Imagine browsing a website for toys and treats to give to your very good pup this holiday season. It’s Black Friday, and there’s a 20% coupon on offer. But if you want it, you have to take a quiz to prove you’re the ultimate dog person. After you’re a few questions in, you begin to wonder: Did my dog write this?
Nope, it was the super creative team at BARK, a leading dog lifestyle empire. Founded in 2011 by Matt Meeker, Henrik Werdelin, and Carly Strife, BARK started as BarkBox, a monthly subscription service delivering curated toys and treats for dogs. The initial target audience was Matt’s XL Great Dane—a huge dog that Matt struggled to find gear and toys for.
Over the years, BARK has expanded their product lines and channel mix. They now fulfill roughly 14 million orders annually through their DTC platform, and also sell their products across over 40,000 retail locations in the U.S., as well as through major online marketplaces like Chewy and Amazon. They’re one of the largest toy and treat companies by revenue in the US and have garnered a highly engaged social media following of over 9.2 million dog lovers.
For over a decade, BARK relied on a custom-built, homegrown e-commerce platform. Like a good Fido, they were loyal to the platform that got them where they were, despite the headaches it caused them. But there came a point where the platform got in the way of their further growth. Changing the slightest thing took the help of their technical team and weeks if not months to implement. It was hard to take new ideas to market, and they felt themselves being pulled away from the pups and towards being a tech company.
That bone is buried now that BARK has come to Shopify. BARK has:
- 6% conversion increase in the first four weeks after moving their marketing efforts to Shopify
- 8% increase in subscription rates during 2024 Black Friday and Cyber Week compared to 2023 on their custom platform
- 43% of new customers checked out with Shop Pay in the first quarter it was available
Challenge: Custom platform keeps innovation on a tight leash
BARK designs over 1,000 new toys each year through their in-house design team and employs approximately 600 dog-loving individuals. They’re as obsessed with innovation as they are with the pups and pup people they innovate for.
Initially, this love for making products and experiences drew the BARK team to a custom platform.
"Up until our move to Shopify, we have been an entirely custom, kind of homegrown e-commerce build,” says Meghan Knoll, Chief Experience Officer at BARK.
At first, the custom site felt like the best way to manage their initial subscription-based business model. But as they grew, BARK’s custom platform presented challenges in terms of innovation and speed to market.
The beauty of being on a custom site is that you can build whatever you want. The danger of being on a custom site is that you have to build everything.
Every new feature required significant development effort and investment. This meant that new ideas—the big kind where it’s experiment and succeed or fail fast—came with high startup costs.
That new video feature for a product page? That’d take weeks and an engineer’s help just to turn it around—and you can imagine the timeline for a more complex idea. This hindered BARK’s ability to iterate quickly on and test new experiences. And it meant that, rather than deciding on new ideas solely on value to the customer, the complexity and time required for implementation also weighed heavily.
Over time, the custom platform accumulated technical debt, requiring ongoing maintenance and resources for features that were not core to BARK's mission of creating magical experiences for dogs and their people.
“There are parts of the experience that are uniquely BARK—like the moment a customer discovers a cleverly hidden squeaker toy tucked inside another toy, or reads a pun-filled name that makes them laugh out loud,” says Meghan. “That level of storytelling and delight, the kind of thing only we would spend weeks perfecting, is core to who we are. But for areas like checkout? Of course it matters, but we’re not in the business of selling optimized payment flows. We’re here to deliver joy, surprise, and connection between dogs and the people who love them.”
The team wanted to get back to focusing on the things that make BARK really special. It was time for a platform that helped BARK move with the agility of a startup while operating at a much larger size, without losing focus on their core differentiators.
That’s where Shopify came in.
Solution: Migrating to Shopify for agility and focus
The BARK team chose Shopify as the platform and ecosystem they saw best able to help them take products and ideas to market quickly, to innovate, and to constantly iterate on the experience.
A necessary reckoning, then a mindful migration
Again, the great thing about custom is that it’s custom; the tricky thing about custom is also that it’s custom.
For BARK, this meant that there were “a lot of weird little custom things we did over the years, some of which were really important, some of which were not” that created technical complication and bloat. They were maintaining infrastructure and code for things that weren’t adding to their business. The first step in the migration process, then, was an audit with an eye towards simplification.
“It was cathartic for our team to throw out the technical debt we had built ourselves,” says Meghan.
Doing so was a long, careful journey, given their many loyal customers; they wanted to make sure they didn’t get rid of anything beloved.
“We got to our first set of core features quickly, then have been testing key metrics and bringing in tranches of customers over a month at a time, testing again, and so forth,” says Meghan.
I think we've been really impressed with how easy it is to build customizations on top of Shopify's systems and the speed of developing those customizations. The tech team's been able to work really quickly in the system.
The support and partnership from the Shopify team were crucial in troubleshooting custom work and connecting BARK with other enterprise-level companies undergoing similar migrations, facilitating knowledge sharing.
Pre-built solutions on the app ecosystem speed deployment—and innovation
On the hunt for functionality that went beyond the standard eCommerce functionality, it was the technical team at BARK that really pushed for Shopify. They were particularly excited about an app ecosystem that could offer pre-built solutions across a wide range of capabilities to enable faster deployment and testing of new ideas.
If there's anything we want to do for our customers in the e-commerce world, there is probably already an app sitting there within Shopify's ecosystem that gets us eighty percent of the way.
