Bark, Inc. (BARK) Business

ITEM 1. BUSINESS

Unless otherwise expressly stated or the context otherwise requires, when we refer to “we,” “our,” “us,” “BARK,” or “the Company” in this annual report on Form 10-K, we mean BARK, Inc. and its consolidated subsidiaries.

Overview

Our mission is to make all dogs happy.

We believe that dogs and humans are better together and we aspire to be the world’s favorite dog brand. We are a team of dog-obsessed people committed to delivering personalization at scale by satisfying each dog’s distinct personality, preferences, and needs with the best products and services. Since our founding in 2011, we have happily served millions of dogs and their people.

We are an omnichannel brand that designs and develops proprietary products for dogs across two key brands: BarkBox and Super Chewer. All of our products are designed and developed in-house, and are BARK branded. We

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leverage an ever-growing collection of first-party data, customer insights, and AI to deliver personalized products and experiences tailored to the needs of each and every dog we serve. We sell our products in two segments: Direct-to-Consumer (“DTC”) and Commerce, through our network of retail partners, which currently spans over 50,000 doors nationwide and online marketplaces including Amazon, Chewy and TikTok.

We began our journey with a monthly-themed subscription of toys, treats, and chews, tailored to the needs of each customer based on their dog’s size, play style, allergies, and more. By viewing each dog as an individual, and by creating magical experiences for our customers, we have been able to build lasting relationships with millions of dogs and their parents. Our customer service (“Happy Team”) proactively engages around 175,000 customers each month. We use the valuable data from these customer interactions to inform the design and development of future products, and we leverage it along with AI technology to recommend additional products to our customers through cross-selling and Add-to-Box (“ATB”).

As a leading U.S. dog toy brand by revenue, we continue to leverage our brand strength to compete in complementary consumable categories, such as treats and chews. These offerings support our core toy business and expand our total addressable market. To optimize profitability, BARK recently narrowed its consumables portfolio by discontinuing certain products, including kibble and dental. We believe this streamlined focus allows us to prioritize our core toy identity while improving operational efficiency and our profitability profile.

Our Industry

Large, growing, and resilient market for pet products:

According to the American Pet Products Association (“APPA”), annual spend on pets in the U.S. was approximately $158 billion in 2025, an increase of 3.7%, compared to 2024.

Dogs are the most popular pet in the U.S.:

According to the APPA, dogs are the most popular pet in the U.S., with approximately 71 million households--representing 53% of all U.S. households--having a dog as a member of their family. We believe we have an opportunity to significantly expand our customer base, both in the U.S. and globally.

Our Segments and Brands

We operate two business segments: DTC and commerce. Our DTC and commerce segments drive the majority of our revenues, representing 82.3% and 17.7% of total revenue in fiscal 2026, respectively. BARK remains focused on diversifying its revenue across segments and brands, including BarkBox, Super Chewer, and BARK Air.

DTC

The majority of our revenue in the toys category is derived from our subscription products that feature monthly themes of premium-quality BarkBox and/or Super Chewer toys and BARK-branded treats and chews that are delivered directly to a dog’s home. Customers have the option to subscribe to these products on a one-month, three-month, six-month, or twelve-month basis. During the life of their subscription, we offer our customers incremental products via ATB, which allows us to cross-sell customers across our full portfolio of products.

Commerce

We also sell our BarkBox and Super Chewer toys and BARK-branded treats and chews in retail stores and other e-tailers, significantly broadening our customer reach and raising awareness of the BARK brand. BARK products are currently sold in over 50,000 retail doors, including Target, TJ Maxx, Costco, Walmart, and PetSmart. Additionally, we sell our products on other online platforms including Amazon, Chewy and TikTok.

BARK Air

Announced in April 2024, BARK Air is a first-of-its kind air travel experience tailored to dogs. BARK Air is partnered with several charter companies offering premium flights for customers and their dogs. Interested parties

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can book flights at dogsflyfirst.com. Our charter partners are responsible for all aircraft, pilots, maintenance, and insurance, allowing BARK to focus on creating a great travel experience for dogs and their people worldwide. We believe this initiative exemplifies BARK’s dog-first approach to curating the best products and services.

