Manish Joneja
Analyst · Jeffries. Your line is open
Thanks, Mike. And good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining our first earnings call trading under the BARK ticker. I would also like to thank our employees, customers and partners for contributions and continued support. Given this is a first earnings call, I will take the opportunity to reiterate BARK’s mission, highlight the durable secular tailwinds that we are benefitting from and ultimately share why we believe BARK is uniquely positioned to capture market share and deliver long-term shareholder value. I will then turn the call over to John Toth, BARK’s CFO to walk you through our recent financial performance in more detail. First let's begin with some key highlights from our strong first quarter. Fiscal 2022 is off to a great start. We saw robust growth in subscription shipments, but in total revenue to the top-end of our guidance range. Our top-line was a gain by strong margins and healthy customer acquisition costs. In fact, our customer acquisition costs were lower last quarter during the quarter is going back to fiscal 2019, despite doubling our subscription base over that time period. Looking at the business in more detail. Revenue in our core direct-to-consumer segment came in at $105 million, an impressive 55% increase year-over-year. We added 280,000 new subscriptions last quarter, bringing total active subscriptions to over 1.9 million. We delivered a record 3.6 million subscriptions shipments in the quarter, a 52% increase compared to the same period last year. Our add-to-box feature which reflects our cross selling capabilities also drove significant growth, accounting for over $7 million in revenue in the quarter, a 174% increase compared to last year. Average order value was also up $0.87 cents to $29.21 versus last year. Turning to our commerce business, which includes sales of BARK products to retailers such as Target, Costco and Amazon. Total Revenue in this segment was $12.2 million, a 59% increase year-over-year, driven by growth in revenue from both existing partners as well as new partners such as Lowes. This performance is encouraging as a segment helps broaden awareness of BARK and presents an opportunity for us to convert these customers to monthly subscribers. We have had a lot of recent success in this segment. To date, 20 individual skews have topped $1 million in sales at a single retail partner, with 7 falling between $2 million and $4 million. Our total revenue for the first quarter was $117.6 million, which came in at the top-end of our guidance range for the quarter while maintaining our best in industry gross margin at 59% plus. We were also pleased with our customer acquisition costs which came in at $40.36, down 6% from the previous quarter. This in an environment of raising media costs, additionally, the customers we acquired for a higher value, thereby delivering a healthy 3 to 4 months payback on a gross margin basis. On a year-over-year basis, our CAC was up from particularly low, $30.83 we had achieved last year. However, this comparison isn't as relevant in our view, as we were lapping impacts from COVID which resulted in lower than normal customer acquisition costs. Nonetheless, we are extremely pleased with a strong start of the fiscal year, and believe we are strongly positioned to capitalize on the immense market opportunity. Taking a step back, I would like to reiterate the broader BARK opportunities for those in the call that are newer to our story. BARK’s mission is simple and has not changed since our first [Indiscernible] nine years ago make all dogs happy. Our customer service, our happy team and wellness advisors help us build lifelong relationships with dogs and their parents, that strives high retention and lifetime value. This is a core and highly differentiating asset, particularly as we expand into new product categories like food and health. As a positive experience, our customers have had with BarkBox products will have a halo effect on our newer categories, which are larger addressable markets and are less discretionary. On the broader industry side, we continue to benefit from durable secular tailwinds. Globally, BARK ownership continues to grow at a healthy flip. Today an estimated 63 million households in the U.S. own a dog, of which we serve only 1.9 million. Internationally that figure is much higher. Furthermore, the humanization of pets is an ongoing trend that we continue to benefit from. Dog parents are spending more time and more money on their pets, often viewing them as members of the family. This is particularly apparent amongst millennials and Gen Z. This presents a significant opportunity for BARK to grow its market share across our fun, food, health and home verticals. So why is BARK uniquely positioned to capitalize on these rising tides? First, we have an incredible asset and our customer experience happy team, which delivers highly personalized experiences and ensures complete customer satisfaction. To that end, our customer satisfaction scores have been around 95% for the past 4 years. Second, we leverage our growing data set to personalize and optimize our products at scale. This data enables us to better understand our customers' needs, while machine learning capabilities allow us to predict and tailor our suite of products for your dog, based on age, weight, breed and more. Furthermore, this data better enables us to cross sell products and recommend specific individualized add on products for our customers, which strives higher average order value and margin accretion. Third, we're the only vertically integrated dog brand. All of our product categories are designed, manufactured and distributed by us. BARK is a brand, we are not a marketplace selling third-party products. We are happy to sell our products to marketplaces to reach all dog parents and further raise brand awareness. In the same way that Nike sells its sneakers in Foot Locker. However, the value proposition is different across these businesses. For example, we regularly partner with other iconic brands like Warner Brothers and the NBA. Our margins are 2 to 3 times higher than that of a traditional pet marketplace, and a social media presence, which exceeds 9 million followers across the various channels is significantly larger. To put that last figure in context, or BarkBox Instagram handle alone has more followers than iconic