Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our interim results call. I'm Lyssa McGowan, CEO, and I'm here with Mike Iddon, our CFO. I'm delighted to report that we've enjoyed a strong first half, and I hope you've had the chance to listen to our recorded presentation, which includes my impressions after my first six months as CEO and our vision to build a customer-centric, omni-channel pet care ecosystem. Before we move to taking your questions, I just wanted to share a few highlights with you. Our performance over the first half of the year has been strong, and we continue to grow our customer base, to grow our business, and to grow our like-for-likes across all channels. In a difficult environment, we have reported 7% growth in sales, with our Q1 performance improving on an already strong Q1. We have welcomed many more pets and pet owners into our ecosystem, we're seeing record numbers in recent months, averaging 29,000 sign-ups a week to our Puppy & Kitten club. That's three times the pre-pandemic average. Our vets have continued to deliver sales momentum, with 7% growth in vet practice sales, again fueled by strong new customer recruitment, averaging almost 9,000 registrations a week. Subscriptions continued to grow strongly, increasing the predictability of our revenues, now reaching GBP 135 million in annual recurring revenue. Good cost control has seen profits land where we expected, albeit with PBT down GBP 50 million-GBP 59.2 million due to the already flagged increases in energy, freight, and our digital expenditure. This is as expected, we have the confidence to confirm guidance for the full-year at GBP 131 million of PBT. Our confidence in the business, together with our strong net cash balance sheet, also allow us to increase the dividend by 5% to GBP 4.5 at the interim stage. It's been a busy first half from my perspective as I've taken on the CEO role, and my priorities in the first six months have been to spend time really getting to know and understand the business from the bottom up and to build a deep understanding of our customers and to begin to position the business to make the most of the fantastic opportunity we have ahead of us. My early impression is that this is a business with distinctive strengths and compelling competitive advantages. We are a clear leader in a structurally growing market with a uniquely strong store portfolio and building digital capabilities supported and underpinned by passionate and skilled colleagues and partners. My track record is in building consumer-centric, digitally capable platforms, and the main change I've made in the first half is to reorganize our teams to simplify and streamline the organization and enable the business to better serve and focus on our customers and on the front line. This includes the creation of a Chief Consumer Officer role to lead the focus. As you'd expect, I've also spent time looking at our major projects and strategic initiatives such as Spice and Polestar, ensuring they have what they need to land well and deliver what we want them to. To conclude, it's been an eventful first half against a challenging backdrop for many of our customers. Our industry is a defensive one, benefiting from structural growth trends, and our business is well-positioned to capitalize on this growth, as you can see in our results. It really is a privilege to lead such a fantastic business, and in my first six months, I've reinforced the size of the opportunity we have in front of us. I'm more excited than ever to deliver our goal of a truly customer-centric, omni-channel pet care ecosystem. With that, we're ready to take your questions. If you would like to ask a question or make a contribution on today's call, please press star one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star two. Please ensure your lines are unmuted locally as you will be advised when to ask your question. The first question comes from the line of Jonathan Pritchard from Peel Hunt. Please go ahead. Thank you and morning all. Sort of two, if I may. Firstly, lots of in-inflation about, especially in food, but in general. Where do you think your price position relative to the competition has settled? I mean, I know it only settles for seconds on end, but where do you think you are? Has it improved? Has it stayed the same? Are you happy with it? Looking out second half and into FY 2024, are you baking in any form of sort of better consumer outlook, any sort of more confidence in discretionary items? Is that part of your thinking behind those guided forecasts? Thank you for those questions. I'll take the first one and I'll let Mike answer the second. Our price position is very important to us. We've always said that we will never let price be a reason for consumers not to shop with us. We've been able to maintain a competitive price position throughout the first half, and I think you see that reflected in our really strong customer growth. We do offer price points right across the architecture. We have over 10,000 products, and it's important to us that we have everything from entry level right up to very Advanced Nutrition and premium accessories. We've definitely been able to maintain that architecture, we haven't seen any evidence of customers trading down through that. One area of real strength in that price architecture is our own label, where customers can save up to 25% versus a branded product. Our recent campaign on Switch and Save has been very successful on that. That's a really good outcome because the customer saves money. We make the same, if not slightly better cash margin, and then they're locked into our ecosystem because obviously those are exclusive brands. We've got a particularly strong price position at the moment versus Tesco, partly because of their well-publicized withdrawal of some products. We also price compare versus