How Expensive Is Pet Care in the UAE?

Tim Elliott (0:00)

So, the Morning Drive, the cost of living now from routine checkups and vaccinations to unexpected emergencies, pet care can be, can quickly get very expensive in the UAN. As more people treat their pets like family, demand's growing for vet care that is perhaps more transparent, preventative and maybe even easier to manage. So, Paws & Co, P-A-W-S, is offering vet care on a subscription membership type basis, and other ways as well. They're entering the market with plans to open 30 clinics across the UAE by 2030 The first two locations open this December.

Co-founder Matt Butterworth is with me. It's good to meet you.

Matt Butterworth (0:47)

Good to meet you as well. Thank you for having me.

Tim Elliott (0:48)

Good to have you. You're very welcome. It's interesting this. I mean, I think that it's probably fair to say pet ownership has kind of exploded in this country, particularly in Dubai probably, but the wider UAE as well. When you look at the traditional vet landscape, you're sort of disrupting that landscape, I think. So what were the pain points that we were facing that you thought, no, I can sort that?

Matt Butterworth (1:14)

So I think when you look at, not just me, the whole team, I think, but I think when you start to look at the disruption model and startup culture, you have to, I mean, part of the strategy to start with, is to actually have an acquisition strategy, to go in and look at vets and actually purchase them. And what we found pretty quickly was just that the industry's kind of become quite institutionalized. It's kind of set in its ways.

I'm not saying they're doing a bad job, but I think that they don't really think about what the whole experience is in terms of, from a pet parent, in terms of what that means day to day in terms of looking after your pets and caring for them and welfare. They're good on the welfare side and the medicine side, but when it comes to the experience, it's not great at all. And I'll speak from my own personal experiences of having animals, and we can get into that a little bit later.

So what we decided to do is we started to start with a blank canvas, and we start to look at where the strategic tension points in terms of how we can differentiate. And one of them was what we call intimacy at scale. So I used a phenomena, the James Herriot model.

Intimacy has always been with one single vet, which is great, and that's where the rapport is, that's where the relationship is. But then as you start to grow that, it becomes very, very difficult, and that's why you have the bigger groups that kind of sit there, and they don't have that intimacy, which is where we then get into the problem of how do you build that with scale. So we said that actually then, well if intimacies can't be at scale, then how do we build the love? And the love becomes a system. So therefore if you put the system in place to create that love, it's not necessarily just about the vet, it's about a multitude of different things. And that's how we kind of built the business out from that specific model. And so we have kind of like what I call four distinctive assets from Paws & Co perspective. One is the proactive intervention, which is the subscription model that you were talking about. But that proactive is actually about education. One is about using digital tools around the app. The other one is about vet well-being, because if we're not looking after our vets, then how can they look after our pets? I mean, it's a sad indictment of an industry where you're full-time more likely to commit suicide if you're a vet than you are in any other profession in the world.

Tim Elliott (3:30)

It's a much tougher profession than we kind of appreciate.

Matt Butterworth (3:32)

Exactly, and the support network is not there for them.

And then the final one is obviously we've got a big rescue issue here from a community perspective where animals are kind of left and abandoned. Again, we have this. So then how do we solve that? So we said to more than just being in clinics about actually trying to solve a lot of other issues that sit within it, and then how do we differentiate? And that's where the forming of Paws & Co came and the positioning, and that's how we kind of built the business from the ground up, blank canvas, and started to look at things differently.