Petco Health and Wellness Company, Inc. (Petco) is a pet specialty retailer focuses on improving the lives of pets, pet parents, and its own Petco partners.
The company serves its customers as a fully integrated, omnichannel provider of pet products, services, and solutions. Through the company’s ecosystem, it provides its customers with a comprehensive offering of products and services to fulfill all their pets’ needs through its pet care centers in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, its digital channe...
Petco Health and Wellness Company, Inc. (Petco) is a pet specialty retailer focuses on improving the lives of pets, pet parents, and its own Petco partners.
The company serves its customers as a fully integrated, omnichannel provider of pet products, services, and solutions. Through the company’s ecosystem, it provides its customers with a comprehensive offering of products and services to fulfill all their pets’ needs through its pet care centers in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, its digital channel, and the company’s flexible fulfillment options. The company also operates pet care centers in Mexico and Chile through a joint venture.
The company’s product offering leverages a broad assortment of national, owned brand, and exclusive merchandise, providing customers with a wide variety of nutritional options at a wide range of price points, including health-focused options free from artificial ingredients, complemented by a wide variety of pet care supplies and companion animals. While the company offers pet parents a full spectrum of product choices, it maintains a number of premium products to address ongoing humanization and premiumization trends in the market. In addition, the company’s owned product assortment, such as WholeHearted, Reddy, and Well & Good, serves as a significant driver of sales, customer loyalty, and repeat purchasing and was a meaningful contributor to enterprise sales in fiscal 2024.
The company integrates its product offering with its services business, building on the foundation of treating the whole pet, including their physical, mental, and social well-being. The company’s service offering includes veterinary care, grooming, and training. Leveraging the company’s experience in Vetco mobile clinics, it operates a network of full service, general practice veterinary hospitals complemented by prescription and insurance offerings. As of February 1, 2025, the company had full service veterinary hospitals in its network and operated Vetco clinics on a weekly basis. By integrating the company’s veterinary hospitals into existing pet care centers, it benefits from certain structural advantages compared to stand-alone veterinary care providers, such as additional basket opportunities (including further tapping into the prescription food and drug market).
The company’s multichannel, go-to-market strategy integrates its digital assets with its nationwide physical footprint to meet the needs of pet parents who are looking for a single source for all their pet’s needs. Petco.com, its e-commerce site, and the Petco app, the company’s personalized mobile app, together serve as hubs for pet parents to book appointments and manage all their pets’ needs, while enabling them to shop wherever, whenever, and however they want. Through the company’s connected platform, it offers its customers the convenience of repeat delivery, buy online and pick up in store (‘BOPUS’), curbside pick-up, same day delivery, and ship from store. Further enhancing the customer experience, the company’s over 26,000 knowledgeable, passionate partners in its pet care centers provide important high-quality advice to the company’s customers.
The full value of the company’s ecosystem can be realized through its Vital Care membership program, which has a two-tiered offering—Vital Care Core, the company’s free membership tier, and Vital Care Premier, its paid membership tier. Sitting at the intersection of value and loyalty, Vital Care Premier makes it easier and more affordable for pet parents to care for their pets and links pet parents with the company’s merchandise and services offerings, while Vital Care Core provides pet parents with a suite of loyalty offerings. Vital Care is the foundation of the company’s customer-centric model, serving as a driver of repeat visits and engagement.
Marketing and Advertising
In fiscal 2024, the company continued to evolve its marketing and media strategy, growing the company’s in-house retail media network to enable advertising activities across paid and owned channels, and enhancing its search engine optimization capabilities through the launch of the company’s in-house content hub. The company’s marketing efforts leverage its integrated ecosystem and competitive positioning to drive customer acquisition, monetization, and retention. The company also utilizes personalization technology to provide relevant content to its first-party customers.
Distribution
The company has seven primary and two regional distribution centers in its network, which are in various parts of the United States, that handle almost all distribution for the company. In addition, the company’s ship-from-store, same day delivery, BOPUS, and curbside programs enhance its distribution network, affording the company the opportunity to utilize its pet care centers as micro-distribution centers.
Vendor Arrangements
In fiscal 2024, the company purchased merchandise from approximately 650 vendors. The company’s top 10 vendors represented approximately 41% of its annual sales, and no single vendor accounted for more than 9% of the company’s sales. In addition, the company only sells the products it carries directly to consumers and primarily purchase the company’s products directly from its vendors rather than through third-party distributors. The company’s policy is to onboard its vendors using a standardized process to confirm their adherence to the company’s applicable standards, policies, and procedures, including those relating to legal compliance, standard payment terms, and product quality. These relationships are typically governed by the company’s standard vendor terms and conditions, under which it submits purchase orders to the company’s vendors specifying the types, quantities, and agreed prices for merchandise that it intends to purchase from them. The company’s terms and conditions do not have a set term, but instead allows it to terminate the relationship for convenience at any time upon written notice to the vendor.
Petco Love
Petco Love is a nonprofit organization changing lives by making communities and pet families closer, stronger, and healthier. It is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization supported by contributions from the company, Petco customers, corporate partners, and individual donors. Through the Think Adoption First program, Petco Love partners with the company’s pet care centers and animal welfare organizations across the country to increase pet adoptions, helping nearly 7 million pets to date find their new loving families.
In April 2021, Petco Love launched Petco Love Lost, a national lost and found pet database that uses image recognition technology to help reunite lost pets with their families should they ever go missing. As of February 1, 2025, more than 3,000 animal welfare organizations and pet industry partners across the U.S. utilize the platform, and Petco Love Lost has helped return over 100,000 pets to their loving homes.
Launched in August 2021, Petco Love’s Vaccinated and Loved initiative provides free pet vaccines to its partners. 3.2 million vaccines have been distributed towards a commitment of 4 million. Providing these much-needed vaccinations in under-resourced communities is something Petco Love believes gives more pets the best chance to live long and healthy lives.
Trademarks and Other Intellectual Property
The company owns a number of trademarks that has been registered, or for which registration applications are pending, in the United States and certain foreign jurisdictions. These trademarks include Bond & Co., EveryYay, Good 2 Go, Good Lovin’, Harmony, Imagitarium, Leaps & Bounds, Petco, Petco Love, Petco Park, PetCoach, Reddy, Ruff & Mews, So Phresh, Vetco, Well & Good, Where the Pets Go, WholeHearted, You & Me, Youly, Vital Care Core, and Vital Care Premier.
Government Regulation
The company’s operations, including its owned brand manufacturing outsourcing partners, are subject to regulation by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (‘OSHA’), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (‘FDA’), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (‘USDA’), the Drug Enforcement Administration (‘DEA’), and by various other federal, state, local, and foreign authorities regarding the sale, processing, packaging, storage, distribution, advertising, labeling, and import of its products, including food safety standards.
All veterinarians practicing in the company’s animal wellness centers are required to maintain valid state licenses to practice and veterinarians practicing in the company’s full-service hospitals are required to maintain valid licenses with the DEA.
History
Petco Health and Wellness Company, Inc. was founded in 1965. The company was incorporated in 2015.