Zooplus and Amazon, and we're very comfortable with where we stand on that price. Mike, do you want to take the second question? Yeah. I think the second question, Jonathan, was about how we saw second half sales, particularly discretionary, and then our thinking on how that might shape up in FY 2024. I mean, yes, just to look back first. I mean, across the half, you know, we saw really good growth in our food business, 14%. We did see a decline in our accessories business, which we planned at -4%. If you dig into that, the second quarter for us was better than the first quarter. Our like-for-likes picked up. Actually, the last period of the half was our best growth period of the entire half. We've got a strong tailwind going into the, into the second half of the year. Big changes actually between the first half and second half. Accessories did pick up, you know, and discretionary accessories did pick up. We've always seen growth in what we call commodity accessories. That's about a third of what we sell, particularly non-discretionary, things like cat litter, things like health and hygiene. And we saw volume growth there as well. But the discretionary side did pick up in the second quarter. Since the end of the half, which was 13th of October, we've had Halloween, and then we've had Christmas. Those ranges, which are clearly discretionary, are selling really well. I think we know when we've got affordable products, that, you know, well-priced, good availability, that customers engage in, we'll sell the product regardless of whether it's discretionary or not. Clearly, as we head into next year, as Lyssa's just been saying, you know, we've got a big focus on affordability and making pet care affordable. Therefore our own label in particular will be really important to us as we head into next year. You know, our own label food, typically 25% cheaper than the branded equivalents. Likewise, you know, a big focus on making our accessories affordable for customers. We recognize there is going to be a significant tightening of the consumer belt, we do think pet care in particular is very resilient. You know, got to remember 75% of what we sell in total across pet and retail is non-discretionary. We're well set up to deal with that, we will continue to make sure we're competitive across everything we sell. The next question comes from the line of Wayne Brown from Liberum. Please go ahead. Morning. Just following on from that last question, it's quite difficult to understand the defensive comments or the defensive nature of the business if we don't put like-for-like sales into the context of price and volume. Obviously, accessories versus food. If you can just give us what inflation you're seeing within those subcategories and then how volume's actually compared. If pricing was obviously put through during the period, then one would expect like-for-like sales to have been better in the latter period rather than the former. Just trying to understand that dynamic better. And then, with regards to inflation within the food chain, how long do you think does it take for inflation to food through into your end products from feed inflation and the raw materials at source? Thank you. Mike, do you want to take those? Thanks, Wayne. This splits out similar to what we did actually when we explained our quarter one. For the half, our 14% like-for-like growth in food splits 9% pricing, 5% volume growth. Very pleasing to see volume growth. You know, pretty consistent what we saw in the first quarter. Commodity accessories, that's about a third of our accessories. The total like-for-like there was 7%. 4% is volume, 3% is pricing. In our discretionary accessories, which were -8.8%, pretty much all of that actually is volume. Okay. Very helpful. Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Michael Benedict from Berenberg. Please go. What happened to the second question? Oh, sorry. Please go ahead. Do you have another question? Second question about. Sorry, yes. Yeah, just from a cost inflation perspective of when feed cost inflation feeds through, what's the lag that you see in the end pricing of the products? Mike, do you want to take that? Well, pretty much straight away. Manufacturers are pretty keen to pass it on, as you imagine. So that's pretty much the negotiation we have with our supplier base. I think while we've got volume growth, obviously we've got a good lever there because volume growth is very helpful to suppliers, creates value in their supply chains through operational leverage. Part of that negotiation is we get growth in our volume, we go back, capture the value we create in the supplier base, which helps us negate the cost price increases that they wish to put through. That's the virtuous circle that we're trying to create there. Yeah, manufacturers are very keen, as you'd imagine, to pass on cost prices really quick. Sorry, one last follow-up. Are there any concerns around security of supply for next year? Or that the cost of supply is going to increase necessarily from what you can see in the market at the moment, certainly considering what's going on in Europe with the pressures on farmers by new climate change regulations. Don't really see much change there, Wayne, you know, from this year to next. Something we're looking at all the time, you know, securing both our own label and with the brands. You know, it's something on our watch list, clearly. So far, actually, availability of product in the, certainly in the second quarter year-over-year is actually better for us. If you remember this time last year, there was quite a lot of supply chain disruption, mainly caused by the availability of the truck drivers for suppliers actually, as much as the product. We've certainly got a little bit more stock year-over-year, and that's helping us through to see better availability, which is helping drive