I joined BARK to help them establish and scale products in a new channel. After 18 months my efforts helped us make $10M from 2 products: dog beds and poop bags.
Two of the biggest categories of dog lifestyle products on Amazon are poop bags and dog beds. I did a lot of product research using JungleScout for keyword research and scanned dozens of product detail pages to understand how sellers were positioning their products for success. The keyword research helped us understand what customers wanted and were looking for, and the product detail page research helped me understand where the design and marketing gaps were. As a brand, BARK is known for funny, irreverent moments that make having a dog even more delightful than it already is. I knew we had to offer customers what they were looking for AND stand out against all the other very commodified products in both categories in order to drive our initial sales. I worked with the creative team to develop versions of our poop bags that would resonate with the majority of dog parents in the US (millennials), and packaged our dog beds with a “pup and the pea” theme, inclusive of a previously viral BarkBox pea toy.
At the time, the Amazon flywheel for 3rd party sellers involved a combination of 1) daily sales of product 2) average rating 3) number of positive reviews/ratio of reviews to sales and 4) reviews with real photos of the product were weighted more heavily in the success algorithm. I used JungleScout to understand how many dog beds and poop bags we needed to sell every day to be in the top 3 spots on the 1st results page for the highest volume keywords and then I built a daily pipeline of customers using a subset of BarkBox’s existing customer base and by pairing our email marketing with a Messenger chatbot service, ManyChat.
Our packaging, design, and in-box marketing set up our SKUs to outperform others on the ratio of reviews to sales, as well as the proportion of reviews with photos included. My strategy of supporting organic Amazon customer sales with a number of daily sales from BARK’s existing customer base helped us achieve the daily sales goal we needed to move up to the 2nd spot on the 1st search results page for the top 5 queries for dog beds and poop bags. After several weeks in that spot, I was able to sustain the position by making regular product detail page adjustents and investing a small budget in ads. Within 18 months, we’d sold $10M in products as a 3rd party seller on Amazon.
