Katie Perry (00:00):
I'm Katie Perry.
Austin Hankwitz (00:01):
And I'm Austin Hankwitz. And this is After Earnings, the show from Morning Brew and Stakeholder Labs that brings investors up close and personal with the executives behind the world's most interesting companies.
Katie Perry (00:14):
Today we're speaking to Matt Meeker, who is the CEO of Bark, the maker of BarkBox. The company serves millions of dogs every year through their monthly themed box of toys and treats. They offer satisfying treats, personal meal plans, and even snacks.
Austin Hankwitz (00:26):
And we covered a ton of ground from the launch of their new dog cereal to their recent Girl Scout collab, expanding retail strategy. And we even talked about artificial intelligence. Yeah, AI with BarkBox. Kind of a weird thing to think about there, but it was a really good conversation. Now Matt gives us his best Minnesota accent at the end, so stay tuned for that. And do me a favor, if you're watching this interview on YouTube, come below how many times you count my own dog coming into the frame behind me. With that being said, let's jump into the interview. Alright, Matt Meer, the CEO of Bart Box. How's it going man? Thanks so much for joining us today on this episode of After Earnings.
Matt Meeker (01:04):
Thanks for having me. I'm excited.
Austin Hankwitz (01:06):
So I saw your LinkedIn profile picture is of a dog makes a lot of sense. My profile picture is being a suit, but yours is of a dog. Very cute dog. You're the CEO of BarkBox, so I would expect nothing less. I'm going to assume it's your dog.
Matt Meeker (01:19):
It is. It's my dog, Hugo. He is the inspiration motivation for Bark. My wife gives me a hard time because she says it's absolutely the worst photo of Hugo that was ever taken and it's very mean to him, but from when he was a puppy and he is asleep and he's snoring. So yeah, it's better looking than me. Even on his worst day, he looks better than me, so I went with that.
Austin Hankwitz (01:45):
It's an incredible picture of Hugo. Now here's the $64,000 question. If Hugo had a favorite Girl Scout cookie dog treat flavor, what flavor do you think that would be?
Matt Meeker (01:58):
Probably lamb. A lamb flavored cookie. Yeah. Okay. I think in his mind his favorite flavor would be probably a mix, like a blend of a squirrel and a rabbit, but he never tasted, so he doesn't really know. It's just that's his goal.
Katie Perry (02:17):
Squirrel Girl Scout cookies would be amazing and potentially break the internet. I love that.
Austin Hankwitz (02:26):
Yeah. Congrats on that Girl Scout cookie partnership, by the way. That is, can you talk a little bit more about that actually kind of how the pilot went and then sort of what the expansion process might look like over time?
Matt Meeker (02:35):
Sure. It's been a long courtship, if you will, of us with this generic idea of we'd love to work with you and be part of the cookie program and understandably, they're really, really protective of that experience and the products for customers. So after a few years of begging and convincing, they said yes, and then we got ourselves to a pilot in this past year and we had an initial projection for how that would go before every troop even received the opportunity to sell that it was sold out. So then we had to double it and then do a little bit more on top of that. So it ended up being two and a half times larger than the initial projection, which was fantastic, really great way to start. Ultimately, if everything keeps going well and we we're really lucky, then we get millions of little salespeople walking door to door selling human cookies with a box of dog treats that are co-branded Bark and Girl Scouts. And who can say no to that? Who could
Austin Hankwitz (03:47):
Say no to that? Oh my gosh, just bring her on a picture of Hugo with you too and it's game over. Yeah,
Katie Perry (03:52):
I feel like if you want something sold, just give it to the Girl Scouts. Absolutely. They will move units.
Matt Meeker (03:57):
They really do. You can't say no to them. You just can't.
Katie Perry (04:01):
Of course not.
Austin Hankwitz (04:03):
The Girl Scouts have been collaborating actually pretty recently, right? I'm not sure if you guys saw on Target, but they've also collaborated with a deodorant brand native. I thought that was ingenious, right? I mean, you wear deodorant now. It smells like Tagalongs or Samoas. That's so crazy. I mean, seriously, you guys starting working with Girl Scouts has inspired a bunch of other companies right next to Apple Vision Pros now are going to start coming with Thin Mints. That'll be crazy.
Matt Meeker (04:29):
No, it is really terrific. And by the way, that's their term. Millions of little salespeople, that's what they call, so I can't take credit for that, but it's really special to be part of that and to have them representing our products, our brand, and going door to door and introducing it to so many people, such a great opportunity, a great partnership, and we're really happy about it.
Katie Perry (04:55):
I really love those unexpected brand collaborations too, and it's interesting for you to explain you approaching them, and I think a lot of us always wonder how those come about. So it's super interesting to hear that you all had that idea and approached them with it.