better sales. Great. Thank you very much. The next question comes from the line of Michael Benedict from Berenberg. Please go ahead. Morning, all. Thanks very much for taking my questions. I have three if that's okay. Firstly, on the gross margin, I wondered if you could break down the various moving parts over H2 and broadly where you expect it to land for the full-year. Inventory is my second question. That's well up year-on-year, but I appreciate there were supply chain issues in the prior year. Just wanted to check in on how happy you are with the quality of that inventory position. Lastly, I think you mentioned in the presentation that you expect GBP 30 million of investment to be expensed this year. I wondered directionally where you think that will be next year. Thank you. Thank you. I'll take the second of those, and I'll let Mike answer on the growth margin and the expense of the investment. Yeah, as Mike said, we're happy with our inventory position. Availability is a really strong and important KPI in our business, 'cause where we've got product on the shelves, we're able to sell it. I think we're very happy both with the quality and the quantity of the inventory we're holding. One change in investment that we've made in the business is a demand and forecasting tool, which is now live in most or some of our estate we're rolling out to the rest, and that will enable us to even more precisely kind of pinpoint stock from our DCs into our stores. Happy with the inventory position and that much better improvement year on year. Mike, do you want to take the gross margin and the investment question? Yeah. Yeah. On the gross margin, we actually have a bridge in the investor deck, which we posted up on the website this morning. That does show gross margin in the first half year-over-year. Last year, 48.7%. It drops 123 basis points to 47.5%. The sort of two we split it between retail and vet group. Yeah. Quickly on the vet group, what we see there is expanding gross margin, completely consistent with the structural growth. We've seen revenues on a fairly fixed cost base. That, we'll expect that to continue, and that should continue into next year. In retail, we pull out three impacts. The biggest one of which is product mix. Product mix is 147 basis points. There's two or three things happening there. The first is we've got a really fast growing food business. So participation of food in total sales mix, about 4 percentage points higher year on year. That in itself, because food has a slightly lower gross margin than accessories, will drive in a mix impact. Will be obviously more cash, mix impact when you look at percentage. Then within our products, you know, a couple of things I've called out already in accessories, you know, our commodities accessories is seeing good growth. Discretionary, which is a higher percentage margin, is in decline, so that also goes into product mix. In food, whilst all of our food categories have been growing significantly, contributing to that 14% growth, grocery, as we welcome some new customers into the business, it's been growing slightly faster, and that's got a slightly lower gross margin. All of those feed into product mix. The other two points we've got in there is freight. You know, we call that out on the front page of the RNS. Freight cost year-over-year, GBP 4 million, that's 49 basis points. We'd expect going into next year that freight to come back quite a lot actually. Both the freight rates have really come off their peaks, so that's very much a this year's impact as we go into next year, although it will still hit us in the second half. Finally, foreign exchange on there, which is a positive for us, you know, we've hedged down all of this year's FX. As we look into next year, you know, clearly cable's weakened. We call out in the RNS. We've got about 50% of our next year's requirement at about $1.17. That compares to $1.34 this year. Going into next year, you'd expect the FX to come back unmitigated, then we'd look to see how we can mitigate some of that. That would impact our gross margin. As we look at the second half, mix will continue. Freight will have an impact into next year. Freight will drop away. Mix will probably even itself out. FX will be a bigger feature. We'd expect gross margins in the vet group to continue to expand as we grow revenues. I think the third question was around digital and the, you know, what we're expensing. Obviously we've fully embraced now the clarification on the accounting standard that requires us to expense digital investment. You know, even though that digital investment's got enduring benefit to the business, you know, we're building real capability. We're probably at peak build at the moment in Polestar. This year is peak investment. The accounting standard requires us to expense that. Yeah. This year, GBP 30 million, next year will be lower. It'll go down because we're going through the peak this year. We will continue to expense through the P&L in line with the accounting requirements, the investments we're making in digital as we build out our capability, but it will go down next year. That's great. Thanks very much. The next question comes from the line of Adam Tomlinson from Liberum. Please go ahead. Morning. Three follow-ups from me, please. First of all, just in terms of customer behavior, I think you've covered a few points there, but when you talk about particularly new customers coming in, spending more on grocery, can you maybe just talk about where you think you might be acquiring those customers from, and as they come in and spend on grocery, you mentioned no trading down, but are you seeing the new customers? Is there a greater percentage to those now spending on grocery versus Advanced Nutrition, for example, that you might have seen in the past, given the tough conditions for the consumer? Second