November 20, 2025 • 24 mins
How a flair for infomercials, TikTok and an endless stream of whiz-bang home appliances turned SharkNinja into a $6 billion behemoth. By Lily Meier and Shelly Banjo
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The gizmo empire. How a flare for infomercials tik Tok,
and an endless stream of whizbang home appliances turned Shark
Ninja into a six billion dollar behemoth. By Lilly Meyer
and Shelley Banjo read aloud by Mark Liedorf, Mark Barakas
huddled with a group of employees staring at the dead
(00:21):
skin extracted from their colleague's pores. Minutes earlier, the chief
executive officer of Shark Ninja had halted the product meeting
so an underling could go get the gunk vials of
dirt skin and blackheads sucked out by a gadget the
six billion dollar consumer products maker was planning to release
ahead of the holidays. Baracus's team of engineers, marketers, and
(00:43):
researchers had been testing the at home facial device on
one another and other coworkers who serve as guinea pigs
for product developers. With twenty five new gizmos a year,
Shark Ninja asks everyone from its accountants to human resources
reps to double as testers in its twenty eight offices,
enabling the Needham, Massachusetts based company to tweak new and
(01:03):
existing products around the clock. In this case time was tight.
It was late May and the company was six weeks
out from the planned production date. Baraccas still wasn't satisfied.
Laid out on a table in Shark Ninja's mock big
box store replete with fluorescent lights, aisles brimming with vacuums
and air fryers, and a logo resembling Walmart's, were multiple
(01:24):
versions of the top secret contraption code named the Lily.
How did they like the way the product moved across
their faces? Baraccas cross examined the group, some anxiously touching
their skin with the device. Any issue, he asked on
the noise, but it was the gunk he fixated on.
Could his engineers light up the cartridge to make it
more of a captivating moment on TikTok? How could they
(01:47):
turn the excretion into a big reveal, a satisfying ritual
like popping a pimple or pulling a bore strip off
your nose. Shark Ninja began hawking vacuums on late night
infomercials in the early two thousand. Today, it's still bent
on building show stopping features into its products, such as
the black water tank of its kitchen mop that reveals
(02:08):
an obscene amount of dirt for the facial pro glow,
as the product would eventually be named. When it landed
on shelves in early October, the goal was to get
users to share that poor declogging moment with their friends
or social media followers. People are extremely voyeuristic when it
comes to things coming out of their face, says Sophie Pavitt,
(02:28):
a licensed esthetician and influencer who tested the device. This
obsession with making products as irresistible as they are functional
is what's turned Shark Ninja into the infomercial king for
the TikTok age. Unlike shoppers who want premium brands they
can flaunt as countertop trophies an eight hundred dollar Revel
espresso machine a twenty six hundred dollars Mila microwave oven,
(02:50):
Shark Ninja fans are more interested in a reasonably priced
product with instant payoff. Want to cook a pizza with
the exact precision necessary to blacken the crust three three
hundred dollars, The company claims its Ninja Artisan five to
one portable electric pizza and outdoor oven can do that
in three minutes every time. No matter what dough you
stick in there. Same thing for its affordable espresso makers,
(03:13):
which do away with that need a PhD to brew
a cup of coffee feeling while making a pretty decent
latte replete with foumart more fodder for TikTok. The company
has used a similar formula for ice cream makers, hair dryers,
air purifiers, and dozens of other consumer gadgets. Its strategy
is to woo customers from the premium in willing to
(03:33):
trade down, and customers from the low end open to
trading up, says Neil Shaw, chief commercial Officer, take converts
like Carrie Dellionardi, a twenty nine year old nonprofit worker.
Last year, after she got her mom to splurge on
buying her the three hundred and forty nine dollars Shark
Flex style hair dryer styler Combo, almost half the price
(03:54):
of a dice in air wrap, her social media feed
was flooded with videos of the Ninja Creamy ice cream maker.
The two hundred and thirty dollars device, which claims to
make almost any frozen dessert in under two minutes, now
has top billing on her wedding registry. I was like, oh,
this is fun. She says you can turn anything you
want into ice cream. Says Goldman Sachs Group retail analyst
(04:16):
Brook Roach of the brand, It's aspirational, but it's still
attainable Shark Ninja Shark is the part of the business
that sells vacuums and beauty products. Ninja makes kitchen items.
Might not yet be a household name, but chances are
you've seen one of its hit products in a Target
or Sephora, or encountered one on TikTok, Instagram or Reddit.
(04:38):
Those familiar with the brand tend to be fanatical. The
company's Ninja Slushy frozen drink maker, which launched in July
twenty twenty four, sold out ten times in the US,
with a global wait list soaring past one hundred and
seventy thousand. Its Shark cryoglow face mask was trending on
TikTok in the UK, where it first launched. In a
(04:58):
matter of days. A video of the Shark turboblade, a
fan that can stand vertically or horizontally, got more than
seventy five million views on TikTok and Instagram, and its
Ninja Lux Cafe coffee maker is the number one espresso
maker this year. Today, the company says product reviewers are
at the ready every time the brand unveils a contraption.