Matt Meeker (05:11):
We do, and we have a lot of those collaborations and more in the future. There's some really fun ones coming up later this year, but going back several years, we've done a lot of work with Duncan. There's fun product collaborations there. We've done Subaru, which seems unusual, but they're big dog people, and so we are typically taking their cars and making them into dog toys and then they sell them or give them away through their dealerships. And maybe a favorite one, or at least a fun one is the Budweiser seven pack. So it's a six pack of Budweiser bottled beer, and then hanging off the end of it is a seventh bottle that is a dog toy of Budweiser beer. And we really wanted sell that in stores, but there was trouble closing the cooler or the freezer on the second.
Austin Hankwitz (06:04):
Oh my goodness. That's good. Okay, hear me out. I'm going to pitch it live here right now. Next big collaboration, scrub daddy. We're going to have the scrub daddy sponge and the scrub daddy dog toy, huh? Yeah, I could see it. I could see it.
Matt Meeker (06:20):
You'll like what's coming up this year. It's just a tease
Katie Perry (06:23):
There. Sorry. Amazing.
Austin Hankwitz (06:25):
Well, speaking of things that are coming up, congratulations on the recent launch of your cereal. That is awesome. Your press release says folks can now purchase your dog cereal at target stores as well as your website bark.co. My real question is how the heck did you come up the names of these flavors, Porky Meat Hunks Frosted Socks, and clunky Nugg Yums. I mean these are crazy.
Matt Meeker (06:48):
The way we come up with that is the creative team doesn't allow me in their space and then I don't interfere with their work. And they come up with engaging fun names like that. But really the inspiration for it was you notice one of the major chains that we're working with and launching this product with is Target really. They kicked this off, I'll say a year and a half ago-ish came to us and said, we love what you've done for our to aisle. You've brought a lot of fun to our pet department. Could you bring fun to our tree aisle? And we took a look at it and we saw a lot of muted colors, boring packaging, and then started to look at the rest of the store for inspiration for fun. And there's a lot of fun in the cereal aisle or in the candy aisle. You've got these bright colors, these fun names, these characters, character driven stories. And so we took our inspiration from there. And this is the output,
Katie Perry (07:51):
I think I heard on a target earnings call too that one of their core strategies is introducing new and innovative brands via their retail experiences. So this seems like a part of that perhaps.
Matt Meeker (08:02):
Yeah, and they've been a very good partner with us for the last six or seven years. We wouldn't have gone to retail as soon as we did, if not for them coming to us and saying, please, looking back, we were really dumb. They came to us and said, we'd love to put your toys in all 1800 stores. And we just said, sure, no problem. We had no idea what that involved and we caught up to it. We've caught our mind around it now, but got lucky.
Katie Perry (08:34):
Yeah. It's also interesting, the nostalgia angle, and I feel like unlike other companies, you're appealing to an end consumer that is a dog and then an intermediary human. And so you're kind of needing to appeal to both of those audiences. So can you walk through the approach on these throwback cereals and maybe are there ideas, similar ideas that didn't make it but are on the r and d floor over there at Bark?
Matt Meeker (09:00):
There are a lot of ideas that don't make it, but let's
Katie Perry (09:03):
See. Can you share any of them?
Austin Hankwitz (09:05):
Oh yeah, I want to hear some of these
Katie Perry (09:06):
Man. Yeah, what didn't make it? He's like, what can I say? He is like
Austin Hankwitz (09:10):
The scrub daddy thing was actually an idea. Didn't make it Austin. We did not like the idea.
Matt Meeker (09:15):
If you are at all familiar with our Instagram, you might see that the limits get pushed quite a bit. I have a bit of a standing challenge for the current social media team, which is I want you to do something this quarter that I have to publicly apologize for. And they're trying harder and harder for that. What a
Katie Perry (09:37):
Brief.
Matt Meeker (09:39):
Yeah. And they haven't met it yet, which is disappointing. So the things that get quite really, I don't know what kind of podcast this is or whatever
Katie Perry (09:48):
You want it to be, you're the first guest.
Matt Meeker (09:51):
Well, I don't know if it's family oriented or it's always in the thinking, and I am often joking, but half joking, we need to get the human out of the middle and give the dog the ability to transact. We've got to find credit cards. It would make our business so much easier. But really I think we take an unusual mindset or point of view. One thing that we call it inside is the dog's eye view and it's really serving the dog as your primary customer and sort of trying to forget the human exists with the idea that the people love their dogs so much and are so obsessed with them that if you create a product or experience that the dog has to have, the human has to give it to them. Almost like Disney World and children, that's such a great experience. Every parent is just forced to take their kids there.