question is, you talk about structural growth drivers, I think, you know, the consensus was the pet population over COVID increased about 8%-10%. I think, you know, within the market, it's often talked about that sort of barbell spend, people overspend in the early years and then that sort of plateaus out until the later years. Just how much of a tailwind do you think there still is from that pet population increase that you saw during COVID and how much of that has sort of fallen off? The third question is around the cost base. I'm thinking a bit more on the retail side here. You mentioned the FX headwinds, energy going up, labor as well. We've seen some big increases there. Perhaps, you know, freight coming back and other efficiencies perhaps helping to mitigate some of that, but just in terms of the overall retail cost base, how that sort of compares in when you look to FY 2024 versus the current year. Thanks very much. Thanks. I'll take the first two of those and then Mike will pick up on the third. Generally, and I'll come to grocery, generally customer behavior is robust. We've seen no material change from what we talked about at the end of Q1. In fact, probably a sort of a bit of an acceleration through accessories through Christmas and Halloween. I'll just talk to the vets because the customer behavior there is really solid. There's a few leading indicators we can look at for changes in vet behavior. A mix of curative care versus preventative, where customers are leaving it longer to take their pet to the vet. An increase, unfortunately, in euthanasia, a decrease in vaccination rates, a sort of cancellation of care plans. We're not seeing any of those. I think the customer behavior in the vet part of the business is absolutely rock solid. In terms of retail, again, I mean, Mike outlined the trading shape and we are seeing those. That is a really sort of strong, solid set of trends. We are attracting more customers into grocery, particularly in the last kind of couple of quarters, where Tesco in particular have been in dispute with some suppliers. That's definitely been a tailwind, but that's always been where we've attracted new customers into the business. We've always had a strong track record of laddering customers up through grocery, through step up and bridging brands, which are growing very well, and then into Advanced Nutrition, which continues to grow well, particularly in scientific and particularly in our own brands versus the branded suppliers. We see the attraction of customers into the grocery from the grocery sector as a real future tailwind in our business as we're able to trade them up. We're seeing signs already that that's the case, and we're not seeing signs in the other direction where our Advanced Nutrition customers are trading down into grocery. All of that growth is fueled by, largely by new customers. A really strong set of trends there. In terms of the structural growth, we've talked in the past about premiumization, and humanization as being two really strong tailwinds. We've also talked about a COVID boom in terms of pet penetration and the 12 to 15-year life cycle that sits off the back of that. I think we are now confident to say that that's no longer a moment in time and a COVID tailwind. It's actually a new third trend joining premiumization, humanization, and we're calling it penetration, which is just the propensity of households to take on a pet. If they've already got a pet, to take on a second, third or fourth pet. We're definitely seeing evidence of that. It's across a number of demographics. It's, you know, particularly younger people who maybe are delaying families and are having a pet before or instead of children. It's families that maybe couldn't afford a pet during COVID because the prices were significantly elevated. Largely, we attribute it to changes in lifestyles as people are working from home more. Whereas a pet may have been something that they couldn't have considered previously, it's something they're now considering. Getting a pet is actually a pretty considered decision for most households. It's not something that they do lightly. The fact that we're still seeing puppy and kitten numbers at 29,000, that's higher than during the peak of the pandemic, and it's high, three times higher than pre-COVID, suggests that, you know, while we talked a lot about this 12-15 year timeline on the COVID boom, it wasn't a COVID boom at all. It was a structural step up in pet penetration into households in the U.K.. We don't see that changing at all. We think that is a third tailwind now powering our business. Mike, do you want to talk about our retail cost base? Yeah. I think Jonathan, sorry, Adam, I think the thing to think about on retail cost base is we've always had, we are really tight operational grip on our costs. That's been the case looking back, will be the case as we go forward. I look at sort of three or four components of our costs. Rents, it's the second biggest cost in the retail cost base. Our rent bill is GBP 80 million. You know, we've had a really good program, of success at getting our rents down, typically 45-50 leases a year. We've been getting where we've got rent reductions there 20%-25%. That's continuing, and we expect that to continue into the future. Store payroll is our biggest cost in the P&L. Clearly, you know, National Living Wage increases going into next year, that will be GBP 10.42, it's in the Autumn Statement. You know, we actually pay slightly higher than the National Living Wage, which is a good thing. Plus, give our colleagues the opportunity to earn above as they train through. We've got a big focus on store labor productivity. We put a lot of technology into our stores to enable our colleagues to spend less time on non-customer facing tasks and remove quite a bit of admin task out of stores, as increasingly we