PETCO UNLEASHES NEW REVENUE OPPORTUNITIES AND SAVINGS

It's often said that, as time goes on, people start to look like their pets. For Petco, it may be more accurate to say that pet owners start to look like their data. Over the last several years, the pet health and wellness company has invested heavily in creating a 360-degree view of its customers, relying on Snowflake to help it tame the terabytes of data pouring in from millions of monthly web visitors and more than 1,500 retail locations across the U.S., Mexico and Puerto Rico.

Modernizing Petco's data environment using Snowflake has transformed the retailer in many ways — from increasing productivity by 20% and accelerating data sharing tenfold, to slashing on-premises hardware costs and further leaning into data-informed decision-making. To accomplish this, Petco expanded access to data across the organization, while focusing on cost optimization — initiatives that Snowflake helped make a reality.

Prior to implementing Snowflake, Petco relied on legacy data warehouse architecture. To optimize data processing efforts and help the team leverage data as quickly as possible across real-time business decisions, Petco moved its data to Snowflake's cloud platform. Snowflake's scalable, multi-cluster architecture allows Petco to better manage large amounts of data, speeding up multiple jobs like sales loads and Salesforce marketing data loads by 25-50%.

Most importantly, Petco’s move to Snowflake allowed the business to build even deeper insights into each customer — from purchase history to shopping behavior like which products they prefer and whether they shop in person, online or both.

Based on this data, the team makes personalized recommendations for additional purchases, looking at these numbers in aggregate to determine which products are selling best and optimize pricing and promotions by region or customer segment. Then, they feed this information to Petco's marketing partners to deliver more targeted offers.

These changes impacted everything from determining lifetime customer value to predicting customer churn. Greater access to insights also enables managers to compare the performance of each retail location, encouraging healthy, revenue-boosting competition among its pet care centers.

With Snowflake now at the core of its data strategy, Petco has changed how it approaches and shares data internally. It began by splitting its data engineering team into five discrete "towers," each handling different aspects of data management — from integration to operations to reporting. Petco also greatly expanded the number of subject matter experts (SMEs) within each team, helping to prevent single points of failure for data analysis if a particular SME was unavailable at a crucial time.

Finally, the company further democratized access to data, making it available to internal partners across Petco, from marketing to sales and beyond, improving the ability to share and use data.

Snowflake’s built-in cost management capabilities also helped Petco better see, control and optimize costs. Working closely with Snowflake, Piyush and his team created live dashboards to dynamically track usage at the warehouse, module and individual user level, then shared these individual usage stats across teams. This allows Piyush’s team to alert and educate users on more effective ways to leverage the platform in real time.

This enhanced visibility allowed Petco to implement more granular controls — from using Snowflake’s auto-suspend and auto-resume capabilities to ensure charges are only incurred when a warehouse is active, to implementing a process to evaluate user requests like loading data and changing warehouse size. Petco also optimized Snowflake storage with transient tables and best practices for large file compression, in addition to optimizing warehouses by fine-tuning scripts and selecting the smallest warehouse size possible for each workload.

This also helps Petco maximize data and reduce annual costs — all while increasing data ingestion and workloads in the platform. “The cost savings associated with Snowflake allow us to focus on and invest in modernizing our overall end-to-end data stack,” says Singhal.

Petco has reinvested these cost savings in initiatives like implementing Streamlit, allowing business teams to securely build, deploy and share apps on Snowflake. These apps have helped Petco further sharpen its competitive edge — including enhancing monthly forecasting for marketing, improving negotiations for merchandising teams through greater visibility into supplier costs, and helping supply chain teams track how inventory replenishments are affecting overall sales for a store.

As its data transformation journey evolves, Petco will keep seeking new ways to modernize and streamline processes — and Snowflake will continue supporting these goals every step of the way.

“Snowflake continues to be a great partner to us,” says Singhal. “So many companies finish implementing products for their customers and disappear, but we’re proud to have Snowflake as a collaborator and problem-solving partner. We're looking forward to unlocking even greater optimization together.”