(cheerful mellow music)
-: Pano, so good to be here at your beautiful London office.
-: Well, it's a pleasure to have you here.
-: Pret has had a fantastic year so far.
Can you tell us a little bit about your growth strategy?
-: We took the stance to take our brand global,
and I think we have seen huge progress.
If you look at the brand four to five years ago,
we were a single-channel brand.
I think if you look at Pret today,
it's an omnichannel brand,
and it's grown at real pace across the world.
Actually, 2023 was the first year we opened more stores
outside of the UK than inside of the UK.
-: In a difficult macroeconomic environment,
how you balance innovation and resilience together?
-: It's clearly a challenging macro-environment at the moment
and I think that will still continue into next year.
What we'll need to stay laser-focused on is how we give
great value to our customers.
And great value for me is not just the right price point,
it's a great environment within a Pret store.
It's how our teams connect with our customers
to give them great service.
-: During COVID, you took a very bold move
to launch like a loyalty program
that has been very successful.
-: As you mentioned, in 2020, we launched
a subscription scheme,
and we have evolved the subscription scheme
over the last four to five years or so.
We now have about 40% of our customers
transacting with us through the schemes.
And that gives us an opportunity
to understand their behaviour,
connect with them in different ways,
and really tailor our overall proposition to their needs.
So we had BCG, I think, for a year we worked together.
The marketing muscle between us,
behind the subscription business,
is so different to traditional marketing.
And I think what BCG did for us is really come on board
and really help to leapfrog
our capabilities within marketing.
And I think that where we are today, we've shortcut it
five years, I think, by having BCG
in for that year to help us, whether it feeds
to up-skill our people, helps suggest key capabilities
we needed to bring in, and really ensure
that we are laser-focused on
the overall customer experience.
-: Can you tell us more about how you leverage data today
and how you're putting that into motion?
-: We are leveraging data more and more.
As an example, when we launched our loyalty scheme,
we started to understand not just customer behaviors,
but where they are living.
So we are starting to target those areas to open more Prets.
And that would've been data
we just wouldn't have had beforehand.
I think another area getting to understand
how customers are purchasing
and key ingredients
or product categories that they enjoy,
and saying actually due to that data
that we're harnessing, this is how we are going
to innovate when it comes to new products.
And I think the third thing is really understanding
different customer cohort behaviours
and starting to tailor our approach
to how we communicate with customers
based on their different preferences.
(bright stirring music)