Chewy Inc. (NYSE: CHWY), the pet e-commerce retailer headquartered in Dania Beach, Florida, is rapidly growing its presence in the Puget Sound region.
Chewy set up shop in the Seattle area in mid-2021 when it opened a roughly 50,000-square-foot office in Bellevue at the One Twelfth @ Twelfth campus. Mark Eamer, who joined Chewy last year as its chief marketing officer, said the company now has "hundreds" of employees in the Seattle area and is still growing.
"Really the focus here was we want to come to a place where we can hire more product and tech leaders and teams, and we'll opportunistically hire across marketing, HR, customer service and any other big leaders we've seen here," Eamer said. "It quickly exceeded our expectations."
Eamer said Chewy has already hired a handful of senior tech leaders in the area, including multiple senior vice presidents and senior directors. As for Eamer's marketing role, he said Chewy is looking to layer technology onto its current marketing efforts. Eamer was a longtime Amazon veteran before joining Chewy last year.
As for why Chewy chose Bellevue over Seattle for its office, Eamer said the location is more central given Chewy's local employees come from all over the Puget Sound region. Plus, Eamer added, the new office is right off the freeway, which makes it more convenient than many places in downtown Seattle.
Chewy was founded in 2011. Its website allows consumers to shop for pet supplies and food. The company was acquired by PetSmart in 2017 for about $3 billion. Chewy ended up going public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2019. The company also has offices in Boston and Minneapolis.
According to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Chewy had roughly 21,300 employees, both full and part time, as of the end of January. In the company's fourth quarter 2021 financial results, released in March, Chewy reported net sales of $2.39 billion and net losses of $63.6 million for the quarter.
As the company grows its headcount in the Puget Sound area, Eamer said Chewy could look to expand its physical space. He added that the company tried to anticipate work in a post-Covid world when setting up its Bellevue office.
"We really over-indexed on collaborative working areas," Eamer said. "We tried to anticipate that to make an open floor plan, flexible with a lot of areas to collaborate."