As our flagship entry into the services category, BARK Air is part of a broader strategy to expand into premium, differentiated dog services. With new routes, expanded partnerships, and high early engagement, we believe BARK Air and future services represent a meaningful long-term growth opportunity. This category is currently included in our DTC segment.

Our Competitive Strengths

Ever-Growing Data Drives Personalization at Scale:

We know the names, age, breeds, birthdays, play style, allergies, and more for millions of dogs. We believe that this is a key competitive advantage as it enables us to deliver highly personalized products and experiences for each and every dog that we serve. We are able to tailor our products to each customer by collecting proprietary product and customer data with each interaction. We also leverage our machine learning technology, and first-party data set to compare dogs’ attributes against our available inventory when recommending products for purchase via cross-selling or ATB. In addition, we believe that personalization requires more than curation. We apply our data-driven customization approach to our product design and development as well, so that our products themselves, and not just our recommendations, are tailored to meet particular dog attributes that have been expressed to us.

Deep Customer Relations Drive Retention and Lifetime Value:

Our strong customer relationships are at the heart of what we do. Our Happy Team proactively engages hundreds of thousands of customers each month. We get to know their dog’s preferences based on breed, size, age, play style, allergies, and more. This allows us to personalize our products and experiences for each customer, which we believe drives stronger retention and lifetime value.

In-House Product Design and Development:

All of our products are designed and developed in-house, and branded BARK, which helps drive our strong gross margins versus companies primarily selling third-party products. We believe that our data and insights have enabled us to design and make superior products for dogs as well as to create new products that dogs and their dog parents love. By employing an in-house team of world-class designers to design our products and having them made exclusively for us, rather than selling third-party products, we have created a collection of high-quality, unique, and cleverly-themed products, with strong brand association and higher potential for profitability. By designing our own products, we have the opportunity to achieve higher price points, therefore expanding our gross margins.

Omnichannel:

BARK currently sells products in over 50,000 retail doors nationwide, including Target, TJ Maxx, Costco, Walmart, and PetSmart. We also sell our products on other online platforms including Amazon Chewy, and TikTok. We believe that these partnerships significantly broaden our customer reach and raise awareness for the BARK brand. We also generate a similar contribution margin across its DTC and Commerce segments.

Growth Opportunities

We strive to be a dog parent’s partner from those first days with a puppy throughout their dog’s entire adult life. BARK seeks to be there every step of the way serving dogs with the best products and services. Our ambition is to grow BARK to be the world’s favorite dog brand. We are focused on several key areas that we believe will be significant drivers to our business, long-term.

Recalibrating our DTC Segment

BARK was founded on our monthly subscription box – which was a form of personalization that genuinely differentiated us from other offerings for dogs. We believe our customers have evolved and that we need to build

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toward a fundamentally deeper level of the relationship between BARK and each dog we serve, mediated by the human who loves that dog. This "Relationship Commerce" has three dimensions:

Depth — how well do we truly understand each customer;

Density — how many meaningful touchpoints exist between us and the customer; and

Durability — does the customer give us permission to offer new products and services.

We believe this approach, compounded over millions of customer relationships, together with the competitive advantage provided by AI, will allow us to rapidly adapt to, and scale for, our customers' evolving needs.

Expansion in our Commerce segment

In fiscal 2026, revenue from the sale of BARK products through our retail and e-commerce partners totaled $70 million, or 17.7% of our total revenue. This reflects a 2.3% increase compared to fiscal 2025, as many retail partners remained cautious in light of ongoing uncertainty regarding tariffs. We continue to expect this channel to contribute an increasingly significant portion of our revenue moving forward, driven by continued expansion of our product assortment and retail presence with existing partners, as well as the addition of new partners both domestically and internationally.