(05:19):
The Ninja Creamy changed the way I think about making
ice cream at home, wrote Bon Appetite magazine in a
July headline. Is the Ninja Creamy ice cream maker worth
the hype? Asked the Food Network earlier this year. The
Ninja Creamy subreddit currently has about sixty two thousand weekly visitors,
who share so many recipes that Reddit users made a
(05:40):
rule book on how to submit them. The ingredients need
to be bullet points and the directions need to be
numbered steps, it details, and the company, which spends one
dollar out of every ten it makes on advertising, has
continued to boost that buzz by enlisting celebrities like David
Beckham and Chris Jenner to hawk its goods. It cut
a product placement to with f One, the movie. Along
(06:01):
with Shark Ninja's logo being featured on Brad Pitt's black
and Gold Mercedes. The brand sold a special collection of
gold hair dryers, fans, vacuums, and coolers, all of which
has allowed Shark Ninja to more than double its annual
revenue in only five years and sent its share soaring
by roughly one hundred and three percent as of mid
November since going public in twenty twenty three. This ascent, though,
(06:24):
hasn't been without controversy. Competitors Dicing Group and I Robot,
deriding the company as less innovator and more copycat, have
both sued for patent infringement involving vacuums. Shark Ninja has
been embroiled in lawsuits with both companies. It's settled with
I Robot last year and with Dyson this winter, but
the largest retailer in the world doesn't seem bothered. Shark
(06:47):
Ninja's ability to produce hits has become so expected, executives
say the company sometimes doesn't even need to give Walmart
and other retailers the specifics of a new product before
the chains guarantee them coveted shelf space. Walmart didn't respond
to a request for comment. That reliability is pretty remarkable,
says jad Jishi, Ninja, vice president for Global Creative, given
(07:09):
that when you really think about it, there's nothing we
make that you actually need. Mark Rosenswig came from a
long line of sewing machine entrepreneurs his grandparents operated their
company out of Montreal. A few years after Rosenswig graduated
from the University of Pennsylvania in the early nineteen nineties,
he joined his parents, who were running the family's business.
(07:32):
Within a few years, Rosenswig started a side hustle, manufacturing
irons and sewing machines in Europe and Asia, then selling
them in North America. Rosenswig called the new company euro
Pro Operating. Though his first breakout brand was Shark, named
after the silhouette of his dirt sucking vacuum. The business
took off, reaching one million dollars in sales after only
(07:53):
twelve months. In the following years, Rosenswig, a natural in
front of the camera as he talked to vacuum sucks power,
began appearing on TV segments on the Home Shopping Network,
where he performed gimmicks like hoovering up sand on a
carpet or suctioning furniture off the floor. In two thousand
and two, he relocated to Boston, and by the end
(08:13):
of that year, the business, with the help of his
sister and brother, had grown to two hundred and sixty
million dollars in annual sales. Look at the way. It
just pulls it in, rosen's Wig said enthusiastically in a
promotional video after vacuuming up rows of cereal and goldfish crackers.
By two thousand and eight, looking to bring in a
more professional management team, he said, he turned to his
(08:36):
buddy Mark Baracos, a fellow parent at his kid's school.
The two men had gotten to know each other from
the sidelines of the ice skating rink, where they'd watched
their girls skate. Baraccas was a natural salesman who'd begun
his career peddling sports branded T shirts as an undergrad
at the University of Michigan. After a series of mid
level management jobs at small clothing brands and a stent
(08:58):
running the uniform business of food service provider Aramark, he
jumped at the chance to do something more enterprising. Baracus
came on as president, focused on persuading retailers to stock
the company's goods, while Rosenswig concentrated on the products. In
the beginning, it was us against the world, Baracas says,
recounting the first time the self described best friends were
(09:21):
able to get the Shark vacuum cleaner into bed, bath
and beyond Landing in the retailer was a huge victory,
he says, but still the aspiration was stay in business
for another day. The following year, Mark and Mark, as
they were known by their employees, decided to expand into
kitchen devices with a new blender. Unlike a typical blender
with blades at the bottom, theirs had a column of
(09:43):
blades up the middle, helping it crush ice more quickly.
When they pitched it to a major retailer, as Baracus
tells it, a product manager told him they loved the machine,
but would carry it only if the company changed its name.
He demurs at first when asked about the device's original name.
I can't tell tell you it's embarrassing and you'll print it.
He pauses, then says quietly, Fiesteville. I don't know. It
(10:07):
sounded good to us at the time. The team renamed
the blender Ninja, a nod to the spinning blades, which
resembled a weapon. While Barakas and Rosenswig were on a
sourcing trip in China, the Ninja master preps sold out
within hours on QVC. It was about five am in
China when the Marks in hotel rooms next to each
other heard the news, they started banging on their shared wall,
(10:30):
celebrating their company's first kitchen success. Not long after, the
company released the Shark Navigator lift Away, a standing vacuum
cleaner with an entirely detachable canister. Within two years, it
became the best selling vacuum in the US, earning its
place alongside mainstays like Hoover and Kenmore, not every product
(10:50):
reached the same heights. Just before the lift Away, the
clunky and flimsy Shark Multivac was a dud. By then,
the company had officially changed its name to Shark Ninja,
and in twenty eighteen it tried to find its way
into the instant pot boom. People were going wild for
pressure cookers, but the food that came out was often soggy.