Subscriptions are core to BARK’s model. But they’re not the standard subscription; they come with the ability for the customer to make customizations. For instance, they offer 6- and 12-month commitments, and allow flexibility for plan changes-mid subscription without rebilling. As such, the technical team was looking for the ability to custom assign subscription boxes, while still leap frogging off of a core set of out-of-the-box capabilities.
As Meghan puts it, “There really wasn’t any subscription company that was going to work for us out of the box.”
They found the right solution in OrderGroove, an app available in the Shopify ecosystem that offers API-based scalable architecture. This has helped BARK build customizations faster to accommodate their unique subscription model, on top of their core one.
Custom subscriptions were just the start. With many desired customizations on the docket, the BARK team has been impressed with how easy it’s been to build customizations on top of Shopify’s systems—and the speed at which it could happen.
“The tech team has been able to work really quickly in the system,” says Meghan. “We had a lot of confidence in the support and account management teams at Shopify taking care of us. We’ve had a lot of interesting technical needs that have been critical to seeing it through the finish line.”
Accelerated checkout delivers the experience customers crave
At BARK customer experience is paramount. With this in mind, the team implemented Shop Pay, Shopify’s accelerated checkout option, for all new checkouts on the site. The team was excited about the potential of seamless checkout—and so, too, were their customers. In fact, 43% of new customers checked out using Shop Pay’s accelerated checkout feature in the first quarter it was available.
“It makes our checkout experience a lot more seamless,” says Meghan. “We’re reducing the number of clicks and the need to log in.”
It’s not just about the checkout; it’s also about the benefits connected to it, such as Shop Cash and the Shop App.
“Those are benefits that we get to give to our customers without additional investment from BARK. That's a really powerful thing.”
Results: BARKing up the right tree: Enhanced agility, improved conversion, and magical experiences
Faster time to market means faster feature launches
Since migrating to Shopify, BARK has significantly improved speed to market, launching new features faster.
For instance, that Black Friday "dog person" quiz was conceived and launched using Shopify Liquid to build on top of the platform. They did it just a few weeks before the holidays, which previously would have been a time of code freezes.
“There were enough safeguards on Shopify’s end to make sure that we would not be disrupting the checkout experience,” says Meghan. “That made us feel more comfortable iterating, being a little bit riskier, and moving faster than we would have on our custom site.”
This agility has allowed BARK to respond more quickly to market trends and customer preferences, maintaining their competitive edge in the pet industry.
Before, it felt like we were wading through cement every time we wanted to launch a new feature. Now we get to start acting like a startup again. We can constantly iterate on the experience.
Conversion rate boosts just in time for the holidays
Since moving their marketing efforts to their new Shopify site, conversion rates have increased, with an initial 6 percent conversion jump in the first four weeks. This immediate improvement validated their decision to migrate and demonstrated the power of Shopify's optimized checkout experience and user-friendly interface.
“This gave us the confidence that we needed to keep it going through Black Friday,” says Meghan, “which, you can imagine, was not an easy decision for us to make, because it's such a critical time of year for us.”
The new platform contributed to one of BARK's strongest quarters ever for subscriptions, with 8 percent higher new subscription sales compared to the previous year on the custom platform.
Together, that means BARK improved outcomes for both its new lines of business and its traditional core subscription business, carrying on their previous success, then pushing it forward.
Unlocked capabilities for both technical and non-technical team members
Now that they have the ability to be more hands-on with site changes, non-technical teams at BARK feel empowered to make updates and template modifications without engineering support. This means they can dream up new and creative ideas and tactics that push forward what the team can do, then deploy them with efficiency and agility. Marketing campaigns go to market faster. Product pages are updated more frequently. And overall, the site content remains fresher and more engaging for customers.
A great example of how this has manifested is with a new video the creative team developed depicting BARK’s holiday boxes.
“It was really beautiful,” says Meghan. “On the old site, video templates weren’t supported. We’d need three to four weeks to get the video live because we had to create a new template, get that live in the content management system, test it out. On our Shopify site, the designer had it up in an hour.”
The technical team feels similarly unlocked and unburdened, as their focus has shifted from backend maintenance to developing new, differential customer experiences.
“Our team has been able to be more focused on bigger, more differential customer experiences instead of backend support.”
Rather than spending time fixing bugs or maintaining basic e-commerce functionality, engineers can now innovate on features that truly differentiate BARK in the marketplace and enhance the customer experience.
We’ve been able to take the maintenance off of the developers’ plates and shift it to the Shopify team so that we can work more on development, especially in terms of user facing features.
BARK is now better positioned to leverage new technologies like AI and focus on further personalizing the customer experience, aiming to make every touchpoint as magical as their products. With the technical foundation provided by Shopify, BARK can explore advanced personalization strategies, predictive analytics for subscription preferences, and innovative ways to engage their community of dog lovers.
This renewed agility positions BARK to continue expanding their product lines, enter new markets, and further solidify their position as a leader in the pet industry.
Potential unleashed, with Shopify
BARK's migration to Shopify represents a strategic pivot that has transformed how the company operates and serves its customers. By moving from a custom-built platform to Shopify's unified commerce solution, BARK has not only addressed the technical limitations that were hindering growth but has also positioned itself for sustained innovation and expansion.
The results speak for themselves: improved conversion rates, stronger subscription growth, faster time-to-market for new features, and a more efficient allocation of technical resources.
With a wag of a tail and a bag of treats in hand, on Shopify BARK is once again off to innovate the dog park, the dog bowl, the dog bed, and everything in between.
