The insights that fuel SharkNinja’s biggest innovations

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1:24100 % guaranteed. This was what promotion for Mark Baracus' company sounded like in its early days. Classic late-night infomercials for its mops and vacuums. This is the new Sharks-themed pocket. It is next-generation steam cleaning technology. Look at the swivel. Whoa! Well, I love my regular steam mop, but this looks really new and different. But insomniacs watching TV aren't the only ones hearing about their products these days because social media influencers can't stop talking about them organically. Come prep this week's Ninja Creamy. I've been using this recipe every single day for almost two years.

2:06It's literally less than 200 calories and 30 grams of protein and never get it. For a strawberry sorbet, Ninja Creamy, I'll take some frozen strawberries. This is my Ninja Creamy, and I've been using it just about every single night over the past couple months, making some high protein, low calorie, super tasty ice cream. And I want to show you exactly how to do some of my favorite recipes. Shark Ninja, maker of everything from vacuums to ice cream machines, has grown into a giant, a nearly$6 billion a year business. And CEO Mark Baracas has no plans to slow down soon. We develop 25 new ground-up products a year.

2:50Every year. I'm not talking about just repainting something or new knobs. I'm talking about a brand new ground-up product. You gotta have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going home. Can you believe it? I'm such an idiot. And then you go back to, this is totally going to be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. Working out of a three-bedroom apartment. Stuff that just seems absolutely nut balls. Ten years later, we're like, well, that's just how you do it.

3:25We haven't made it just how you do it.

3:30This is Masters of Scale.

3:36I'm Jeff Berman, your host. This week on the show, Shark Ninja CEO Mark Baracus 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. Mark, welcome to Masters of Scale. Thanks so much for having me. I've been super excited about this conversation, and 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 Shark Ninja is. Can you just kind of set the stage for us and tell us how big the company is today?

4:18Yeah, full-year guidance puts us at over$6 billion of revenue this year. We're in 37 different product categories, which I think surprised most people, as they might say, I have a Ninja air fryer or a shark vacuum. I mean, we sell 37 different categories of products. We built two multi-billion dollar brands. You know, 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. And so scale, diversification, but still innovating. I mean, we still feel like there's a lot more places for us to go inside and outside the home.

4:58Okay, so take us back. When you joined the company, it was not called Shark Ninja, right? So what was the company and how did you come into it? So my partner, Mark Rosenzweig, founded the company and he and I started talking about getting together in 2007. The business had gone through kind of an organized restructuring and we were a small business at the time. Which is code for it wasn't doing great. It wasn't, but it had some good bones to it. And, you know, he and I were best friends and I was running a business and he would talk about, you know, the challenges that he had in his business. And the business at the time was called EuroPro.

5:37And we had one brand, which was Shark. And for the most part, most of the business was a product called the Shark Steam Mop, which is a product that we did way back many years ago and still a category that we sell today. We got together in 2008. It was the start of the financial crisis. Yeah, not a great time to join a company that was struggling a bit. No, no. And, you know, honestly speaking, I mean, we felt like we were both product developers. We were both marketers. I had run businesses before, but we just wanted to get together. And we felt like if we could develop one hit product a year, it would allow us to make a living.

6:15I mean, the aspirations were not New York Stock Exchange public company. But you'd had some success at this point in your career. You undoubtedly had a lot of options in front of you and not with saying the fact that it's one of your best friends. Why jump into a struggling company and try to build one product a year and go in that direction? So I started a business when I was in college at University of Michigan, and I had been trained from a kid by my grandfather that you need to work for yourself. So lots of kind of periods of success and ultimately failure. And I was 27, 28 years old. I was married.

6:54My wife was pregnant and she said, you've got to go out and get a job. You know, we can't keep doing these entrepreneurial things. And I went and did that. I did a stint at Aramark, which was a large public company at the time. And I came to realize that, you know, I wanted to really be more in control of my own destiny and do something that was a lot more entrepreneurial. And so I think I was frustrated where I was. I think Mark and I felt like it would be fun to work together and do this together. And it would be he and I against the world. And we jumped in feet first and did it. When you and the other Mark came together, how did you build the foundation that let you start scaling?

