Tom & Co, From Pet Retailer to Trusted Care Partner
Client
Turning a pet retailer into a trusted companion for everyday pet care, online and in store.
Tom & Co is a Belgian pet retailer with roughly 200 stores across Belgium, France, and Luxembourg, with bigger ambitions. Physical retail is second nature to them. What's missing is the bond beyond the basket: becoming the brand pet owners rely on throughout their pet's life.
That relationship long lived in stores, backed by paper folders and a basic loyalty card, while digital lagged behind the brand's footprint. Acquiring PharmaPets, a digital-first pet pharmacy built on subscriptions and online vet products, gave Tom & Co digital muscle and a clear signal of intent: become a brand that advises and supports, not just sells.
Nimble shaped that platform through a discovery track across desirability, feasibility, and viability, distilled into a focused first product. The question: how does a pet retailer become a pet care partner without alienating the stores and franchisees that built its trust?
That relationship long lived in stores, backed by paper folders and a basic loyalty card, while digital lagged behind the brand's footprint. Acquiring PharmaPets, a digital-first pet pharmacy built on subscriptions and online vet products, gave Tom & Co digital muscle and a clear signal of intent: become a brand that advises and supports, not just sells.
Nimble shaped that platform through a discovery track across desirability, feasibility, and viability, distilled into a focused first product. The question: how does a pet retailer become a pet care partner without alienating the stores and franchisees that built its trust?
opportunity
Tom & Co's perspective
The ambition is one relationship across store, app, and e-commerce, not disconnected touchpoints. Chewy and Pets at Home are the reference points.
That relationship barely exists digitally: e-commerce is a sliver of sales, and most customer knowledge disappears after each transaction. Closing that gap meant starting with the store, not around it.
The store network is the brand's biggest asset and its biggest sensitivity. Anything built must drive footfall, not cannibalize it.
Real constraints exist: fragmented loyalty/customer data, and legal limits on animal health advice online. The approach had to work within both.
The industry's perspective
Pet retail is crowded, with online discounters setting the pace on price. Tom & Co's edge is advice and stores, not cost.
Growth sits with younger owners (20–35) who treat pets as family and expect digital experiences to match, not a loyalty stamp.
Owners now self-diagnose via search and apps before reaching a shop assistant, raising the bar for useful, trustworthy answers.
Chewy (US) and Pets at Home (UK) win by bundling commerce, services, and care, with subscriptions driving retention.
What the concept covers
A platform that turns one-off purchases into an ongoing care relationship
Pet profiles
Name, breed, birthdate, weight, and behavior form the data layer that makes everything else personal.
Care timeline
Nudges owners on vaccines, grooming, flea treatment, and food refills before they fall behind.
Visible loyalty
Benefits that grow with engagement, shown clearly, rather than a points counter no one checks.
Shop and reorder
Purchases tied to the pet, turning essentials into a one-tap habit instead of a chore.
Expert chat
Answers everyday questions with a clear hand-off to a store or vet when that's the right call.
What the concept doesn't cover
Not a platform rebuild
Discovery drew hard lines around scope. The platform advises, it does not diagnose or prescribe: vets cannot examine or prescribe online, so the assistant offers direction and triage, then hands off to a professional or a store.
The first version is deliberately narrow (profile, timeline, reorder, loyalty, basic chat), with the symptom checker, service bookings, click & collect, and subscriptions held back for later releases.
The rule we kept was to start with one focused, integrated journey rather than a broad app that does everything and earns trust at nothing.
The THINKING
6 things that the discovery track taught us
1. The store is the moat.
The advice and familiarity behind the counter is the one thing an online-only rival has no answer to. So the platform's job is to pull people toward stores and make staff more valuable, not route around them. It is also what wins over franchisees, whose buy-in decides whether any of this works.
2. The pet is the asset, not the transaction.
Almost everything Tom & Co learns about an animal disappears at the till today. The real build is a single pet profile that links needs to products and services and sharpens with every visit. It is the recurring-relationship model behind Chewy, pointed at the animal rather than the order history.
3. One platform, not two.
The strongest internal signal was that Tom & Co and PharmaPets had to feel like one relationship, not a retail app bolted onto a pharmacy app. Merging them into a single experience is what turns the acquisition into an advantage instead of a second silo.
4. Advice builds trust, but only within clear limits.
Expert content and triage are the emotional hook, the reason someone opens the app when they are worried. But in a health-adjacent setting the line between guidance and diagnosis has to be explicit, with vet oversight and an honest hand-off. Restraint and sourcing are part of the product, not a constraint on it.
5. Emotion, not just utility.
A reorder button is useful; it is not loved. The features people lit up about in testing were the ones that recognized the pet as family: a profile that holds its life, reminders that feel like care, loyalty that feels personal. That emotional layer is what repositions the brand away from price wars.
6. Start focused, build modular.
The validated path was a small, tangible first version rather than the whole vision at once, built so the next layers (symptom checker, bookings, subscriptions) snap on without a rebuild. Ship something real, then grow it.
Sneak peek
What's next?
The first MVP is in active build, with the webshop and the core care journey (pet profile, care timeline, reorder, loyalty, and a basic expert chat) in the first release, and subscriptions and richer services following close behind.
The ambition is bigger than a better app. It is a single thread running from the store to the app to e-commerce to in-store services, all anchored to one pet profile instead of scattered across channels that never talk to each other. Over time the same foundation powers a symptom checker and expert Q&A, a store locator and service bookings, click & collect that rewards a store visit, and a personalized content engine that turns expert knowledge into care plans by breed, life stage, and condition. The new pet owner setting up a profile is simply the first thread. That is the omnichannel pet care platform Tom & Co and Nimble are building toward, with the loyalty and data foundations maturing alongside it.
The ambition is bigger than a better app. It is a single thread running from the store to the app to e-commerce to in-store services, all anchored to one pet profile instead of scattered across channels that never talk to each other. Over time the same foundation powers a symptom checker and expert Q&A, a store locator and service bookings, click & collect that rewards a store visit, and a personalized content engine that turns expert knowledge into care plans by breed, life stage, and condition. The new pet owner setting up a profile is simply the first thread. That is the omnichannel pet care platform Tom & Co and Nimble are building toward, with the loyalty and data foundations maturing alongside it.