want to free our colleagues up to serve customers. That will make our payroll more efficient. If you look at our, this year revenue per payroll hour, actually in stores, that's actually stepped up, as you'd expect with the investment we made in technology. I think the third one to pick on is distribution. At the moment, we're managing our distribution out of three DCs, Northampton, Stoke, and we've got a satellite DC for Stoke. You know, Spice will transform that. The new staff at DC comes on stream spring, summer next year, delivering to stores, and then we'll get all of our online business in there as we go through next year. That's gonna really step change operational costs, in terms of distribution, create a lot more efficiency, but also, of course, reduce our working capital as well. That's coming through. I guess the fourth one I'd look at is energy. You know, I mean, energy costs, you know, not unique to us, but our energy cost this year will be GBP 22 million. It was GBP 8.5 million last year on an apple-to-apple basis. You know, we put a big focus on trying to reduce the amount of energy we use. Great example will be, and it's in our capital plan, you know, we're gonna spend GBP 3 million putting solar panels on the roof of our new DC. Effectively, that'll make that DC self-sufficient in energy. Really good payback there as well. Those are the things we can do to manage energy costs. Hopefully that was helpful. Yeah, thanks very much. Just to follow up on a couple of points you made there. On the vet side of things, you mentioned almost 9,000 new customers a week there. Can you just remind us what that compares to versus pre-pandemic and how much you think you might be benefiting from potentially the independent sector there struggling? Just on, you made the point about you think that the propensity for people to buy a new pet or add a third or fourth pet is now a sort of permanent feature. Is that from your data or anything you're seeing in terms of market data you've been able to look at? Thanks. Mike, do you want to take the vet question? Yeah. You, you're quite right to highlight, you know, we've got a step up in new client registrations, so, 8,800 a week. That is up from pre-pandemic levels. It's actually up from last year. Last year, we did 8,500 a week. I think the thing to remember about our vet business is we still got capacity in there to take on new clients. You know, we still have, you know, over 60%. There's a helpful slide in our presentation deck that breaks this out. We still have over 60% of our practices still building, establishing themselves, so still less than eight years, nine years old, with the capacity to take on new clients. I guess the other feature of our vet business was that mainly through the pandemic, we stayed open, and they're able to take on more clients. I think that combination of capacity, the joint venture model, the owner-driver, makes our business capable of taking on more clients. We see that trend, obviously continuing. Over to Lyssa. Yeah. Just on that as well, it sort of supports the penetration trend. We talk about new client registrations, which is humans. If an existing human takes on a new pet, that counts, doesn't count in that number. Actually we're seeing new pet registrations with our vets accelerate ahead of our new client registrations, which is one of the data points that gives confidence that penetration is going up, and particularly amongst our engaged customers. Yeah, our view that this is a permanent trend is a combination of our own data of course and our own trading, but also the customer research we do, the insights into our customers and segmentations, which suggests that these are underlying trends that are gonna continue. Thank you. Okay, thanks. The next question comes from the line of Simon Bowler from Numis. Please go ahead. Good morning. Two, maybe three for myself. I'll take them one at a time. Firstly, can you comment on what you're seeing and perhaps expecting in terms of kind of pricing both in food and accessories, as we kind of look into 2023? Kind of perhaps within that, how you think about kind of managing any FX headwinds. Do you typically look to hold percentage gross margin or do you take that on the chin? Okay. Thanks for that. I think, to your question on gross margin, there's a real focus obviously on gross margin percentage. In a non-inflationary environment that makes sense. I think as we move forward in a very high inflationary environment, we have the ability to pass on sort of cash increases, and we've proved that we've been able to do that over the last year and year and a half quite successfully, particularly in food, without taking a margin, as it were, on the increase. I wouldn't focus too heavily on our gross margin percentage going forward. I think our cash margin, which we will hold firm on, is a better indicator. So far, we have a good track record of being able to pass through that pricing, and we expect to be able to continue to do so. As Mike said earlier, you know, our growth, our scale, our relationships with suppliers mean that we are definitely in a good position on all of that, including actually our sourcing office in China or in Hong Kong, which enables us to source very effectively from the Far East as well. Mike, do you wanna comment specifically on the FX please? Yeah. I mean, you're right to call that out, Simon, because this year, you know, as we say in the RNS, you know, we've got our exchange rate at 1.34. Next year, we secured 50% at 1.17. Unmitigated every cent based on us buying $100 million is about GBP 600,000. Clearly in the past we have done things to try and mitigate that. You know, we can do things on pricing to some extent, and we can look at where we source from and move to more near shore sourcing. I think the overriding thing we're trying to achieve is affordability