Business Strategy

We are focused on enhancing profitability, diversifying our revenue, and positioning BARK for long-term growth. In fiscal 2026, we delivered our second consecutive year of positive Adjusted EBITDA, driven by improvements in operational efficiency and cost structure, while navigating a volatile tariff environment.

As part of our ongoing strategic evolution, we are reducing our reliance on promotion-driven growth and reallocating resources toward higher-return product categories with greater long-term opportunity. This includes narrowing our product and geographical focus to concentrate on areas where we believe BARK has a genuine competitive advantage.

We are also investing in new service offerings, such as BARK Air, and maintaining a lean operating model to support disciplined capital allocation. These strategic initiatives are intended to preserve profitability and position the business to deliver sustained long-term value.

We exited fiscal 2026 debt-free, with a leaner cost structure, and a business that is more diversified.

Our People and Culture

The Team

As dog people, BARK employees join us because they are aligned with our mission to make all dogs happy. The work we are doing is inherently joyful, optimistic, and humorous because our primary customers, dogs, possess those same characteristics. To that end, BARK’s culture is centered around service, creativity, and a high level of ambition to serve all dogs and their humans.

At the end of fiscal 2026, BARK employed approximately 501 full-time and part-time employees, with 196 employees based in the U.S. and 301 employees based in the Philippines. Our employee population includes approximately 314 BARK Happy Ambassadors and their leadership, 20 engineers, data scientists, information security, and technology staff, 51 operations employees, and 93 marketing, creative, general, and administrative employees. As of March 31, 2026, 71% of our employees, 33% of our management team, and 43% of our Board of Directors identified as female or nonbinary.

Employee Engagement

Team communication is frequent and direct, allowing for a high level of transparency and feedback. We engage with employees through periodic surveys to measure employee engagement, receive feedback, and respond to

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employee concerns effectively. We leverage these data points to continuously evolve our policies and practices to meet employee needs and align with BARK team values. Though most of the team has worked remotely since March 2020, we currently use our office in Brooklyn, New York for regular team collaboration, all hands meetings, workshops and more.

Fairness and Inclusivity

At BARK, we recognize that people, like dogs, should be celebrated for their differences and the diverse life experiences they bring to work each day. We advocate for and celebrate a culture of inclusiveness for all people regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, family status, religion, ethnicity, national origin, physical ability, veteran status, age, or love of cats as we work toward one common goal: to make every single dog as happy as they make us.

BARK is committed to paying employees fairly for their work. Our Total Rewards team determines and regularly reviews all compensation based on a leveling and benchmarking system guided by market insights from third-party experts and tools. On a regular basis, we review all grants of equity for parity across gender and race to ensure that we are taking a consistent approach to compensation for all team members based on market data, role, and level.

Manufacturing

BARK purchases substantially all of its merchandise directly from third-party manufacturers. Some of these suppliers operate their own manufacturing facilities and others subcontract the manufacturing to other parties. BARK’s manufacturers generally agree to terms that are substantially similar to its standard manufacturer terms, which govern its business relationships. BARK has long-standing relationships with a base of vendors that BARK believes to be mutually satisfactory.

All of our exclusive products are required to be produced according to BARK’s specifications, and our manufacturers warrant that such products will perform in accordance with BARK’s specifications. Our manufacturing and supplier contracts are generally on multi-year terms and provide BARK with the additional right to terminate the agreement for uncured material breaches. We require that all of our manufacturers comply with applicable laws and BARK generally has the right to audit the suppliers’ facilities.

Distribution and Inventory Management

BARK currently utilizes global third-party logistics providers to warehouse and distribute finished products from their distribution facilities to support BARK’s domestic operations. These logistics providers manage various distribution activities including product receipt, warehousing, assembly, certain limited product inspection activities, and coordinating outbound shipping.

BARK manages its inventory levels by analyzing product sell-through, forecasting demand, analyzing product ratings, and placing orders with our manufacturers before BARK receives firm orders from customers to ensure sufficient availability.

