Bark & Co.: Company Analysis

Bark & Co. is a company founded by Matt Meeker, Henrik Werdelin and Carly Strife. The company owns several products – the initial and probably best known is ‘BarkBox’. Due to BarkBox’s success, the company Bark & Co. was created, which dedicates to build products that promote health and happiness of dogs everywhere (BarkShop, 2014). It was launched in December 2011 and had reached $25M in revenue by June 2013 with 100,000 subscribers (Fueled, 2013).
Like illustrated in Figure 2, Bark & Co. has different businesses: ‘BarkPost’ is a dog content website that has the capability of receiving over 400,000 visitors monthly, ‘BarkCare’ is a dog health mobile application that can be reached 24 hours 7 days a week for vet consultation service (D’Onfro,

The treats are sent in a box, which are tailored to size and age of the dog. Some of the products can even be personalized by providing information about the dog’s reception of previous products (Grant, 2013). According to BarkBox (2014b), the boxes have a varying combination of four to six treats, toys and even hygiene products that are not repeated in later boxes. The products are chosen from high quality vendors that use top ingredients in their treats.
The company started with 12 employees packing the boxes by themselves. Their first month started with 49 boxes - including handwritten notes. When the company reached 1500 boxes, this process stopped and another company was hired (Tastytrade, 2013). After four months of success in their business, the founders decided to expand internationally to Canada by maintaining the same type of products and providing benefits to the first 100 customers who signed up in the subscription (Boyd Myers,

According to Porter (2008), a strategy should create a long-term sustainable competitive advantage for a company. This can either be achieved by performing similar activities better than rivals meaning to have a higher operational effectiveness – or to have a unique and valuable position with a consistent fit among a company’s activities and some trade-offs.
Bark & Co.’s strategic positioning can therefore be described as a highly needs-based one due to the fact that the company focuses on meeting the needs of a particular group of customers and therefore also creates a fit among all activities. Whether this strategy will lead to a sustainable competitive advantage and what Bark & Co. needs to consider in order to operate successfully in the Pet Product Industry will be evaluated in the following chapters of this