A Pennsylvania company that grew out of one large dog.

Big Barker is an American dog bed brand built around beds for large dogs. Its own story begins with one dog. The company’s 2022 press kit names its president as Eric Shannon and pairs him with Hank, the dog whose search for a suitable bed the brand presents as its starting point. The same press kit says Shannon has been in the dog bed business since 2006, and a PhillyVoice report published on 21 February 2017 also said the company had started in 2006, describing Big Barker as a business based in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, in the suburbs north-west of Philadelphia.

The product the brand is named for came later. On its own “About us” page, the company says the Big Barker Original Orthopedic Bed “was born in 2012”, and it treats that bed as the centre of everything that followed. The page tells the story without naming Shannon at all, speaking instead of one big, loyal dog and the person who wanted a proper bed for it. The press kit fills in the names, and a 2023 trade report in dvm360 identified Shannon as the founder of Big Barker. Read together, the sources date the company to 2006 and the Original bed to 2012.

Size is part of the name and part of the pitch. The brand addresses owners of large and giant breeds directly, and its press kit frames the whole company around big dogs and the beds they sleep on.

The press kit also gives the brand’s founder a light, self-deprecating introduction. In the section about Shannon, it says that “his family thinks he spends too much time thinking about dog beds”, and adds that big dogs appreciate the results. The company’s own pages use a similar personal tone, telling the brand’s story through one owner and his dog.

Made in America, with a Pennsylvania workshop.

Where the beds are made is central to how Big Barker presents itself. The company says its beds are “handcrafted in the USA” and “still made in America”, and its 2022 press kit describes them as hand-crafted and American-made. Independent coverage places that work in the company’s home state: in its report of 17 April 2023, dvm360 said each bed was handmade at Big Barker’s Pennsylvania workshop. The made-in-America message appears on the brand’s own pages alongside the bed itself.

The same dvm360 report is also the clearest dated statement of who owns the company. It described Big Barker as a majority-owned brand of Tenth Avenue Holdings, while still naming Shannon as founder. The report did not give a date for that investment, so the ownership can be stated only as it stood in April 2023. The article also listed the beds then in the range: the Headrest Edition, Sleek Edition and Sofa Edition versions of the Original bed, crate pads, and a bed for the back seat of a car sold as the Backseat Barker.

The brand has since widened its own name. On its current site, the company says it grew from “Big Barker” to “Barker Beds” so that it could serve dogs of every size, and the copyright line on that site now reads Barker Beds.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all make beds for dogs. Dog bed brands in general sit at many different points in the pet trade, from small workshops run by the people who started them to names that now belong to much larger pet companies, textile manufacturers or investment groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a specialty pet shop to an online marketplace or a hardware store.

A dog bed brand’s identity is usually carried less by one bed than by a name, a mark, its fabrics and colourways and the way its range is described and packaged, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown well beyond its first product. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its beds are actually designed and made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its beds are made and how its range and packaging have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Police dogs, a travel bed and a wider family name.

Big Barker’s most widely reported moment of local publicity came from Philadelphia. In February 2017, PhillyVoice reported that the company had donated beds to the Philadelphia Police Department’s K-9 unit, so that each of the city’s police dogs received a bed of its own. The department marked the donation on social media, and PhillyVoice quoted its post saying the company had “donated mats to our K9 Unit so our pooches can better enjoy their downtime”. The report described the beds as designed for large dogs, in keeping with the brand’s focus.

Around the Original bed, the company has built a small family of products under the same name. Its current pages list the Original bed in its Sleek, Headrest and Sofa editions, the Fold-N-Go Travel Dog Bed, crate beds, replacement covers and liners, a blanket and a throw pillow. The naming is direct and descriptive: the edition names say what shape the bed is, and the travel bed’s name says what it does. That plain, literal approach runs from the Big Barker name itself to the Barker Beds name the company uses today.

The smaller items follow the same habit with a little more play. The current site lists a Snuggle Up Blanket and a Cozy Up Throw Pillow, while the car bed reported by dvm360 in 2023 took the rhyming name Backseat Barker. The word “Barker” does most of the work across the range, turning up in the company name, the car bed and the wider Barker Beds label, so that a shopper meets the same word at almost every step.

For a design guide, Big Barker shows how a brand can be built around one dog, one bed and a made-in-America message, then widen its name without letting go of the original. Compare Furhaven, the Bellingham, Washington, pet bed brand, and PetFusion, another bed and furniture brand that kept its name inside a larger group. For this guide we use charcoal gray, saddle tan and linen with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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