“I never wear make-up, by the way”, Lyssa McGowan remarks as she sits down at the table to have her photograph taken before tucking into lunch with The Times. “I had to wear it once at my old job, they caked it on. I couldn’t wait to scrape it off.”

The chief executive of Pets at Home is indeed fresh-faced, dressed in trainers, jeans and a company-branded zip-up jacket, having spent the morning walking her two labradors, Freddie, aged 10, and Barney, a “naughty” one-year-old.

The down-to-earth, laid-back leader prefers to keep things casual. Instead of the upmarket restaurants favoured by many executives, for our lunch she opted for a picnic in the staffroom of the company’s newly refurbished store in Brentford, west London.

McGowan, 46, insisted on bringing the food herself. “A selection of her favourite things,” I was told before the interview, expecting an assortment of pre-packaged nibbles and snacks from her local supermarket.

To my surprise, the FTSE 250 boss arrived with a spread of home-cooked dishes that she and her husband had prepared the night before: poached trout with tzatziki, chicken breast wrapped in Parma ham, celeriac remoulade, honey-roasted butternut squash, chargrilled courgettes with feta and mint, and roasted cauliflower with miso-tahini dressing.

For dessert, a lemon posset with fresh raspberries (which we ending up forgetting about). “All the ingredients were bought from Waitrose,” she tells me.

McGowan, whose mother is a chef, has “always loved cooking — it’s a hobby and a passion of mine”. But her culinary skills faced a challenge on the home front when her husband, Murray, took gardening leave just before the pandemic and did a six-month chef’s course at the Tante Marie Culinary Academy, where her mother had also trained.

“He’s now so much better than me, it’s actually embarrassing. The kids went from being like, ‘Yay, Mum is cooking’ to ‘Oh, Mum is cooking’. They forget that I cooked for them for the first 15 years of their lives.”

McGowan has kept a relatively low profile since taking charge of Britain’s largest pet supplies retailer in 2022. Now, in her first interview as the company’s chief executive, she is ready to share her vision and the challenges that have come with it.

Her journey to becoming the top dog at Pets at Home is an unconventional one. Before joining, she spent 12 years at Sky, the British media conglomerate, where she served most recently as chief consumer officer. “I was ready to be a CEO,” McGowan says, recalling the moment she got the call-up from Pets at Home.

Founded in 1991 by Anthony Preston, Pets at Home sells pet products including food, toys, bedding, medication, accessories and small pets. It operates 460 pet care centres in Britain, many of which also have vets’ practices and grooming salons. The group also runs a veterinary business, with 448 practices. The company, valued at £1.4 billion, has enjoyed steady growth since its initial public offering in 2014, which raised £280 million.

As we tuck into the spread, McGowan freely admits that retail was new to her. “I didn’t come in pretending I knew retail or vets, but I had a very complementary skillset,” she says. Her approach was simply to ask questions, rely on experts and empower her team.

She arrived as the business at a key juncture. The pandemic had brought both a boon and new challenges as the pet population surged, followed by the impact of a cost of living crisis. Pets at Home was able to help struggling pet owners by hosting donation points for pet food banks and through its adoption club.

“We did have a huge amount of momentum through Covid,” McGowan says, pausing to take a bite of butternut squash. “The pet population boomed and we went from signing up 9,000 puppies and kittens a week [to its puppy and kitten club] to signing up over 30,000 puppies and kittens a week; that’s now come down and stabilised. We’re lapping a year where we were growing really fast with a year where we weren’t.”

Like-for-like retail revenue fell 0.8 per cent in the 16 weeks to July 18, while total group like-for-like revenue rose 0.5 per cent to £441 million. That was largely boosted by a 13.3 per cent lift in like-for-like revenue at its veterinary practices, driven by higher average spend and growth in visits.

McGowan acknowledges the post-pandemic challenges, particularly a slowdown in demand for “core” accessories like leads and beds. Yet she remains optimistic, pointing out that customers are still investing in premium pet food, clothing and other “humanisation” products, treating their pets as members of the family.

The clock strikes 1pm and shop workers begin joining us in the staffroom for their own lunches. McGowan offers up some of our feast, but they politely decline.

Under McGowan’s leadership, the company is undergoing a transformation into a “unified pet care platform”, integrating its retail, grooming and veterinary services through a new app. The app, which allows customers to book surgeries and consultations, manage subscriptions and order products to its stores, is a key part of her strategy to create a seamless, tech-enabled customer experience. “It is being the one-stop shop for everything a customer needs for their pet and making it super-easy and seamless, using all of our data and consumer insights.”

The work carried out has helped to boost loyalty club membership. The company’s “pets clubs” sign-ups are over 50 per cent up year-on-year with more than 625,000 people joining since April. Total membership is now over 8 million.

One area where McGowan draws the line is the sale of larger pets, citing the company’s commitment to animal welfare. “For larger animals, you just can’t do that in a retail operation,” she says, explaining the rigorous standards Pets at Home maintains for the care of smaller animals, such as guinea pigs, rabbits, rats and hamsters.

She is the first female chief executive at the company, a rarity in the retail industry. Reflecting on the challenges that came with being a woman in business, she says: “There were many ‘me too’ moments, being underappreciated and spoken over,” she says, noting that those experiences only strengthened her resolve to foster a diverse and inclusive workplace. “I’m massively invested in making sure we have a diverse business, not just in terms of gender but in ethnicity and class.”

Is there anything that keeps her awake at night? “My secret talent is I’m amazing at sleeping,” she says. “Literally, my head hits the pillow and I’m out until someone wakes me up. But nothing keeps me up at night. I think the thing that drives me forward is that we’ve got such a huge opportunity at Pets and I just want to make sure we get after it.”

McGowan and her husband, who is the chief strategy and development officer at Imperial Brands, the tobacco company, both have “big, demanding jobs”, yet they make it a priority to have family dinners and host friends on weekends at their home in southwest London.

As for juggling their dual careers? “We’ve been doing it for forever,” she explains, as she scoops a spoonful of home-grown tomatoes onto my plate. “It’s actually really good to have somebody to talk to and is on the same journey. We’ve both got our lists. He does the cooking now and the house insurance. I do the school admin, finances and holidays. It’s just divide and conquer.”

Any time she has spare is spent keeping fit. She enjoys high-intensity interval training, yoga, dog walking and cycling. Scuba diving, too, when abroad. “That’s how I discovered my love for turtles. They’re my spirit animal.”

As our conversation winds down, it is McGowan’s turn to ask me a question: what was my favourite bit of the lunch?

“It was all delicious, but it would have to be the chicken,” I tell her, blissfully unaware that I had partaken in a cooking competition between her and her husband.

“Excellent; I made the chicken” she says, fist-pumping the air. “I can say that at home.”

CV

Age: 46

Family: Married with three children aged 20, 15 and 13

Pets: Two labradors, Freddie and Barney

Education: St Helen’s School, Northwood, northwest London; 1995-1999, BA in geography, St Edmund Hall, Oxford; 2003-2005, MBA at Harvard Business School

Career: 1999-2001 and 2006-2010, consultant, McKinsey & Company; 2001-2003, head of telephony, Telewest Broadband; 2010-2022 various roles including managing director comms, chief commercial officer and chief consumer officer, Sky; 2020-2021, non-executive director, Morrisons; 2022-present, chief executive, Pets at Home