7:36So I think we first believed that for us to build a sustainable long-term business, we had to develop the products from the ground up. We only had a few engineers in the company. So we had to build an engineering team. So that was number one. And when we started, it was all about this idea of affordable, accessible innovation. We wanted to make products for almost everyone. People have either said to us, well, you either have to be in the opening price segment or you need to be in the higher price segment. There is no middle. Well, I think we have taken the approach that we can move the opening price consumer up into our brands, but we can also be the brand of choice for premium consumers.

8:14The performance, the quality, the value, where they feel like they've made the right buying decision. 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? Mark and I, we would spend at least 10, 12 times a year in China. I mean, we were finding kind of owner-operator factories that we could work with and we could bring ideas to and they could help us kind of amplify and develop those ideas. we really started with this whole business around consumer insights and ethnographic research. I mean, we felt like we wanted to build our business around consumer problems, find a consumer problem, and then come up with a solution to that problem.

8:54That sounds like, well, what kind of moat can you create? I mean, can't everyone find consumer problems? I will tell you that over the last 17 years, the problems that we found, they're not, you know, surface deep. I mean, we're mining in two places. We're either mining through social media, online reviews, or observing consumers in their home about what could be a problem. Or is the consumer doing something out of their house that they are not able to do inside their home? And I'll give you an extreme example from that one. And that's a product called the Ninja Slushy. I know about the Ninja Slushy.

9:33Tell us about it. Well, it's a great example of consumers are going to restaurants, for example, like Sonic. And they're not even ordering any food. They're just ordering slushies. People are going into places like 7-Eleven and they're buying Slurpees. And so we felt like with this slushy machine, you could literally pour almost anything into here that has a little bit of sugar or fructose in it. and you can turn it into this incredible frozen drink. It was just a great example. And we've had a number of these over the last 17 years of what's the consumer doing outside of the home that they're not able to do inside the home.

10:09Going back to the early days, Mark, was there a consumer insight where you all had your first aha moment when you were like, this is our next product, this is what we need to do? Yeah, so I'll give you a few. We looked at the blender market and we saw that all blenders had blades on the bottom. And when you put ice into them, the ice jumped up. And by the time you had to pour more and more liquid in it, your drink became watery and liquidy. And you were never able to get that frozen drink consistency that you could get if you went on vacation or you went to a restaurant. And so the fact of the matter is that consumers wanted to make frozen drinks at home, but they weren't able to do restaurant-quality frozen drinks.

10:51So we looked at it and we said, well, why are the blades on the bottom? Why couldn't we put the blades going up the top? We presented it to some people and they said, you're crazy. That can't be done. And we ultimately developed that product in 2009 and we brought it around to retailers. And he and I would go around to gas stations and we would buy bags of ice. And we would fill up these blenders with bags of ice and we would crush the ice to snow. And once you had snow, that was the consistency that you would need to make these restaurant quality frozen drinks. and we'd sit in these retailers and we'd crush the ice to snow and we would throw the jar and we'd put the snow on the table and we'd say to people, well, go feel it.

11:33And they'd look at us like we're crazy. You want us to put our hands into this icy snow that's on our, and by the way, you've made a mess. Well, anyway, we came out with our first Ninja product in 2009 and it instantly resonated with people. By 2013, we became the number one selling blender in the United States. We've never looked back from there. We own 40 % market share today of the blender category. And that's what catapulted this$3 billion ninja business from that one aha idea. It strikes me that part of the genius of getting the blender in with the retailers was creating an experiential marketing moment in the room, right?

12:10You're literally saying, no, no, no, touch the product, feel the product. That's much harder to do with a customer. So was the infomercial the way to show the customer what the product really could do? Or was there something else you were doing that helped you break through there? It absolutely was the infomercial. It's funny. People looked at infomercials at the time and they'd say, these are one and done products. You know, you're not building a business and a brand off of that. And what we really kind of identified back in 2008 was the world was changing. Prior to that, if you wanted to buy a vacuum cleaner, you went to the store and you bought Consumer Reports.