Trademarks and Other Intellectual Property

We believe that our rights to our intellectual property, including trademarks and domain names, as well as contractual provisions and restrictions on access to our proprietary technology, are important to our marketing efforts to develop brand recognition and differentiate our brand from competitors. BARK owns a number of trademarks that have been registered, or for which registration applications are pending, in the United States as well as in certain foreign jurisdictions. These registered or pending trademarks, standardized and stylized, include, among others, “BARK,” “BARKBOX,” “BARK BRIGHT,” “BARKEATS,” “BARK SUPER CHEWER,” “SUPER CHEWER,” and “BARKPOST.” The current registrations of these trademarks are effective for varying periods of time and may be renewed periodically, provided that we, as the registered owner, or our licensees where applicable, comply with all applicable renewal requirements including, where necessary, the continued use of the trademarks in

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connection with similar goods. We expect to pursue additional trademark registrations to the extent we believe such registrations would be beneficial and cost-effective.

In addition to trademark protection, we own numerous domain names, including www.bark.co, air.bark.co www.barkbox.com, www.barkshop.com, and www.dogsflyfirst.com. We also enter into, and rely on, confidentiality and proprietary rights agreements with our employees, consultants, contractors and business partners to protect our trade secrets, proprietary technology and other confidential information. We further control the use of our proprietary technology and intellectual property through provisions in both customer terms of use on our websites and in agreements with our vendors.

We believe that our intellectual property has substantial value and has significantly contributed to BARK’s success to date. We continually engage with manufacturers to develop and market better quality dog products under our brand names to better serve our customers at a lower price.

Competition

The dog products industry is highly competitive, fragmented, and spread across four primary segments:

•supermarkets, warehouse clubs, and mass merchants;

•specialty pet store chains;

•traditional or neighborhood pet stores; and

•subscription service businesses and e-retailers.

We believe that the principal competitive factors in BARK’s market are product selection and quality, customer service, price, brand awareness and loyalty, reliability and trust, convenience, and speed at which orders are delivered to our customers. We believe that BARK differentiates itself from our competitors by the strength of our brand, customer relationships and engagement, proprietary branded products, data-driven design and marketing, and achieving a high level of performance with regard to these competitive factors.

Government Regulation

Our business is subject to foreign and domestic laws and regulations applicable to companies conducting business on the Internet. Jurisdictions vary as to how, or whether, existing laws governing areas such as personal privacy and data security, consumer protection or sales, and other taxes, among other areas, apply to the Internet and e-commerce, and these laws are continually evolving. Related laws may govern the manner in which we store or transfer sensitive information, or impose obligations on us in the event of a security breach or an inadvertent disclosure of such information. International jurisdictions impose different, and sometimes more stringent, consumer and privacy protections. Additionally, tax regulations in jurisdictions where we do not currently collect state or local taxes may subject us to the obligation to collect and remit such taxes, or to additional taxes, or to requirements intended to assist jurisdictions with their tax collection efforts. New legislation or regulations, the application of laws from jurisdictions whose laws do not currently apply to our business, or the application of existing laws and regulations to the Internet and e-commerce generally could result in significant additional taxes on our business. Further, we could be subject to fines or other payments for any past failures to comply with these requirements. The continued growth of and demand for e-commerce is likely to result in more laws and regulations that impose additional compliance burdens on e-commerce companies.

In addition, we are subject to a broad range of federal, state, local, and foreign laws and regulations intended to protect public health, natural resources and the environment. Our operations, including our manufacturing outsourcing partners, are subject to regulation by OSHA, the FDA, the USDA, and by various other federal, state, local, and foreign authorities regarding the processing, packaging, storage, distribution, advertising, labeling and import of its products, including food safety standards.

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Public Filings

Copies of our annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports on Form 8-K and amendments to those reports are made available free of charge at https://investors.bark.co/financials/sec-filings/default.aspx as soon as reasonably practicable after being filed electronically with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”). Our reports are also available free of charge on the SEC’s website, www.sec.gov. Information on our website is not incorporated into this Form 10-K.