lifestyle brands such as Peloton, Opi [ph] and Beyond Meat, which is extremely powerful, as it serves as a force multiplier for us to launch and market new products and categories. Lastly, we are only channel. We sell products direct to consumer, but we also leverage partnerships with top retailers like Petco and PetSmart in addition to the ones I mentioned before. You can buy BarkBox toys waiting in line and Dunkin Donuts walking through the cost of food growth as shown in for the Pet Island Target. So how do we intend to capitalize on these opportunities and deliver long-term shareholder value? To that end, we remain focused on the following key growth strategies: one, expansion to new product categories; two, scaling and optimizing existing products; three, enhancing cross selling any add on opportunities; four, increasing our presence in retailers and other marketplaces. I will touch on each of these but first, I'd like to spend some additional time on our expansion into new categories. We are more than just a dog product company. We are the only company offering dogs and the parents a suite of products spanning the 4 pet categories, fun, food, health and home. We are replicating the success we have had in the fun category by applying our learnings and data into our newer categories, extend the lifetime value of our customers and drive increases in average order value. While we are still an early days, we have progressed in these categories, and we are confident that the halo effect from our BarkBox success will enable us to replicate our success across new initiatives such as Bark Bright and Eats. BARK Eats is a highly personalized meal plan created for your specific dog and delivered in portion daily needs. Our wellness advisors work with dog parents to understand their dog and create a meal plan consisting of high quality kibbles, toppers and other supplements. Our nutritionists maintain ongoing relationships with our customers, navigating their dog's wellness over time and amending different meal plans and supplements as their dog matures. Currently, personalization in the kibble market is limited and generally consists of a label on the bag indicating puppy, a dog or senior. This presents BARK with the significant opportunity to capture market share of the $40 billion plus kibble business in the United States alone, by creating a highly personalized and premium product at a more mass market price point. We are confident in our ability to scale this business as we leverage our data and customers from our existing play category. Given the magnitude of the opportunity, investing in our each product and infrastructure is a key priority, which will enable us to reach more markets in line with the plan for full national rollout by end of fiscal year. We have also made a number of recent enhancements in our Eats products as well. First, we redesigned the packaging to be more consistent with a brand identity. We also launched an act [ph] dog’s feature for existing BarkBox and Super Chewer customers, which will allow us to process into our 1.9 million active subscriptions. This will enable our current subscribers to add each from their existing dashboard in a couple of easy clicks. The same is true for our proprietary Bright dental product as well as home products like Bed. While it’s still early days, we are extremely pleased with the early reception of Eats. We cannot provide specific numbers of this time. However, July was by far our strongest month to date, and it is looking like August will be even stronger. The encouraging early data from Eats is notwithstanding the fact that we have spent minimal marketing dollars. Most of our customer acquisition has been through word of mouth. One of our founders Carly Strife is leading Eats for us and is dedicated to its long-term success. All in all, we are excited about these new categories and look forward to updating you on our progress over the coming months. Moving on. Our second priority is to continue scaling and optimizing our toy and treat subscription business. Our passionate Happy Team engages over 250,000 customers per month. We learn about you and your dog, which helps deepen our connection with the customer and provides us with valuable insights and data. Our creative team then leverages this data to inform product design and development decisions as part of the flywheel. Our third priority is to enhance cross selling opportunities to utilize our data-centric model to recommend add-ons. Historically, this has focused on just toys and treats. However, we are scaling this opportunity by including the Eats and Bright and Home products as additional add on features. This is a meaningful opportunity for us as we look to grow average order value and extend the lifetime value of a customer. As I mentioned, we increased our add-to-box revenue by 174% last quarter. We anticipate additional growth as we execute on these priorities and continue to improve our machine learning capabilities, enabling us across all our products more effectively. And fourth, we are focused on increasing brand partnerships and retail distribution. We have had the privilege of partnering with some truly iconic brands including the NBA, Warner Brothers, Universal Studios, Dunkin Donuts and more. These partnerships, raise awareness of BARK brand and drive incremental sales. Recently, we signed a unique collaboration with Netflix, which will roll out next year. These types of opportunities remain a key priority and we will continue to secure new and exciting licensing deals. We are also looking to expand our presence in retail. These channels raise the visibility of products and creates additional channels for us to convert onetime sales to monthly subscriptions. In summary, FY’22 is off to a great start and the market opportunity for BARK is immense. Our mission is to make all dogs happy, and we obsess over supporting the unique relationship and bond between each dog and the parent be at home, while many of us work from home or back in office. Our strong brand enables us to effectively scale this business beyond that of a traditional market base or retailer. I’m proud of our team's customer obsession and dogged determination towards disciplined execution to deliver results. We will continue to execute and we look forward to updating you on our progress as we scale the BARK ecosystem. With that I will turn the call over to John.