(10:50)
There's like a gravitational pull. So trying to serve the dog in that way, to your point, it's very hard to stay in that mode all the time because the human has the credit card unfortunately. And so you do have to think about how do you capture their attention, how do you appeal 'em or how do you even explain that benefit to the dog? And so that works its way into the storylines, into the positioning. And there's a nostalgia part of this with the serial positioning and the character driven narratives and hopefully that engages the human. And then what we've put inside is exciting enough for the dog and rewarding enough that they keep coming back for more.
Katie Perry (11:34):
Hey, dogs with credit cards, I don't know who would ever oppose that. And I'm also curious,
Matt Meeker (11:40):
Capital One will acquire us for 35 billion.
Katie Perry (11:43):
Hey FinTech, let's go. Also curious, all this dog talk cats, just not a cat guy, not a good economic opportunity for you. What's the story on focusing only on dogs
Matt Meeker (11:56):
Don't like cats?
Austin Hankwitz (11:57):
Same. Okay, cool. Let's
Katie Perry (11:59):
Go. There you go. There you go.
Austin Hankwitz (12:00):
Good answer Matt.
Matt Meeker (12:02):
If you want a more thoughtful answer. I mean that's true, but my mother has cats and loves cats, so she's very disappointed in me. But really we think the relationship between people and their dogs is very different than people and their cats a dog, and I know people feel like the cat is a family member, but their relationship is different. You can feed the cat for three days and walk away and no one can stay with them. It's fine. You can leave them home alone. They have a different need or type of affection that they seek or don't seek. The dog human relationship in our view is much closer to the human parent child relationship. And so you may have seen, maybe not in December, we actually created a companion toy for some of the dog toys that was for human children because what we've heard over and over is like box comes in the house, the human child then takes the toy and plays with it. So we created a companion toy for children so they can play with the same toy the dog got. And that relationship is so much easier for us to understand than a cat or a hamster or a horse or whatever.
Katie Perry (13:25):
Yeah, I feel like cats aren't just not as appreciative also, so makes clear sense to me. Yes.
Austin Hankwitz (13:32):
I'm also allergic to cats, so I'm team dog on this one. Right.
Matt Meeker (13:35):
Alright. Alright, great.
Austin Hankwitz (13:37):
Alright, let's jump into the recent earnings. Congratulations on an awesome quarter. Obviously gross margins expanded 2% year over year, up 6% when compared to 2022. Jeff's published a really nice report about you guys expanding now into 2,400 doors starting here in the spring with additional marketing investment to support that rollout. Obviously the Girl Scouts partnership, tons of potential for expansion there, but Wall Street says it might be a little bit too early to tell if pet discretionary spend is completely ready to rebound, but early signs are very positive. So Matt, I'm curious, are you doing anything today to prepare the company for what is probably going to turn into future demand, right? If that might be from a supply chain perspective, a marketing perspective, any operational perspectives? Are you guys laying any groundwork today to prepare yourselves for an increase in demand if that's in 25 or beyond? We've
Matt Meeker (14:34):
Done a lot of that work over the last two years, mainly on the well all the way through. So I came back into the business two years ago as the CEO after a 16 month break. And when I came back in, it felt like there's a three year turnaround here in terms of the economics and the structure of the team, pretty much everything. Part of that is setting that foundation of how do you grow from the half a billion dollars of revenue and springboard up to 1,000,000,002 and five beyond there. The first part of that was getting the unit economics in shape, and that meant going back to a lot of suppliers, renegotiating our relationships narrowing. So we had a few key suppliers instead of just a wide number across everything. And we've done really well with that and that gives us that ability to turn it up or turn it down.
(15:30)
And whenever we do that, we're going from a very profitable foundation from the start, get the cashflow going in the right way, clear some of the inventory, consolidate your fulfillment, all the boring stuff that really matters to the results. And now we're sort of entering year three of this three year turnaround. And this is for me the fun part where it is time to turn on those growth levers. So it's how do we grow with the current products and marketing playbooks that we have that we've had for the last 12 years, how do we turn those up and get more out of them? But what else do we add? What products and services come on top of that? How do we layer in awareness marketing? How do we get all these products on one destination instead of scattered across many? So now we're hitting the growth engines of it and we're only able to do that because we spent the past couple of years building the foundation to support
Austin Hankwitz (16:32):
It. A hundred percent. Now before I jump in actually into the question about some of those efficiencies, a little bit more detail, you took a 16 month break. What caused that? Where'd you
Matt Meeker (16:41):
Go? Where did I go? I moved to Florida, so that's where I am here Florida, man, I am now very cool. Yeah. Yeah. I took a 16 month break. What caused me to step away primarily was we talked about my dog, Hugo up front. He was getting older and he is a big dog. Big dogs don't last as long. And I had the sense that he didn't have many years left. And once he would pass, I felt like I wouldn't want to be associated with bark in any way, just get it away from me. Can't look at it, can't think about it. So instead of just being a public company and walking out the door one day thought it might be more responsible to put a successor in place. And we did that. And over those 16 months, by the way, really tough time to be a new CEO in anything stepping in the middle of a pandemic. Really? Oh
Austin Hankwitz (17:38):
My gosh. I know.
