Dive Brief:
- BarkBox’s personalized subscription box model that the company built itself on is no longer enough to distinguish the company, CEO Matt Meeker said on a call with analysts last week.
- “The insight that is guiding our next chapter is this: BarkBox is not a box,” Meeker said.
- The company’s fourth quarter revenue for fiscal 2026 dropped 25% year over year to $86.6 million, according to a press release. Full-year revenue fell 18.5% year over year to $394.8 million.
Dive Insight:
DTC pet company Bark is determined to get back on track following a rough period, but the rest may take time.
“I have dealt with some hard truths, a company moving at the pace we have been moving does not always give itself permission to sit there,” Meeker told analysts. “In many ways, we fought the wrong battles. We have been optimizing a model that the world has started to move past. The revenue trajectory you saw in today's results reflects that.”
Meeker acknowledged that the pet care market was not in decline. “The world has evolved,” he said. “What was differentiated has become the floor. Mass personalization, that is knowing your dog’s size, your dog’s age, whether they are a heavy chewer, that is table stakes now.”
Meeker said that Bark’s future success lies in better understanding its current customer, building “a fundamentally deeper level of specificity,” consolidating its product offerings and reallocating resources toward higher return categories.
BarkBox “is a relationship between a brand and a dog, mediated by a human who loves that dog. The job is not done when the box arrives. The job is done when the dog is happy,” he said.
As Bark looks forward, the company wants to reallocate resources in order to claw back its share of the overall U.S. pet industry, which the American Pet Products Association projected to hit $165 billion in sales in 2026.
In a move to deemphasize its DTC numbers and diversify its revenue stream, the company is expanding its Commerce segment across wholesale and marketplace channels. That, combined with Bark Air — the company’s dog-friendly charter airline — is expected to collectively represent more than $100 million of its fiscal 2027 revenue.
Meanwhile, the company noted an intentional decision to curtail promotional spending as part of an effort to “prioritize bottom line durability in the face of historic tariffs and a volatile macro environment.”
The company cut its total fiscal 2026 marketing spend by more than $24 million year over year, “choosing to protect our margins rather than chase inefficient growth,” Meeker said. He added that the decision “means we are entering fiscal 2027 with a smaller D2C subscriber base” but “steadily improving retention rates and growing average order values.”
The company’s guidance for the first quarter of 2027 reflected its lowered subscriber numbers, with projected revenue of $77 million to $79 million for the period, down 23% to 25% year over year. Meanwhile, full fiscal 2027 guidance projected total revenue of between $325 million and $340 million, down from $394.8 million in 2026.
Earlier in the year, Bark effected a 1-for-20 reverse stock split effective April 1 to avoid being delisted on the New York Stock Exchange, per a March 26 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. That move came in response to a noncompliance notice from the NYSE from July 2025. It was Bark’s second noncompliance notice; the company previously had to regain compliance in 2024 following a similar NYSE warning in 2023.
Amid that turmoil, Bark also reviewed a pair of take-private offers, both of which came in January and both of which the company declined ahead of the stock split.