and price competitiveness. Clearly in the market we're in, that's really important as we head into next year, particularly on those accessory lines, you know, where we know that, you know, those price points make a big difference to customers. We will not try and pass on price if it risks us being uncompetitive, but clearly we'll be looking to see what we can do to mitigate some of that foreign exchange. It's right to call out. Look, you know, if we do end up at 1.17 full-year versus 1.34, you know, that gap for us is worth, what, GBP 10 million, GBP 11 million, GBP 12 million. Well, in the sense that- Okay. Sorry, I was gonna say anything kind of in terms of kind of expectations on kind of pricing for next year on food or accessories? Mike, do you want to take that one? I mean, overriding thing, Simon, across all of this is being price competitive. We, you know, we're trying to keep three KPIs sort of in attention there. First of all is our gross margin percent. Clearly, our commercial team very focused on gross margin percent. Notwithstanding Lyssa's point around, you know, actually cash margin matters more, but percentages is clearly one of the KPIs our commercial team manage too. Second, obviously, is like-for-like sales growth. Keeping our business in growth, you know, we know that makes good sense to us in terms of the efficiency of the business operational leverage, like-for-like sales growth and taking market share. Obviously the third one is being price competitive. You know, those, you know, our trading meetings each week, our price position, our like-for-like growth and our gross margin percent are those three KPIs. You know, we've gotta keep in the right place. So far this year, we've made good progress there, but we won't become uncompetitive on price at the risk of, you know, of chasing a higher percentage margin. That's the key point. Mm-hmm. Okay. The second I just wanted to touch on was, you've mentioned kind of the sequential improvement in discretionary accessories. It doesn't kind of feel like consumers sequentially kind of got better. Just wondering what do you think has kind of driven that other than kind of changing your trading stance? Is there kind of some self-help efforts that have gone into supporting that? Kind of along similar lines, just on the grocery side of the food, are you kind of leaning into that opportunity through kind of range expansion and working closer with some of those third-party brands, in that part of the business? Thanks, Simon. On the discretionary accessories, I think there's a few things. One is, you know, we've traded well, our traders are on top of that day in, day out. Secondly, availability has been stronger. I talked earlier in the call about how availability is a big driver for our business and on certain elements more in our consumables actually. Things like puppy pads and hay and cat litter, we've had better availability in the 2nd quarter. Mostly actually it's the quality of our accessories range, we're not a particularly seasonal business. Halloween was really strong. We did a big push on Halloween this year, my dog Fred definitely enjoyed his pumpkin costume. Over the kind of the general, all of our stores saw a really good response to Halloween and great ranges. Christmas has started really strongly. We're slightly ahead on our sell through of Christmas. I told you that we have sold almost 100,000 purple spotted dinosaur dog toys, I think you might be surprised. We're definitely seeing, you know, customers respond really well to Christmas. It's not a particularly expensive thing to buy a dog toy at GBP 5 or GBP 10. You know, when times are tough and the press is reporting all sorts of bad news, I think just that ability to walk into a Pets at Home and treat the pet, the companion that loves you more than anyone, is definitely something that our customers are responding to. In terms of food, yeah, we're always looking at range expansion, customer needs, humanization, premiumization continuing to evolve. As I said, our bridging, we've got an own brand in our bridging area. That's doing really strongly. Our own brands in Advanced Nutrition are performing really well. Our own brands in accessories continue to grow and we expand and innovate in that area as well. Lastly, areas such as frozen, and fresh are areas that we think are about to take off, and that's something that we'll be very well-placed to compete in. Overall, you know, a strong trading, strong availability, but mostly a really good product. Okay, thank you. Sorry, go ahead, Lyssa. The next question comes from the line of Manjari Dhar from RBC. Please go ahead. Hi. Morning, guys. Thank you for taking my questions. I just had two, if I may. The first is on Pathfinder in the vet business. Can you give a bit more color on what you're seeing from this initiative, where you have rolled it out, and I suppose how you're thinking about the rollout to joint venture practices in fiscal year 2024? Secondly, on customer churn for the VIP club, what can you give a bit more color on activities that you're doing to mitigate customer churn and anything else you might have planned in the pipeline? Thank you. Yeah, no problem. Great questions. Thank you. Pathfinder is our initiative to use our in-store colleagues to take some of the task away from the vets and the nurses and create better signposting into our retail offer. They replace the receptionist and work with the client through the journey. We've seen that be very successful. It's one of the productivity improvements that Mike referred to earlier. We're seeing stronger sign-ups into cross-sell into the retail offer, stronger sign-ups into preventative medicine. We're seeing stronger sign-ups into Advanced Nutrition, as well as freeing up more vet time to focus on the things that vets should be doing in curative care and treating