So a lot of times we look at human services that are innovative. "Really, what we try to do is not even think about just being like a pet company, we're trying to innovate as any company. "It doesn't take much to be forward-thinking in the pet industry," she says of their lack of current competitors. Strife sees Bark & Co as an early pioneer in catering to pet owners online. We turn a corner and find ourselves back on the main meadow. I don't have a ton of experience but I like to think that I learn from my mistakes quickly and am risky enough to take them." "I have a lot of energy and I'm kind of like a bulldozer when it comes to doing things. "I think it was because I was eager to do whatever the hell it took," she says, plainly. I ask Strife why she thinks her partners brought her on, largely untested, as a co-founder. "I'm not scared," Strife fake-boasts into the twilight. The site features curated, sharable articles and posts, under the headings of "Cute," "Funny," "Wacky," "Heartwarming" and "For the Hoomans." At about a quarter-million e-mail subscribers, it just might be the BuzzFeed for dog fanatics.Īs the sky darkens, our trail begins to look less familiar. This online community propelled the creation of BarkPost, which Strife calls a content property.
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"And when we say 5,000, 10,000, 50,000 to them, I can't say they shit their pants, but they shit their pants." Beyond that sales boost, Strife says inclusion in BarkBox boxes can bring a company new exposure plus useful data from BarkBox customer responses. "A lot of them are excited by a 50-piece order or a 100-piece order," she says. As the company grew, she began ordering products from small artisanal sellers, which BarkBox continues to do today. In those early months, Strife went to pet stores and shopped on Amazon to find products to fill customer boxes. So that's kind of how the grand scheme of Bark & Co started to evolve." So much of that came after we started to see the way that people took to BarkBox and talked about it and were excited about anything we were doing. "Oh my god, I had no idea," she says, "I don't think any of us realized the actual opportunity in the market of dog parents and people who are just obsessed with their dogs. When she helped start BarkBox, Strife admits, she hadn't foreseen the company's trajectory.
Really, they were like, 'Hey, come be our third, come build this business with us.'" But neither of them had the bandwidth to really get the company up and running. "They knew that the subscription box business was kind of taking off," she says, "so they had the idea. Werdelin and Meeker met earlier in 2011 and decided to found a business around their common love of canines ("Matt is crazy-obsessed with his dog," Strife explains, "and Henrik fosters a bunch of dogs.") A friend directed Strife toward them. In less than two years, the service has grown to nearly 100,000 customers, and they've recently rebranded as a dog owner-focused umbrella company called Bark & Co.
Think Birchbox but with a monthly supply of dog treats instead of makeup samples. Strife co-founded BarkBox as a subscription box service for dog owners in late 2011 with Henrik Werdelin and Matt Meeker. And she's banking her career on like-minded dog owners. Beneath her dry dismissal of her dogs' quirks (she places Roxy on the autism spectrum - "She won’t look anyone in the eyes" - and calls Cooper "a big chunker") she clearly adores them.
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