i guess the big question is growth for you because you've been so dramatic in your growth you're projecting something like 40 growth how long can you keep this up good morning thank you for having me it's uh it's a pleasure to be here look we just posted strong first quarter results you know in line with our confidence for the market and also the guidance that we've published you know reflects confidence in our ability to execute uh combine that with the fact that you know the market is large seventy seven zero billion dollars growing at about
three four percent kager uh e-commerce overall is fairly low penetrated in the united states and uh you know we are early days in our growth uh you know combine that with the fact that we're out on a mission to create kind of a one-stop pet shop that really hasn't been done in e-commerce before we're really excited for what's ahead of us uh so we think we've got runway here submit it's emma chandra here we got to speak at the time of your ipo now since with that heist you made since then we have heard from
a number of analysts after the quiet period ended you mentioned e-commerce growth there a lot of them concerned about how you're going to deal with the amazon threat what are you doing what can you do to reinsure investors yes a couple different things in the way that we're focused on pat first of all going right there you know we've got 10 000 members team members who call themselves utopians who are pet parents many of them are pet parents as them pet parents themselves and really focused on on the pet category two we're built for pet
uh you know our website all the way to our high touch high bar customer service and that's really important right i mean we we strive to to offer exceptional personalized care which is so important in this category because you know we treat pets as family we're pet parents serving like pet parents and so we've got this emotive index that we're bringing to the category along with the scale and convenience of e-commerce you combine these two together it's really powerful for our customers and that's really what we strive for so we're offering them you know competitive
prices the broad assortment the fast and reliable delivery products like auto-ship and underneath of that just 24 7 us-based personalized care uh that's a pretty powerful proposition for us it is powerful summit but also we look at the likes of amazon we like look at the likes of walmart everybody is improving their customer service at the moment especially when it comes to delivery how long will that be a differentiating factor for you you know when we say when we talk about customer service it's easy to think about that as just a call coming in and
and answering it but when we think of customer service we think of customer engagement we think of you know vowing the customers we think about that experience that you can only get in a local neighborhood pet store and that's very hard to replicate by the way you know that personalized interaction where you know if david walked in and we said hey david how's it going and how's whiskey and you know you know did you know that labs at year six into year seven develop hip dysplasia and you should be feeding them consequent at that time
you know that level of authenticity unadulterated advice uh it goes to build trust trust that builds engagement engagement that fuels loyalty and that loyalty that fuels repeat purchases and that's entirely the crux of our business so we look at not only the industry or the way that we're shaping it but also the proposition that that we believe is very durable and long lasting to our consumers assuming you do know yeah labs because hip dysplasia is the issue but let me ask you about how you acquire new customers if you're going to keep this rate of
growth up you've got to acquire new customers what's your front door look like obviously they're not coming in through amazon they're coming through google search how do you acquire new customers you know we deploy we deploy an array of tactics classical techniques as well as digital techniques so we use you know direct mail tv for a little bit of brand building but most of our acquisition is direct response and we're going out there and we're talking to customers everywhere from every walk of life from the gen y's and z's to the millennials to the baby
boomers we're talking across the nation uh and you know for now we've been focused primarily on direct response and we feel and we believe that our customers are actually coming to us from everywhere uh from food and mass from the pet stores from online from other players from organically we're growing the market so it's a combination of all of that and and i think it's intuitive in a little bit of of a way because we're so early in our journey that we aren't there yet kind of fishing with the fishing rod it's more broad than
that and we're happy about the strategy that we've taken so far uh sumit can you talk a little bit about sort of pricing and are you gonna sort of follow like the netflix model even the amazon model where you have to spend you have to lower your prices you have a lot of marketing and advertising and that really prevents you from turning to real profitability can you give us a sense of that so i think on profitability uh you know one thing i would note is we've demonstrated consistently that we have a really balanced outlook
for growth and profitability we've been getting good uh big fast but at the same time we've shown the ability to get fit as well over the last couple of years uh you know case in point of gross margins have expanded 330 basis points are even the losses have improved by over uh 69 percent year over year and so we are we're definitely uh you know building an enduring franchise pricing you know is one of those levers where you just have to build trust with a customer we don't take it as a cat and mouse game
we monitor the industry pricing and we essentially you know strive to be competitive and that's the strategy that we take and that will continue to take to make sure that we retain the trust that we have with our customers
