, this builds, I think, a point of capability which we own, and it's something which is absolutely right for our business. More importantly, the capability we're putting in the business allows us to move at pace moving forward. I think that's probably the most exciting thing.
You know we're financially strong and resilient and continue to do so we can execute, and we can make sure that we're building the best pet care business in the world for our customers, but also for our investors. Finally, we are really proud of we run a good business. We have done for 30 years. We're also building a sustainable business. It's a little tiny thing I've just put on top of your bags, which is the poppy. I put that for one very simple thing for you to take away. That was something we launched three years ago. This year, we will have donated GBP 1 million to The Royal British Legion off a poppy, off that poppy.
That just really goes to demonstrate, I think, the benevolence of our pet owners, really understanding our pet owners in such a unique way that they of course want to celebrate in the Poppy Day in a unique way and look at the amount of good we've been able to create. That's a small example of how we really understand our customer base and how we're driving forward.