12:46And Consumer Reports told you the eight vacuum cleaners to buy. And if you weren't - For the younger members of the audience, this is Wirecutter before there was Wirecutter. This is a physical magazine or book you had to go buy. It was pages. There were actually real pages. And there were eight vacuums in there. And if you weren't one of the eight vacuums, it'd be very hard for you to be able to break through. Now, I'll go back to like a little nugget of inspiration when I was a kid growing up. And it's interesting how you take some of these things and they impact your business decisions moving forward.

13:16Back in the mid 80s, growing up in New York, there was a store called Sims. And their tagline was, the educated consumer was our best customer. Was it Psy Sims? Was that his name? Psy Sims? It was, yes. So here I was as a 13, 14 year old kid. You'd say, why am I watching Sims commercials or why did this last with me? But I always found it interesting. The educated consumer is our best customer. In 1985 in New York, if you had a problem with a product, there was no one to tell. I mean, you returned the product to the store. You told your mom or dad or brother or sister, you know, never buy this brand again or never shop.

13:52But in 2008, the consumer was starting to get actually educated. And we felt like there was this great equalizer called online reviews. Okay. Now you say online reviews today. I remember in the end of 2008 being in front of a major U.S. retailer, and they asked us about our strategy. And 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 he said, that's the dumbest idea in the world. Who's going to write a review about your products? So you fast forward, and people write paragraphs and paragraphs about Shark and Ninja products.

14:34And that really helped us kind of catapult the businesses, this idea that consumers, they were seeing the demonstrations on infomercial. They were getting educated by the products by watching these 30-minute commercials that we were doing. They were going online and they were saying, hey, does this product really work? And they were getting this feedback from all these consumers that were saying, yes, it worked. This is well before social media time or anything like that. there was a groundswell of there might have been brands that were around for 50 years. This was the great equalizer to that.

15:08So the world of marketing has changed a lot in the last 17 years since you came into the company. What's changed about how you've approached the market, given that you've just got fewer people watching TV and the economics have changed? Well, let's start with every aspect of what we do in the company is centered around what's right for the consumer. So as an example, we sell through every retail chain in every market that we're in. Why? Because we want to be relevant wherever the consumer chooses to shop for our products. If it's brick and mortar, great. If it's online, great. If it's direct to consumer, great.

15:43On the advertising side, it's the same way. We want to be relevant wherever the consumer ingests content. And so if I go back, yes, it was infomercials for a period of time. Then we needed to get more reach. And we did have to do 30-second commercials and 15-second commercials. If I go back to 2016, it was Facebook groups. I mean, there were sometimes 30 ,000, 40 ,000 people on a group that would be sharing recipes or things like that about our products. And then it ultimately evolved right before COVID into social media. And now when you say social media, it's not one size fits all. It's meta, it's TikTok, it's Reddit.

16:23It's incredible how many searches are starting on Reddit right now. It's Pinterest, it's YouTube, long and short. So it continues to move where the consumer is moving to. And I think that that's emblematic of Shark Ninja. Like we constantly reinvent ourselves. I mean, we were EuroPro, the shark steam mop company. And today, 18 year old, you know, high school kids think of us as the Ninja Creamy company and almost 2 billion impressions on social media. in the last six months, we've done very little advertising on the Ninja Creamy. 99.5 % of the content every month on the Ninja Creamy is generated by consumers.

17:04What is the Ninja Creamy for those who aren't familiar? So the Ninja Creamy is an at-home ice cream maker. And I'll take you back to the beginning of it because it started kind of pre-COVID. We saw this insight that consumers at home were kind of nesting more, like investing in their homes and investing in their families. Mark, where did this insight come from? How do you know that that's happening? Yeah, so social media trends, being in consumer homes, look at the Netflix shows that are on TV. I mean, it's interesting over the last five or six years, look how many at-home chefs there have been developed.

17:36There was another insight, which was more and more allergies and more and more dietary restrictions. I have two children that have nut allergies. There was always a pain going out to an ice cream shop and saying, is there cross-contamination? You know, what was going on? And so the original insight was all these pieces converging and saying, what could we do to make this at-home ice cream experience? Over COVID, I remember being in a board meeting. This was in 2020. And one of our board members said, you know, what are you doing wasting your time with this ice cream product? You know, you should be doing something with, you know, sanitization or UV light.

