Halo Collar to expand into 2,000+ stores, spends nearly 30% of revenue on marketing
Halo Collar's GPS-tracking dog collars average $500, yet the brand's typical customer household earns roughly $86,000 a year, CMO Seth Solomons told AdExchanger. Founded in 2018, the company has grown annual revenue 35% to 40% in recent years and puts close to 30% of that revenue into marketing. Its collars now sell at Scheels and 50 PetSmart locations, with plans to reach more than 2,000 stores next year. To support that growth, Halo Collar centralizes customer and collar data in Snowflake, links it to third-party sources like Equifax, and targets channels differently: Amazon purchase history informs timing, Meta lifestyle data drives creative selection among roughly 100 variants, and Northbeam measures incrementality across a 30-to-45-day purchase window.
Unaided brand awareness sitting at 17%, against a target of 25% to 30%, shows how much runway a direct-to-consumer brand still has before retail expansion pays off in shelf recognition. Solomons expects live sports, including NASCAR and college football broadcasts, to close that gap, noting that roughly 70% of NASCAR attendees own dogs. The approach signals a broader shift as ecommerce brands enter physical retail: first-party data built for direct response now has to justify upper-funnel spend on television and live events, with incrementality tools like Northbeam tasked with proving the link between awareness campaigns and store sales.