Matt Meeker (17:40):
Geez. And for this guy, he also got that added surprise of basically on day one, me going, by the way, we're going public. Bye. So it was a really tall order, but jumped forward 16 months and Hugo passed away, which was very, very sad. But also I was not met with that energy. The energy I felt was more responsibility to him and his legacy and to bark and it was like, you got to keep this alive. It has to be meaningful, it's got to be huge. That's what he deserves, not for me to go throw my head in the sand. So I step back in and as people ask how long I'll be here, I usually tell people I intend to die in the saddle.
Austin Hankwitz (18:28):
Wow, that's inspiring. Well, so kind of now bring the conversation back to whenever you returned, the company's doing a great job driving toward profitability, right? You mentioned consolidating your suppliers and vendors that added about two and a half percent gross margin improvement. You mentioned some website consolidation there and some other ideas. I think for the quarter that subtract I think 3.5% sg a expense year over year now Wall Street's modeling about a four and a 5% gross margin improvement between 24 and 25, another 5% with the sort of expense subtraction there. You talked about briefly about all these incredible things you're doing to help build this company into a profitable multi-billion dollar behemoth. Talk to us about the decision process while also keeping the customer at the forefront of every decision you make, right? I mean, at the end of the day, you are in love with dogs as much as I am, and I'm sure some of these decisions might be a little tough. I mean, give us sort of the play by play on how you are making these decisions while also keeping your customers at the forefront of those outcomes.
Matt Meeker (19:38):
Yeah, there's tension in that. The main place where there's tension for me in that trade-off if you will, is in pricing and just the general idea that the lower the price, the more accessible our products or services are to everyone. But it doesn't matter if you're not profitable and sustainable. So the first thing you have to do is find a way to be alive constantly, consistently. And we've swung into that. We delivered a EBITDA positive quarter, we need to deliver those more consistently and now deliver an EBITDA positive here and then keep going from there. But then it is really the focus is on the mission. And our mission is to make all dogs happy. And the word all is very important in there. It's not to make rich dogs happy or some dogs happy, it's to make all. So we have a responsibility of creating products.
(20:40)
Some products, maybe not all, but some products that are accessible to every dog and every family. We also have a responsibility to take care of or not let out of our sight. Those dogs who don't have a family, those who are hungry, those who are not as fortunate to get a monthly subscription of toys coming through the door when they would just accept a meal on a daily basis. So we've got to balance all of those things. But again, none of it happens if you're not profitable. Eventually you'll just run out of money and you won't serve anyone. So we need the baseline there and you need some buffer in that in order to weather the harder times or the turns that are unexpected. But I don't see us in profit maximization mode for several years for that reason, but also for the reason of we have this long list of expansion ideas that we can invest in and so we can keep moving the growth rate up and up and up as we invest in those. I think when we start to run out of ideas, then maybe the profit starts to expand a bit, but I would view that as a bad sign that we've turned into a slow growth, not interesting out of ideas business rather than,
Austin Hankwitz (22:08):
I mean, let's talk about that for a second, Matt. I know Katie had some really good questions regarding marketing spend, customer acquisition, so I'll let her dive into that. But that's so interesting and I appreciate that additional perspective.
Katie Perry (22:17):
Yeah. Actually before we get into that, I'm curious, when you're talking about expansion, what can you tell us about that? Is that expansion within the core product suite? Are there perhaps other areas of the life cycle of a dog that you guys feel like you can plug into healthcare for pets, things like that?
Matt Meeker (22:35):
There's a whole universe of expansion outside of the core product set. So the core being we have a toy or a play business that's very big, does very well, has great margin. And like I mentioned, there's expansion opportunity in there just continuing to grow it. But also if you start to think about the opportunity to introduce children's toys and sell those to families or to retailers, that's an expansion Just within that vertical you've got consumables where we've barely scratched the surface, a lot of upside there so we can grow there. We've talked a little bit about services and I think when people hear services, they think of a typical dog service like grooming, boarding, daycare, things like that. And generally, I would take the approach that we don't need to invent something if it's already served. If the boarding works for everyone, great. If we have a great idea of how to make it significantly better and make a real business there, awesome.
