About BarkBox
Bark is a dog product company. It designs products and experiences for dogs and the people who love them, and it is best known for Barkbox, a direct-to-consumer subscription that ships monthly themed boxes of toys and treats. Bark also runs other subscription experiences and add-on products. More recently the company has leaned into a broader commerce strategy, connecting with major national retailers across the United States and expanding into marketplaces.
What do they do?
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The data landscape at Bark
All of it lands in BigQuery, which the team runs as its single source of truth.
When Brandon joined, Bark was running on an AWS / Redshift stack that he describes as fairly disjointed, with little in the way of a modern design. Pipelines fed into single tables that were also used for downstream reporting, so the same tables were constantly being written to and read from. That created recurring performance problems and expected downtime whenever the team needed to make changes. Many sources also landed without proper modeling, so there wasn't always a reliable source of truth.
The team took on the work of modernizing the stack and eventually moved onto BigQuery. That let them tackle the issues they had identified one by one. Introducing dbt let them model data correctly and set layered access. End users now see a clean, built-out single source of truth rather than the underlying tinkering, because their access is scoped to a governed warehouse layer.
Before Hevo, ingestion was a mix. Bark used CDP tooling for some data and a custom, REST-API-based pipeline for the rest, built to handle the load of an earlier period. As Shopify became central to the business and volume climbed, that custom pipeline started hitting data-freshness issues the team had to act on right away. Shopify data was now core to the business, so they needed a reliable product to own that ingestion, ideally with a backup on their own side.
Once you're in there and you can look at the numbers yourself, you can see it's a very costly tool. Month over month it just kept getting bigger and bigger, and we saw where it would end up. No, this isn't a tenable product for us anymore.
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