HOW HENRIK WERDELIN BUILT A LIFESTYLE BRAND FOR MAN’S BEST FRIEND.
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R DO TH G E S
SUCCESS STORY
By Laurie Mega
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o to Henrik Werdelin’s way the company operates day-to-day, is website and the first centered on one theme: an obsession with thing you see is the serving dogs and their people. entrepreneur getting a huge, sloppy kiss from “We tapped into a culture that a dog. It’s an image that captures his sense was already there, but really of humor, his openhearted approach didn’t have a place to hang to business, and, of course, his love of dogs. out, which were everybody
Werdelin is the co-founder of BARK, which began in 2011 as BarkBox, a monthly subscription box for dog products. Based in New York, it has since expanded to include BarkShop, an ecommerce site for dog products; BarkBrite, an oral health line for dogs; Bark Park, an outdoor club for dogs and dog owners; Super Chewer, a line of tough toys for bigger dogs; and other ventures. As you can see, Werdelin is all in when it comes to businesses that cater to our fourlegged friends, and it’s paid off. The entire story of BARK, from its founding to the
like me, Matt, and Carly, who see dogs as their kids.”
So where other startups might begin with an analysis of viable markets, BarkBox started simply because Werdelin and his cofounders, Matt Meeker and Carly Strife, really loved their dogs.
SUCCESS STORY
Starting a Business on a Heart-Shaped Bed
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“Matt and I met, and this is a true story, in a heart-shaped bed on a cruise ship,” Werdelin says with a laugh.
The duo had identified an opportunity in an industry that, as Werdelin saw it, wasn’t taken very seriously by entrepreneurs. So there hadn’t been much innovation.
ut pet care, particularly dog care, is a It was a conference on a cruise ship and he huge industry. was paired with Matt, whom he’d never met, According to as a bunkmate. The bed separated into two Statista, there pieces, and was pulled part when he got were 89.7 million there, but Werdelin thought it would be funny dogs owned in the to push them together into their original United States in heart shape. Lo and behold, when he came 2017. Yet, there back from dinner, Meeker was already asleep have been very in the one bed. few startups that cater to dogs and Werdelin and Meeker, who was a co-founder their owners. This was a particularly great of MeetUp, got along immediately and opportunity given the rise of dogs as true started trading business ideas. members of the family unit. “Pretty quickly, we realized that we shared a lot of the same values when it comes to business building,” Werdelin recalls. They knew they wanted to build a business together, but they weren’t thinking about what would make them the most money or be the safest choice for the market.
“We were just kind of shooting the shit and we thought it would be fun to do something with dogs, because I was adopting dogs at the time and Matt had this Great Dane called Hugo,” he says. They saw all the subscription boxes out there for clothing, cooking, and kids’ toys, and they thought it would be fun to put one together for dogs. They built the first one over a weekend and showed it to friends. Everyone thought it was a great idea. Almost immediately, they had 70 orders.
“We came in at a time when people’s relationships to their dogs was changing,” Werdelin says. “And so dogs were no longer pets living out in the yard. They were invited in, becoming part of the family…. We kind of took a lifestyle approach to dog ownership pretty early.” Just before they were ready to launch, they met Carly Strife, who had been running operations for Uber’s launch in New York City. But she was looking for something closer to her heart. A dog person herself, BarkBox was the perfect fit.
SUCCESS STORY
The Lifeblood of the Company
They’re also a big part of the company’s PR strategy, maintaining the company’s reputation as being helpful and caring.
BARK has built a strong community around its products and services. According to Werdelin, they have just under a million subscribers, and they’ve expanded into dental care, exclusive dog parks, and a number of other dog-related products and services.
“When we do something dumb, these are the ones who have a relationship and say sorry we sent you the wrong toy. That’s on us. Let us send you a new one,” Werdelin says.
All of it has grown out of a commitment to customer service.
“And so we feel that the Happy Team is really the heart of our organization
BARK speaks to about a third of its customers every month, something very few and it’s the one that informs a lot of companies can claim to do. The hub of their the decisions that we make.” customer service is called the Happy Team, a group of customer service representatives based in Columbus, Ohio. Placing the team in the Midwest was a strategic decision. “In the Midwest, here in the U.S., you just have a culture of being very kind and nice and humble,” Werdelin says. And every single person on the team, says Werdelin, is a dog lover.
“I think that we probably have 200-ish people sitting in Columbus, Ohio with a dog on their lap and texting frantically pictures [of dogs] back and forth for our customers. We’re happy to talk to them about anything.” Werdelin considers his Happy Team as more than just customer service. To him and his co-founders, it’s their research team. “It’s the people who can tell us what products we should build next because people tell them what products they should build.”