(23:45)
But I'm viewing the dog opportunity or the dog market or ecosystem as probably the way I envision that human children reviewed a hundred years ago. There were no theme parks, there weren't toy companies that existed for them. It was basically, here's some food and here's your healthcare. And that's what dogs essentially have today. And so when you start to think about that, it's think about every business out there that accommodates a human child and how they do it of restaurants have kids' menus and special events and setups for kids, hotels and resorts have programming for them. And you just kind of keep going on. And very little of that has been designed for dogs who are a significant part of the household in 65 million US households and the spending keeps reflecting that. So there's so much opportunity beyond food and healthcare and where does the dog get a haircut? Not to say those aren't important or good businesses, but they're solve problems. They're more interesting things for us to do.
Katie Perry (24:58):
Super interesting
Austin Hankwitz (24:59):
Lens heard about that was you mentioned the amusement parks. Matt, are we going to get a dog cruise ship? How fun would that be? Listen, we all go, it's like a booze cruise. We're on the ship. We have dogs to pet, all different sizes. They're grooms, they don't smell bad and they know tricks so they can sit and stand and dude, how fun would that be? I would pay a pretty penny to be on a dog only cruise ship.
Matt Meeker (25:25):
I like it. I like it.
Katie Perry (25:27):
Free idea.
Matt Meeker (25:29):
Maybe a bigger capital investment than we can take on today, but it's a good one. I know
Katie Perry (25:34):
I would pay to watch that.
Matt Meeker (25:36):
You'll like where we're going, Austin, I promise.
Katie Perry (25:39):
Well, no, we'll get more into the product suite in a bit, but do want to touch on the AI element? So that was pretty prominent on the call talking about AI implications specific within the marketing and design org. Super interesting to hear how you guys are applying that sounds like it's for creative iteration, things like that. Can you voice over how you are deploying AI within your marketing org and are there other pockets of the business where you see opportunity there in a real way and not just, Hey, we're doing ai. Where's it actually making an impact?
Matt Meeker (26:13):
Yeah, it's something we actually think about a lot and I'm sure every company says that. My co-founder Henrik, is absolutely obsessed with it to the point where he's got an AI podcast, he is been going around a major university speaking about it, he's all in. And so he puts that pressure on me and the organization to keep up. So what we talked about on the call I would say is what I would think of as pretty of using AI technologies in order to create different iterations faster. Come up with almost like your brainstorming partner of learning how to prompt and get back something that's the starter of a creative unit or a creative execution and then have many iterations off of that to power your AB testing. All that seems straightforward and table stakes. And it's kind of in line with can you take AI bots or agents and deploy them against your customer service?
(27:22)
I think everybody is thinking that way and should be doing that. One of the more interesting things that I have to give Henrik credit for is Henrik. For years, since the beginning, he is been our, I'll call him our brand snob. He's the one who leads the Bark brand and all the standards and is very, very particular about what we do, how we do it, how we say it, what it looks like. And it's tough for one human to do that across hundreds or thousands of employees. What he has done is he created an LLM basically a bot. I call it the Henrik bot. He calls it the brand bot, but it's the opportunity for anyone in the company to bring an asset. Here's a product or here's an ad unit, a creative execution, copy, whatever, bring it, put it to the brand bot and say, is this on brand and get it back?
(28:20)
Yep, absolutely. That's on Bark Brand or no, it's not. But also a very detailed explanation as to why it is or is not. And it's spot on with the way Henrik would say that to someone. So now we've taken him and scaled him across the whole organization. You can be proactive with that and ask the bot, did I do it right? If the bot says, no, you might, let's use a food bag, a real thing. We can show them a Purina bag and say, is this on brand for bark? And we will get a no, can ask why. It'll explain why. And then we say, can you make a food bag that's bark and in a second here's a food bag? And then you can start to iterate off of it. And when we do that, you get the reaction internally of like, it's actually pretty good.
Katie Perry (29:12):
It'll surprise you. I actually got into, I'll say a borderline argument last week with somebody who was bullish on automating all marketing functions with ai. And I'm a writer by background and I was like, well, chat g PT sucks at writing. And he's like, change the make a custom GPT, upload all your writing, all your documents, train it. So now I have this writing intern that has basically scaled me, and that's something for the folks at home. You guys can go play with that right now. But I think that's fascinating with fielding those inputs and like you said, scaling a special talent with an org like you mentioned using ai. Super interesting.
Matt Meeker (29:49):
It's fascinating. And as you learn to prompt it better and better, the way I've started to think about it is that prompting it is no different than prompting the team that reports to me of like, I need to give you really clear instruction about what we're trying to accomplish here. And then you're bringing work back to me. It's usually bringing work back to you in a few seconds and not a few days, but you can go so much faster. And when the work comes back and it's not quite what you were looking for, that's where you start to make those adjustments. And so we've done that on the brand side and we're starting to deploy that. I think that opportunities in everything, think of the people function of how many of us have questions about how can we use our healthcare benefits? And you can read through the policy documents that are all created, but nobody ever does be able to ask an agent, a bot, just What's my deductible for this? That's it scales that whole organization. And it's not to say, all right, great, get rid of all the people because you need those people to populate and train and prompt. But it's a very different skill now. Yeah,
Austin Hankwitz (31:11):
Definitely. Absolutely. Well, speaking of brand,
Matt Meeker (31:15):
I went on and on there. I'm sorry about that.
