That's emblematic of SharkNinja. We constantly reinvent ourselves. We were Europro, the Shark Steam Mop company, and today 18-year-old high school kids think of us as the Ninja Creami company and the Shark FlexStyle company. I remember at the end of 2008 being in front of a major US retailer and they asked us about our strategy. At the end of the meeting I said to them, 'We're going to grow our business one five-star review at a time.' And the guy looked at me like I had two heads and said, 'That's the dumbest idea in the world. Who's going to write a review about your products?' Fast forward and people write paragraphs and paragraphs about Shark and Ninja products. That really helped catapult the business. Consumers wanted to make frozen drinks at home but couldn't do restaurant-quality frozen drinks. We looked at it and said, 'Why are the blades on the bottom? Why couldn't we put the blades going up the top?' We ultimately developed that product in 2009 and it instantly resonated. By 2013, we became the number one selling blender in the United States.
I'm Jeff Berman, your host. This week on the show, SharkNinja CEO Mark Barrocas reveals how he turned a struggling mop seller into a global consumer product powerhouse. We discuss the rise of the educated consumer, wildly successful ways to leverage social media, and how the company is weathering the current tariffs.
This is Masters of Scale.
Mark, welcome to Masters of Scale.
Thanks so much for having me. I've been super excited about this conversation.
I want to go back and get some of the history from you, but before we do, I'm not sure that people realize how big SharkNinja is. Can you just set the stage for us and tell us how big the company is today?
Yeah, sure. Our full-year guidance puts us at over $6 billion of revenue this year. We're in 37 different product categories, which surprises most people. We've built two multi-billion dollar brands. We've never acquired a dollar of revenue in the company's history, and we built these two brands this year that will each be over $3 billion in revenue from scratch. We're in 26 countries around the world. So scale, diversification, but still innovating. We still feel like there's a lot more places for us to go inside and outside the home.
Okay, so take us back. When you joined the company, it was not called SharkNinja, right? What was the company and how did you come into it?
So my partner Mark Rosenzweig founded the company. He and I started talking about getting together in 2007. The business had gone through an organized restructuring and we were a small business at the time. It had some good bones. He and I were best friends. I was running a business and he would talk about the challenges he had. The business was called Europro and we had one brand which was Shark, mostly the Shark Steam Mop. We got together in 2008, the start of the financial crisis.
Yeah, not a great time to join a company that was struggling.
No. Honestly, we were both product developers and marketers. I had run businesses before, but we just wanted to get together and felt like if we could develop one hit product a year, it would allow us to make a living. But you'd had some success at this point in your career, you had a lot of options. Why jump into a struggling company? I started a business when I was in college at University of Michigan. I had been trained from a kid by my grandfather that you need to work for yourself. So lots of periods of success and ultimately failure. I was 27, 28 years old, married, my wife was pregnant, and she said you've got to get a job. I did a stint at Aramark, a large public company, and came to realize I wanted to be more entrepreneurial. Mark and I felt like it would be fun to work together, he and I against the world, and we jumped in feet first.
When you and the other Mark came together, how did you build the foundation that let you start scaling into rapidly expanding products? What were the first set of steps you took?
So, we first believe that to build a sustainable long-term business, we had to develop products from the ground up. Easier said than done. We only had a few engineers, so we had to build an engineering team. It was all about affordable, accessible innovation. We wanted to make products for almost everyone. People said we had to be in the opening price segment or the higher price segment, no middle. We took the approach that we can move the opening price consumer up into our brands and also be the brand of choice for premium consumers. A billionaire could own a SharkNinja product and a factory worker could own one, and each gets something from it: the performance, quality, value.
What did you do to get to a place where you could start launching even just one new product a year that customers would love?
Yes. One, Mark and I would spend at least 10-12 times a year in China, finding owner-operator factories to work with. We started with consumer insights and ethnographic research. We didn't build a product development company based on core technology; we wanted to build around consumer problems. Find a consumer problem and then come up with a solution. We've been mining through social media, online reviews, or observing consumers in their homes. Examples: wrapping hair on a brush roll, or consumers doing something outside the house that they can't do inside.
An extreme example from that one is the Ninja Slushie. I know about the Ninja Slushie. Tell us about it.
It's a great example. Consumers go to restaurants like Sonic, not even ordering food, just ordering slushies. People go to 7-Eleven and buy Slurpees. So we felt with this slushie machine, you could pour almost anything with a little sugar or fructose and turn it into a frozen drink. We've had a number of these over 17 years of what consumers do outside the home that they can't do inside.
Going back to the early days, Mark, was there a consumer insight where you all had your first aha moment when you and your partner were like, 'This is our next product, this is what we need to do'?
Yeah, I'll give you a few. We looked at the blender market and saw all blenders had blades on the bottom. When you put ice in, the ice jumped up and your drink became watery. Consumers wanted to make frozen drinks at home but couldn't get restaurant quality. We asked, 'Why are blades on the bottom? Why couldn't we put them on the top?' People said we were crazy, that can't be done. We developed that product in 2009. We went to retailers, bought bags of ice, crushed it to snow in the blenders, and said, 'Go feel it.' They looked at us like we were crazy. We came out with our first Ninja product in 2009 and it instantly resonated. By 2013, we became number one selling blender in the US. We've never looked back. We own 40% market share today. That catapulted the $3 billion Ninja business from that one idea.
It strikes me that part of the genius of getting the blender to the retailers was creating an experiential marketing moment, saying 'No, touch the product, feel it.' That's harder to do with the customer. So was the infomercial the way to show the customer what the product could do, or was there something else?
It absolutely was the infomercial. People looked at infomercials and said, 'These are one-and-done products, you're not building a brand.' But in 2008, the world was changing. Prior to that, if you wanted to buy a vacuum, you bought Consumer Reports which told you eight vacuums to buy. If you weren't one of the eight, it was hard to break through. When I was a kid in New York in the mid-80s, there was a store called Sims with the tagline 'The educated consumer is our best customer.' In 2008, consumers were starting to get educated through online reviews. I remember in 2008 being in front of a major US retailer and saying, 'We're going to grow our business one five-star review at a time.' The guy said, 'That's the dumbest idea. Who will write a review?' Fast forward, people write paragraphs about Shark and Ninja products. That helped catapult the business. Consumers saw demonstrations on infomercials, got educated, went online, and saw feedback saying it worked. This was the great equalizer.
So the world of marketing has changed a lot in the last 17 years. What's changed about how you approach the market given fewer people watch TV and the economics have changed?
Well, every aspect of what we do is centered around what's right for the consumer. We sell through every retail chain in every market to be relevant wherever the consumer chooses to shop. On advertising, we want to be relevant wherever the consumer ingests content. It was infomercials, then 30- and 15-second commercials, then in 2016 Facebook groups, then before COVID social media, and now TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest, YouTube. It continues to move where the consumer moves. That's emblematic of SharkNinja: we constantly reinvent ourselves. We were Europro, the Shark Steam Mop company, and today 18-year-old high school kids think of us as the Ninja Creami company and the Shark FlexStyle company. We have almost two billion impressions on social media. In the last six months, we've done very little advertising on the Ninja Creami — 99.5% of content is generated by consumers.