SUCCESS STORY
Listening to Your Customers
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than focusing on the true purpose of their business.
nd while creating a Listening to their customers has paid off in successful business big ways for the BARK team. Many of their is obviously important most successful product lines have come for Werdelin and his from customer input. Super Chewer, for team, they prefer to example, is a line of tough, rubber-based toys put more emphasis on for bigger, more active dogs. The idea came the product and their about from customer complaints about the customers—and their lack of durability in the plush toys. total obsession with dogs and their people. It wasn’t too difficult to come up with,” While other startups begin to worry about Werdelin says, “when suddenly, your things like scalability before they even get customers are calling up and saying, ‘Hey, all off the ground, Werdelin, Meeker, and Strife these plush toys that you sent me, my dog just went full steam ahead and worried about chewed them up in like 30 seconds.’” those issues later. And so was born Super Chewer, which BARK sent out to customers in their boxes. Then they asked them directly what they thought. This is what the company does with everything that goes into its boxes and on its online store. Of the millions of products they send out, Werdelin says, every single one has a net promoter score. “If you then take that kind of empathy and you mix that with an obsession for data collection, suddenly you know what a six-year-old labrador in Texas really liked because you have been through enough of these conversations to give you a pretty good statistical prediction of what this dog would like.”
Focus on the Magic Werdelin is a mentor and advisor for other startups through Prehype, a venture-building research and development group. Over the last 15 years, he has been a part of the successful launch of many other startups, including Hot Potato, which was acquired by Facebook, and Go Try It On, which was acquired by Rent the Runway. Over time, he noticed that startups kind of get caught up in a lot of buzzwords rather
When they started with their 70 orders, Werdelin figured they would pack the boxes themselves. When people pointed out that wouldn’t scale, Werdelin wasn’t worried. He told them, “When we have a million boxes, we will have a robot and a 3PL and systems in place. But by that time, we’ll also have a shitload of revenue, so we can afford throwing money at it.”
“And so sometimes people, I think, obsess about the scalability of something before figuring out what is the magic, what is the service, what is the product that the customers really love. If you can find that, then I feel often you can find a way of scaling that on the back of it.”
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The Acorn Method ocusing on a single product or service is also something Werdelin and his cofounders never really bought into. Instead, they understand that the most successful companies diversified their businesses, branching out into other verticals.
SUCCESS STORY
As one product or service matured, companies like Apple or Amazon would begin another venture to keep the business growing out instead of up.
“Like trees, when a product line matures, it just can’t grow any further,” Werdelin says. “So, the way that trees have learned to develop over the years is not to become a much bigger tree, but to become a forest.” Apple went from computers to music to streaming. Amazon went from books to online storefronts to entertainment. BARK went from BarkBox to Bark Brite to Bark Essentials, and so on. In his new book The Acorn Method, Werdelin advises companies to expand into self-contained product and service areas, rather than sink money into growing a single business. He calls this planting acorns—growing new ventures when your core business is strong and mature.
“At one point, you’re not going to get exponential growth by putting another branch on. You’re going to get exponential growth by creating a system where you can plug an acorn or a bunch of acorns around fertile ground.”
Isolating Your Acorns The best way to diversify, says Werdelin, is to first identify ventures that make sense for your business by working inside your brand permission—that is, what your customer base will readily accept in terms of product expansion.
For Bark Essentials, a line of basics like pee pads that are sold primarily on Amazon, they set up a separate team with its own budget. They weren’t allowed to tap into BARK resources and BARK wasn’t allowed to tap into theirs. In about a year, the venture was a milliondollar business unto itself.
“Some companies have brand permission to spread out,” Werdelin explains. “Like if I told you that Nike is making a new hotel, you probably have an idea what that would be. But if I told you that Hilton is making a new shoe, you probably wouldn’t know what that would be.”
“And so, like an acorn, we dropped it in a place where we thought there was fertile ground,” Werdelin says. “And we definitely had a root system, so there was connecting tissue. But we gave it a lot of autonomy and a lot of independence so that it didn’t remove BARK has worked within its brand permission the focus [from the core business].” to expand in the dog care space, and has done it quite successfully. But the team didn’t do it by attaching a bunch of new lines to the core business and seeing which succeeded. Rather, they followed a strict process of setting up a new venture and isolating it from the rest of the business.
Author: Laurie Mega
is a writer, editor and SEO consultant in the Boston area. A bit of a Renaissance woman, she writes about tech, women-owned small businesses, real estate, parenting, restaurant management, women’s health, and content marketing. You can find her work at lauriemega. contently.com.
While other businesses may focus on the viability of the business itself, Werdelin, Meeker, and Strife focused on building a lifestyle brand that truly understands its target audience. They expanded it within the parameters of their company values. And they created it for a customer base they know and love—including the dogs.