Austin Hankwitz (31:17):
Oh no, this is great, man. No, that was awesome. I'm learning so much. I didn't even, honestly, I'm such a noob to ai. I'm learning AI right here in this episode. Well listen, you mentioned brand and I want to talk about brand a little bit specifically brand awareness, given your partnership with Target. Can you talk a little bit about how you guys approach retail partnerships in general, not just from a revenue play but also a brand awareness play? Cause I think that's really important that some listeners right now might not be connecting the dots on
Matt Meeker (31:46):
Our marketing. If we have a poor model, it's my fault because we spend a lot of our dollars and our energy is in direct response and mainly digital direct response. And that's based on me. I'm a numbers guy. I grew up in digital direct response. I'm obsessed with a CAC and a CAC to LTV calculation. And not to say there's anything wrong with it, but when it's a hundred percent of your playbook, maybe you've over indexed in that direction. So at the same time, we have to create awareness and we've done so digitally through social media, big followings there, a lot of engagement there. When we think of brand out in the world, like you're talking about in target stores or the 40,000 retail doors we're in, including Duncan stores and Subaru dealerships. And when a Girl Scout goes to a door, we think of the brand as how you show up in the world and where you show up and it's fine.
(32:54)
It's great actually to show up in a target store or a Duncan location. We want to start from the place of when we show up somewhere that it catches everyone's attention and brings them into bark's world or makes them aware that we exist in the first place. But we've started with how do we want to make an impact? And then we back our way into, okay, if that's the impact we want to make, where is the best place to do it? And then what's the product or experience we need to craft in order to make that happen with the retail partners, you need products on shelf in order to make them money, make you money, sustain that. But the awareness really can be mutually beneficial. So in a target store, if we're on an end cap, we'll have 30 million people a week passing by our products and our brand across 1800 stores and then Walmart and Duncan. And so this is the best kind of awareness that you can get where you can build a profitable business model and achieve that kind of awareness. We need more ideas and more awareness driving activity beyond just the retail channel as well.
Austin Hankwitz (34:08):
Did I read in your recent earnings, Matt, that you guys are also in Costco? Did I read that correctly?
Matt Meeker (34:13):
Yeah, yeah. Very cool. Yeah, they're very fun. And that's some of the best stuff where that idea of how we show up comes alive. I
Katie Perry (34:23):
Was going to say, are there anything coming on the snack section next to the hot dogs?
Matt Meeker (34:30):
The first product we ever did for them was we created a food court bundle. So it was a big package with four items from their food court presented in that, and they were all toys.
Katie Perry (34:42):
Oh my God.
Austin Hankwitz (34:43):
So they were the buck 50 hot dog toy. I love it. Perfect. Yeah,
Matt Meeker (34:47):
Yeah, they love that. And I'll say that they recently introduced in the food court, like this giant cookie. I don't know if you've seen that. Yes. And so we're a little bit obsessed with the giant cookie right now and thinking what we could do with that. Oh my
Austin Hankwitz (35:02):
God. Oh my gosh. That's awesome. Well listen, before we jump into a little bit more about your background and leadership style, I just want to give you the opportunity. You've gone through the gauntlet, right? Earnings calls are stressful, wall Street's asking you questions left and right. I've asked you plenty of questions. So is Katie here, do you have any sort of questions you wish someone had asked you but never asked yet as it relates to this earnings or even your company in general? Something you just want to scream from the mountaintops and answer to?
Matt Meeker (35:30):
Wow, that's a good question. I don't know. No, nothing's leaping to mind. It's such a good question and I'm letting you down here. I don't know, I have to think on
Austin Hankwitz (35:41):
That. No, that's cool. You're good. I just want to, someone might be working on something fun behind the scenes. You never know.
Katie Perry (35:47):
Did man, your PR team's going to give you a word about that one. That was a,
Matt Meeker (35:51):
It's quite the opposite. We are working on a lot of things and usually the notes coming into this is like, do not talk about this thing.
Katie Perry (35:57):
Okay, amazing. All good.
Austin Hankwitz (35:59):
Usually
Matt Meeker (35:59):
I get in trouble for saying too much. Okay.
Katie Perry (36:02):
Yeah, that kind of goes with the Instagram strategy. It seems you've laid out as well, so you sound like a fun CEO.
Matt Meeker (36:11):
I have my moments. We'll see.
