Dive Brief:

• Bark, known for its Super Chewer and BarkBox subscription boxes, on Thursday announced it formed a new partnership with Walmart where its products will be available for purchase in nearly 2,800 of the mass merchant's stores and on walmart.com.
• The company also added REI as a retail partner recently, building on its existing wholesale network, which includes Target, Costco, Petco, PetSmart, Amazon and others.
• The recent partnerships pushed Bark's product availability to more than 33,000 physical stores across the U.S., CEO Matt Meeker said on an analyst call Thursday evening.

Dive Insight:

As it continues to grow, Bark is ramping up its wholesale partnerships to help expand its customer base.

In the company's third quarter, which it also reported on Thursday, Bark total revenue increased nearly 34% year over year to $140.8 million, driven by a 51.5% increase in its commerce revenue to $22.7 million and a 31% rise in direct-to-consumer revenue to $188.1 million.

While DTC still makes up the majority of Bark's revenue, Meeker said that the company has experienced "ongoing success in adding new retail partners." Like many DTC brands, Bark is increasingly finding value in wholesale as the limitations of selling exclusively direct to consumer become apparent.

The company in Q3 added 371,000 active subscriptions during the period, pushing its total subscribers to 2.3 million. Bark also achieved "record" average order value of $31.10, a 7.3% increase from last year. The retailer's net loss in the quarter narrowed slightly, to $13.2 million from about $25 million in the year-ago period.

The company benefited at the onset of the pandemic as consumers invested more into their pets or became first-time owners. And over the last couple of years, Bark has experienced changes, including entering the public markets and shuffling its C-suite. The company in 2020 entered into an agreement to be acquired by Northern Star Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company, in order to go public.

Bark last year also announced that Chief Financial Officer John Toth would step down from his role, while also naming Amazon vet Anil Nair as its chief supply chain officer. And Bark's co-founder Matt Meeker also reclaimed the chief executive role just 16 months after stepping down from the position.