animals. Very pleased with that initiative. two thoughts on that. One is, I think we can go further. The fact that we have vets and retail and grooming within four walls means that we are much more able than any competitor to get the right task to the right person with the best customer outcome, the best revenue at the lowest cost. We will, you know, take the learnings from Pathfinder and potentially look more broadly at the four walls, within the four walls at task and where it's best done. In terms of plans to roll out to our JV practices, a number of our JV practices have seen the results of our group managed practices, are very excited and very keen to do that. It isn't something that costs a lot of money obviously to do. It's just a change in a change in kind of roles and responsibilities, so it's something that we can roll out quite fast and quite effectively. I think this is one of the strengths actually of having a small group manager state within our ecosystem, in that we can test and trial things, and then figure out the best way to get them through to the joint venture practices. Because this one in particular creates a bigger pie, then it's sort of a win-win and we will proceed with that. In terms of churn, you'll have seen that we've made real strides year-on-year in reducing churn. A lot of that is down to our data platform and our ability to target offers, relevant offers and relevant products to customers that we think are at risk of churning. We've made good steps in figuring out the signals that mean a customer is at risk of churning, and both doing that now more cost effectively and to greater effect, which is one of the things, as well as the attraction of new customers, that's increased our active VIPs year-over-year by 9%. Thanks for your questions, and I think both of those things are both really good things that are showing up in our H1 results, but also have lots of legs for the future. Great. Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Andrew Wade from Jefferies. Please go ahead. Morning. A couple of questions from me. The first one I think probably for Lyssa. You talk about in the statement and you mentioned indeed in your intro, about a reorganization to de-layer, simplify and speed things up. Sort of interested in that. That sounds like the sort of language we normally hear in businesses that aren't working well, but this one obviously is. Just sort of a little bit more color on what changes you've made there and what needed to change and why it needed to change? Yeah, no problem at all. Thank you. Yeah. Actually this is very much what it says on the tin. It's about streamlining and flattening and speeding things up. It's not sort of code for restructuring or cost cutting. In fact, the whole thing is cost neutral. It's just about putting our resources where they're needed and closer to the front line. 1 major change as part of the reorganization was to remove layers of execs to create one single exec. That's important because the strategy of the business is very much about creating an integrated ecosystem and therefore, you know, wanting to remove all silos and divisions between or as many silos and divisions as possible between vets and retail and bringing those businesses together, as well as taking out a layer between the executive and both the front line and our customers. So a true sort of streamlining and flattening. As part of that, created a consumer function, responsible for digital, for marketing, for brand, for consumer value proposition. And while this business has always been incredibly pet-centric, and it's a huge source of strength, we're not gonna step away from that. Our number one value is that we put pets first. It's right at the heart of what we do. It's important to every single one of our colleagues and partners. We have an opportunity both through offering our expertise and bringing together our data to really step up our customer centricity. What our real insight is into the bond between the owner and the pet. A pet is just an animal until it has an owner. Putting our customers more at the heart of our thinking, is a real opportunity for us. As part of the change, we've created a Chief Consumer Officer role which we'll be filling in the new year. We've also been able to bring in some external talent. Rachel Mooney joins us as CPO. She comes from a background of data digital services, which will be a really strong addition, and she's started off brilliantly. We've been able to rotate and promote some of our top talent to ensure continuity. Lisa Miao takes on the retail role. She's been with the business a number of years, has deep expertise in retail. Louise, who for a long time was our GC, took us through the IPO. In fact, I think she's been with the business almost two decades. She's gone over to run the vet, which is a fantastic move, and we're really pleased with that. Lucy, our general counsel, has been promoted to Chief Legal Officer and has taken on a number of other corporate functions. All in all, not code for cost-cutting. It's come out cost neutral, which was the intention. I think we've got a simpler, more streamlined, more integrated structure that will serve us better going forward. Very helpful. Thanks. You sort of segued into my second question, which was around customer centricity or specifically your talking about step-changing customer centricity. You talked about the importance of it there, just interested as to what that could/will look like to customers. How is it gonna look and feel different for them, you being customer-centric? Yeah, no, thanks for that. As I said, I've created the consumer function, to bring together... We've got a lot of data, we've got a lot of insight across the business into customers, but it's, we've not potentially been using it to its full capability. I think if I can just give you a little example