18:13We're in the middle of COVID. We're in a pandemic. And my honest answer to them was, you know, people love ice cream. We could be in the middle of a, but people love ice cream. And so we came out with the product in 2021. And here's what was interesting. Things that we thought the consumer were going to do with it, they did do it. They made their own recipes. They addressed their dietary restrictions or whatever it might be. But there was an amazing thing that happened in the end of 2022, which was consumers on their own started saying, wow, we're making protein shakes. What if we took those protein shakes and what if we turn them into ice cream?

18:53And it started this whole trend of protein ice cream, that you could make a protein ice cream. It could have 250 calories. It could have 35 grams of protein. What an amazing dessert. And that catapulted this whole creator community that started developing lots and lots of different things you could do within the cream. So that wasn't something where you said, oh, we're starting to get some reviews that are saying people are creating protein ice cream. Let's plow dollars into some creative around this and ads around this, et cetera. It was more let the customers show each other what they're doing with the product.

19:29And if we can jump on the wave and accelerate it, all the better. That's exactly right. As we started seeing these trends developing, I mean, we started doing our own recipes in it and starting to figure out we were partnering with protein firms that were coming to us, protein powder firms. but honestly speaking and this is where i think it becomes so compelling and organic is let the consumer decide what they want to do with it let's not be overly prescriptive and then we're able to learn insights from those and those feed kind of the next innovation i mean it's interesting in the united states generally speaking when you're successful with a product you develop an excel version of the product of course okay people want they love the ninja creamy but the pint's too small.

20:11You know, what if we had a pint and a half? What if we had a gallon, Mark? Why are we pulling ourselves back? Let's go. So we went and we developed an XL Creamy. And then just recently in February, we developed a soft serve Creamy. So at home, I mean, you could essentially, I mean, I grew up as a Carvel fan. Please fudgy the whale. Exactly. And so, you know, what if you could take your Creamy and then turn it into delivering soft serve ice cream? I think the thing that's so exciting about all of it is people are experimenting with things and having fun. Still ahead, how Shark Ninja instills a culture of innovation and what it's like weathering tariffs as a global business.

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22:30So if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com slash mos and get up to three months free. Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on our YouTube channel. as i hear you talk about these products and i think about it through an investor lens i can hear the cpg investors in my head saying gosh all sounds great but you know you're gonna buy one of these once every 10 years like you know it's a good product it's gonna last a long time you have one blender you don't need another blender you splurge on an ice cream maker why would you buy another one and i imagine you'd have concerns about investing in a company that's creating products that don't have a high repeat purchase to them.

23:18Was that a concern early on? How did you think about that? Okay, so I'll give you two answers to that question that were like fundamental going back 15, 16 years ago. The first is, I think Mark and I recognized early on that you cannot have long-term sustainable success as a single product company, period. I mean, you're either going to be disintermediated or you're not relevant to a consumer on an everyday ongoing basis. You buy a product and you come back four years later when you need another product, which is why today Shark Ninja's in 37 categories. I mean, we want to sell you two products a year, an air fryer and an air purifier, robot vacuum.

24:00I think the second answer to your CPG question is this. Our job is to put our products into retirement before their usable life. Our vacuum cleaners last a long time. Okay. Our blenders last a long time, but we develop 25 new ground up products a year, every year. I'm not talking about just repainting something or new knobs. I'm talking about a brand new ground up product. So our job is at year two, you as the consumer say, wow, Sharker Ninja's come out with this new product. It's solving this next thing. That's my problem. I got to go put this product into retirement. Maybe I go give it to somebody else.

24:39Maybe I go retire it somewhere. It's no different than Apple's business. First of all, if I think about the iPhone 16, if I'm a consumer that owns an iPhone 14 or 15, I don't need an iPhone 16, but there's some evolutionary improvement that they've made to the product that the consumer says, I got to have that. When you are ground up developing upwards of 30 new products a year, there have to be some where you are really fired up and they just fall flat. They just don't work. What's an example of one where that's happened? Yeah, I'll give you an example that goes back years ago. First of all, I will tell you that every product has a meandering journey.