Fireside Chat with Mark Barrocas, CEO of SharkNinja

Yeah. Well, look, I mean, thanks for having me. Let's start with what's Shark and Ninja's core DNA and that is we're great consumer problem solvers. We like to say that we see problems that others don't and we solve problems that others can't. You might ask how unique is that? What type of superpower? What type of moat is that? For us, we were a business here in Massachusetts going back 2008. We did under $200 million in revenue. We were a small startup in West Newton. Fast forward to today, we're a business that'll do over $7 billion this year in revenue and over a billion dollars in EBITDA. We've never acquired a dollar of revenue. We've entered into 39 different product categories. We sell them in 30 different countries around the world. The common theme through all the product categories we go into is finding a known or unknown problem. We do that through going into consumer homes and observing consumers. We go into places like restaurants and look at how people cook. We look at offices and how people are cleaning. We scrub social media content and online reviews, looking for the nugget or white space that we think we can develop and exploit. We built a team of 300 engineers around the world, based in Boston, London, and Asia, that developed this into what we call wow products for consumers. You see it come to life: we're the second largest vacuum brand in the world, the largest kitchen appliance brand in the world, the fastest growing beauty tools company in the world. And it goes on and on. In 2009, I wrote a mission statement for the business: positively impacting people's lives every day in every home around the world. That is really what we do. This business is maniacally focused around the consumer and delighting the consumer. We built a business around marketing, sales, and operations all centered on the consumer. Part of what grew our business was the online review. Ivonne talked about the idea of email. I'll take you back to 2009. A big US retailer was asking what our strategy was. At the end of the presentation, I said to them, 'We're going to win one five-star review at a time.' The guy looked at me like I had two heads. Sometimes when something comes out of your mouth and you think it's really smart, and then you look at the person on the other side of the table and they think it's pretty stupid. They said, 'Who's going to write an online review about your products? You're in a low engagement category.' I said, 'I feel like I'm in a high engagement category. I didn't realize that.' And you look today, 18 years later, we have built our business one five-star review at a time.

Look, I mean, this is a company that actually thrives in crisis. Part of why we thrive in crisis is because we don't commiserate over it. We think that it's an opportunity where there's a level playing field and our job is to outplay the next person. So, the president announced his tariffs on liberation day and he ended at about 4:45 in the afternoon. My CFO walked into my office and he spent 15 minutes just railing about every reason why the president is not great. I looked at him after 10 minutes and I said, 'Are you done?' He said, 'Yes.' I said, 'Game on.' He said, 'What do you mean?' At 8 o'clock the next morning, I got 200 of the senior executives in the company and I said, 'The impact of the tariffs is going to be hundreds of millions of dollars on our business. We have a choice right now. We could say, "Well, this will never stick and who knows what happens, woe is me." But I want to shut down the entire business and in eight days I want to mitigate the total impact of the tariff.' This idea of shutting down the business is not something new for us. We do this routinely. Most people think that if something's important, we'll schedule a meeting a week from now. We'll put an hour on the calendar and then schedule another meeting a week from now. If you've really built a great business, your business is going to be around if you just stop everything today. Whatever is most important for you to do, do it today. So we decided we are stopping the entire company. When I say the entire company, we got into teams and eight days later, we came up with 1,500 initiatives on the buy side, on the sell side, and the operating expense side. We mitigated 93% of the impact of tariffs by the following Friday. Three weeks later, I went and did our conference call. We're a public company. I said, 'Not only did we have a great quarter, but we're beating and raising our quarter.' They said, 'How can you do that? There's so much uncertainty.' I said, 'There's actually not uncertainty. In business, you're dealt a deck of cards and you got to play the deck of cards that you're dealt. All too often in business, you're trying to justify the cards, explain the cards, hope the cards change. At that moment, the tariffs were what they were. 40%. That is what it is. Three weeks later, we were able to confidently say if the tariffs remain at the current rate, we're confident that we can grow our revenue and grow our earnings in light of that. It wasn't one silver bullet. There were initiatives down to $10,000, but when you add it up across 1,500 of them, and then you execute it, fast forward to the full year 2025, in spite of tariffs, the company actually grew its gross margin year.