Austin Hankwitz (36:13):
I did a little bit of, as I mentioned before, some browsing on your LinkedIn. I saw Hugo. Awesome, awesome profile picture. But I also saw a little bit of little background there on being a founder of meetup.com. How the heck did you go from meetup.com to bark? How did you make that? What happened? Give us the background, the play by play. Everything you can.
Matt Meeker (36:41):
I just don't interview well for jobs. So the only job I can get is one that I create for myself. And Meetup came off of the heels of starting another company and my first try of starting a company where I did everything wrong or we collectively did everything wrong, made every mistake in the book, shut it down, and then instantly went into Meetup and said, we'll do ITing the opposite. That's got to work. And it turned out it did work really well. The inspiration for Meetup though, really came from the time period we were living in one of my co-founders, Scott and I, living in New York at the time, both in the ashes of startups and we were talking day to day about ideas every which way we could go. One was that we would open a fine dining restaurant in New York City that only served breakfast cereal and we took it very, very seriously.
(37:46)
So there were a lot of ideas discussed. Meetup was one of them. But the reason it stuck with us, this was late 2001, early 2002, so right after nine 11, there was a very different feel in the streets of New York where you'd walk down the streets and people would say to you, how are you doing? But they meant it strangers. They wanted to hear, how are you doing? People are stopping on the sidewalks to engage. And that's faded as things do over 20 years. But it really hit us of like, this is powerful. When neighbors are coming together and truly connecting and caring about people, that's powerful. So we wanted to set up a mechanism where it was structurally and societally safe to meet strangers who you met on the internet, which was not a given at the time. It was actually the opposite. So great time learned a lot from Meetup, really fun building the business, great partners.
(38:49)
And then I exited after seven years, I went to the venture capital side. I had what I describe as the dream job, running an incubator, hosting 20 startups at a time and helping them be successful. And then after six months off they went. It was really fantastic and I would've done that for the rest of my life, but I brought Hugo into my life and he was a great Dane. He lived in New York. Pet stores don't wait for Great Danes to come through the door. And it was like, he needs stuff. He needs stuff that I can't find or can't get anywhere else. And that led to the idea of the box and we launched it and seven or eight months later, it was going so well that it yanked me in. And my life has never been the same since. What a great
Katie Perry (39:39):
Story. Yeah, that's incredible. I think meetup.com too, it's still up and running. It's still doing its thing.
Matt Meeker (39:46):
It is, yeah. It's great to see that. It is.
Katie Perry (39:50):
Yeah. It lives on, not a lot of things from that time of the internet have lived on. I was in New York in the 2000 tens and the pivot to video era and it's been crazy seeing Vice buzzfeed all of these headlines, but it's pretty impressive. That's been going for so long
Matt Meeker (40:06):
And there's got to be a lot of credit to the team that's doing that, who I don't know at all. It's kind of a bizarre thing. If I walked into the building today, everyone would be like, who's that guy?
Katie Perry (40:17):
Security? Yeah. That's awesome. One thing I noticed in the earnings call transcript was the use of the word momentum. And that really stuck out to me because I really believe that in business, in life, momentum is so important. So speed, the power, the energy and things happening in a cadence order. Can you talk about how you think about momentum as a leader, how you build momentum within the company and how you sustain it through great times, not so great times?
Matt Meeker (40:48):
Yeah, I agree with you and I think kind of the straightforward answer, and I mentioned I'm very metrics oriented. I've had a process for a very long time going back to the start of Meetup and even before that and other jobs or businesses where I wake up on Sunday morning, I'm starting to analyze or look at the data from the week before and make sense of it, and I do it for myself. But then since stepping into a CEO role, I've got this added responsibility of communicating that and making sense of that for the team. And sometimes it's not always good news. So I think the consistency of the message, just having a message from me every week and saying, this is how things are going. And when they're not good, being very clear of this isn't good and we need to address it and here's how we'll address it or who's responsible, and we're looking at them to find the way out of this.
(41:59)
But when it is good, everybody wants to talk about the positive things that are happening and highlight those. And there are always positive things in every business. And so really taking great effort to highlight the positives and celebrate the positives and even one of our approaches is I think there's a lot of, across a lot of businesses or companies, people tend to focus on fixing the things that aren't going well and you need to do that, but we actually take good effort to look at the things that are going well and ask ourselves why are they going well and what can we do to make them go better or capitalize on that more and maybe put the negatives out of our line of sight unless it's going to be fatal if you're doing that. So really doubling down on the winners, looking for the bright spots and amplifying the bright spots is part of that. So
Austin Hankwitz (43:04):
Then I want to just follow up with real quick, Matt, and maybe I'm wrong here, but when I was reading your earnings called transcript, either you or your CFO mentioned, and this was sort of like a closing remark. You're like the underlying momentum and excitement for the business is not reflected right now in the stock price. As you lead hundreds if not thousands of employees, how do you help get that point across to them? Because people are people, we see numbers go up and down and we see things and we hear headlines. All those different types of outside just channels are always sort of distracting us as employees or other team members of a larger organization. How do you help people and specifically your employees kind of keep the blinders on of just like, this is the goal, here's where we're going and just come along for the ride.