of what a future kind of customer journey might look and feel like, which might help bring it to life for you. My dog, Fred, is a little bit overweight, let's say. In the future, I would go on to, the pet's app to try and book a vet appointment for Freddie, to talk about his weight loss. We would have the data insight from all of his vet visits to know, we'd use two AI questions to know that this isn't an issue with Fred. He's not unwell, he just needs to be on a different diet. We would offer up, obviously, a vet appointment, which the customer has asked for at a cost, but we'd offer a free nutrition consult. We'd use all of our data to know what breed he was, therefore, who's the right expert, where I live, and therefore, what's the right pet care center for me to go to. We would find a match with Sharon in S taines, who is an expert on Labradors and nutrition. That would be offered a virtual or a face-to-face consult. I'm choosing a face-to-face. Off I go down to Staines a week later at the time that's convenient for me. Sharon's there. She talks to me all about Fred. She does a weight check, she does a health check, a coat check, puts Fred onto a particular weight loss diet. She knows he's an older dog, so she gives us a supplement in there as well for his bones. All of that's packaged up into an Easy Repeat, which is sent every three weeks 'cause that's the pattern that suits me to my house. All of that's then written to the vet record, which is in our ecosystem. I have an ongoing chat relationship with Sharon, telling her how Fred's going, putting in his weight records. Three months later, I go in with my now slim, svelte Labrador, and she puts him onto a new diet, and that's now in my Easy Repeat. You know, we can bring together all of our data online, digital, hybrid. We can bring together the expertise in-store, all of our product in a way that is so customer-centric that we know what the customer needs. We deliver it how they need at brilliant cost, and that powers the business. Hopefully, that just brings to life a little bit what I mean by both customer-centric, but also omni-channel and an ecosystem. Gotcha. Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you. Then just a final one from me. The store transformation program, just interested as to any additional information or data points or returns or anything like that you can give us on how that's performing. Thank you. Yeah. Let me take that up. It's ongoing, Andy. It's ongoing. The store refurbishment program, you know, we're making good progress. Cumulatively now, we've got around 60, just over 60 stores now that sit in the format. I think you may have seen a couple of those when we've been out on, out on visits. You know, we'll continue that program. We're refining it all the time. You know, you know, there's some features we know are particularly appealing and are particularly good for customers. The service desk, for example, has proved, you know, universally appealing for customers. We're also looking to see how that can work in much smaller formats. For example, the store we opened in Putney, the store we opened in Balham, you know, the way we've, transformed our store in Camden. You'll continue to see us, looking at opportunities for new pet care centers in the M25 in particular, but also continuing to refurb our rest of our estate. We'll do it at a sensible pace. You know, we think about 40 a year, 45 a year. Clearly, that's part of our capital investment program. We can dial up, dial down. You know, we've got choices to make on the pace we go. As we move forward, we've definitely now honed down on what actually is working for us. And, you know, we're really enthusiastic because, you know, putting the window... What Lyssa's talked about, customer, you know, dealing with the customers or pre-customers of the center. That's basically what we're trying to do in one of our new pet care centers. Uh yeah, and quite excited about it. Happy to take people around, by the way. Anybody on this call who wants to have the chance to go around one of our pet care centers, very happy to organize that and show what we're achieving there. Just to add to that, one of the main things we do when we refurbish a pet care center is we put a vet in, if there isn't a vet and we've still got real opportunity in that space. As well as where stores already have a vet, we've got good opportunity to provide extensions, as our vets are, you know, the ones that are getting to seven to 10 years old, or even earlier actually, are filling up and can do with more space. And open advanced practices as well within our stores. I wouldn't think of it as just a retail investment. It is in fact an investment across our ecosystem. Think we've probably got time for one more question. The next question comes from the line of Matthew Garland from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead. Hey, guys. Thank you for taking my questions. I guess in terms of underlying vet practice, how are you seeing sort of the growth of Matthew, your line's really bad. Can you maybe start again? Oh, sorry. I was saying two quick questions. First of which, on the JV practices, underlying JV practices being sort of the profit of the pet store space. Are you seeing increases in underlying. Matt, Matthew, we're struggling to hear you. Maybe we can pick this up after the call. We can't hear the question at all. It's all badly broken up from our end, at least. Yeah, I think we've- Can you hear me now? No, I'm afraid not. We can always speak after the call if you wanna pick that question up. Very happy to do that. Okay. Thank you. you. Thanks. I will now hand you over to your host for closing remarks now. Thanks very much. Thank you all for your time today. I hope you can understand the confidence we have in the business and in its growth and in the future. Thanks very much.