Matt Meeker (43:53):
This is the hardest or worst part of being a public company, CEO and the earnings calls, the interactions with investors, whatever the bad things that people say about the role are, those don't bother me at all. I like the earnings calls. They're fun. They force you to organize your thinking, and you get to meet smart people who give you a new way to think about your business. So I like that. This is hard. This is constantly saying, you got to keep the faith when over this period of time, there's no reason to. Our stock has been bloodied. And a lot of that has to do with the sectors that we're viewed in. We're a spac, we're a pet company, we're a direct to consumer, we're on profitable. We are the trifecta of things that are not favorable in the market at this time. And so you kind of have to just keep repeating to them and to yourself that if we do the right things, if we build a business that's growing and profitable over time, this rights itself.
(45:03)
But it's convincing yourself as much as it is convincing your team. So part of that goes back to the hiring and the people you bring in. And I feel like we're fortunate that we have a lot of people on the team and the people that we hire are what I'd say true believers who they want to work at Bark because of the brand and who we are and the opportunity to serve this customer and they see the growth potential. And that would be really nice if we got 10 times our stock price, but there's so much more great quality of life or quality of career in there and so much belief that'll take care of itself. But it's a really difficult thing to manage. You're absolutely right, and I don't know any way around it.
Austin Hankwitz (45:58):
That was a great answer. And you're absolutely correct, right? Just sticking to the plan, executing the plan, and ensuring that you're hiring the right people that believe in the mission and the long-term vision. I love it.
Katie Perry (46:10):
Alright, Matt, so I know we got a wrap soon, but we had one more. We were curious. We were also stalking and saw you went to school in Minnesota, so we were wondering if you could do a Minnesota accent for us.
Matt Meeker (46:22):
I'd never had one, but my Uncle Vaughn has the Minnesota accent, so I have to channel him. He's the friendliest guy, so I'm trying to channel coming into his home for Christmas. It's like, okay, here we go. So hard. Hey, how are you doing? Oh, it's good to see you. How's everything?
Austin Hankwitz (46:44):
I love it. Let's go, Matt. Round of applause. What a guy. That
Katie Perry (46:48):
Was awesome. Was that Amy that Matt? I don't know.
Matt Meeker (46:51):
That's a first for an interview, I've got to say. Yes.
Austin Hankwitz (46:55):
That's what we like to hear. Well, Matt, thanks so much for hanging out with us on this episode of After Earnings. It was incredible learning more about your background, the company you've built, all the intricacies as it relates to customer acquisition, all the perspective you all added on artificial intelligence. And again, congrats on the New Dog cereal.
Matt Meeker (47:13):
Thank you so much. It was a lot of fun. Can I come back sometime?
Austin Hankwitz (47:18):
Absolutely. Yeah, let's do it. We'll see you back in six weeks. Wow, Katie, what an incredible conversation with Matt Meeker, that Minnesota accent. I was not expecting that.
Katie Perry (47:28):
And that was a level of transparency you do not often get from CEOs. I got to say,
Austin Hankwitz (47:34):
Yo, a hundred percent. I mean, the way that he talked about his ai, he was talking about the Girl Scout stuff. I mean, could you imagine a Girl Scout knocking on your door with dog treats and cookies? I would say yes immediately.
Katie Perry (47:46):
Totally. I am so bullish on the Girl Scouts, they could sell anything, and I think that's a smart move by Bark. I also loved hearing about their retail strategy. They came up as a direct to consumer brand. They have this retail component now. Super interesting. And he did a great job of breaking down how those two lines of business work
Austin Hankwitz (48:04):
A hundred percent. And I really agree with him from the perspective of the profitability, right? He's like, we want to serve all dogs, but we can't serve all dogs unless we have money to serve all dogs. Therefore we need to be more efficient as a company and things of that nature. I mean, it was a great conversation. What an awesome, awesome guest and looking forward to having a back on the show.
Katie Perry (48:25):
I'm Katie Perry.
Austin Hankwitz (48:26):
And I'm Austin Hankwitz,
Katie Perry (48:28):
And this was the After Earnings podcast brought to you by Stakeholder Labs and Morning Brew.
Austin Hankwitz (48:33):
Be sure to subscribe and share this episode with a friend if you learn something, and we look forward to catching you on our next episode.