(11:11):
After talking to home cooks who'd put their food in
the broiler to crisp it up after using the pressure cooker,
Shark Ninja released the Foodie, casting it as a pressure
cooker that crisps. It was getting the attention of gadget reviewers,
from the likes of The New York Times, Wirecutter and
New York Magazine's strategist, cementing the brand as a contender
in the kitchen space, but that same year Rosenswig decided
(11:34):
he was ready to exit the company. Shark Ninja tapped
Goldman Sachs to help it sell a steak in the business,
including a large swath of Rosenswig's shares. They found a
buyer in Chinese billionaire C. J. Schuning Wang, who'd made
his fortune inventing an electric soy milkmaker. Wong's private equity
firm acquired a majority stake in Shark Ninja, then folded
(11:55):
it into a holding company called JS Global Lifestyle that
he soon listed on Hong Kong's stock exchange. After a decade.
Alongside Rosenswig, who still holds many of the company's patents,
Baraccas was now fully in charge. Rosen's Wig spends a
chunk of his week consulting for the company, including making
appearances in its vacuum cleaner infomercials. All the Dirt's gone,
(12:19):
It's magic, exclaims rosens Wig, an overly enthusiastic, bald, middle
aged man. Now in a recent CNBC spot, watch as
I empty the canister to truly reveal what was hiding
deep inside. Whoa look at that? We'll be right back
with the Gizmo Empire. Welcome back to the Gizmo Empire.
(12:45):
Under Baracus, Shark Ninja barreled into dozens of new product categories,
picked up the pace of manufacturing, and went hard on
social media. In twenty twenty one, the company released the Creamy,
followed a few years later by the Slushy. Both were
geared for maximum instaworthy attention on the heels of a
pandemic fueled cooking boom, during which everyone was eager to
(13:07):
show off their latest creations. TikTok influencers tried to one
up one another with the craziest recipes, among them apple
pie protein ice cream and breast milk ice cream. The
company was also getting into beauty. Several years earlier, Dyson
had made the unusual jump from vacuums to beauty products,
tapping its suction technology to design a more effective hair dryer,
(13:30):
and Shark Ninja followed suit. Only Shark Ninja priced its
version significantly less than what Dyson's was selling for then.
Not long after Dyson came out with its hair curling
air wrap, Shark Ninja introduced its own cheaper version and
unleashed it all over social media. Suddenly the brand was
reeling in a new customer, younger women, who might turn
(13:52):
to Shark to turbocharge their beauty routine rather than clean floors.
The move also brought Shark Ninja to court, where it
defended more allegiations by Dyson of patent infringement, this time
over its hair products. The litigation, which the companies declined
to comment on, settled at the same time they resolved
their vacuum patent fight. Sales at Shark Ninja boomed, but
(14:13):
the company's stock did not. Barakas says US investors were
losing their appetite for investing in Chinese owned companies, and
Asian investors weren't familiar with its products, which were mostly
sold in the US and Europe. So in twenty twenty three,
Shark Ninja relisted as a standalone, publicly traded company in
New York after spinning out of JS Global. Wang, who
(14:36):
became chairman of the board and still owns thirty nine
percent of the stock, didn't respond to a request for comment.
In twenty twenty four, Barakas plunged his company further into beauty.
It was typically a more challenging category for new entrants
because existing brands already had devotees, and medical devices are
tightly regulated. By the time Shark released the three hundred
(14:58):
and fifty dollars Cryoglow lu D mask in the US,
designed to dim signs of aging and toned down redness,
the company had received US Food and Drug Administration clearance
to qualify as a medical device maker, and it had
become fluent in TikTok with only seconds to pull off
a cell. It added a light up feature on the
mask that would twinkle when the under eye cooling pads
(15:19):
were activated, a made for infomercial moment optimized for the
set with a short attention span. The extra lights didn't
make the product work better, but they made it look cooler.
Shark Ninja now had a host of new product categories,
an expanding set of enthusiasts, and runaway growth. But within
a few months of the Cryoglow's arrival, Baracas suddenly had
(15:41):
a problem. President Donald Trump was about to make manufacturing
overseas a whole lot more expensive. Baracus's office is oddly
free of most Shark Ninja trappings. There are no sky
high piles of the discarded air fryers, ovens, vacuums, and
other plastic products that are littered across the corporate headquarters.
(16:01):
Absent are the cardboard boxes that border on workplace hazard.
For an executive who always seems like he's in a hurry,
Barakas's office is eerily quiet and exceptionally spacious, with dim lighting,
fish tanks, crystals, and at least three hour glasses. Near
an electric fireplace. Chimes go off at the top of
the hour to let him know it's time to cut
(16:22):
a meeting. Short fire water chimes, he says for Fung Shwei.
Just after Trump's Liberation Day announcement in April, the zen
vibe was interrupted. Shark Ninja's then chief financial officer, Patrick Reagan,
rang Barakas in a panic. The stock market had gone
haywire and the stock plunged more than twenty percent. Shark
(16:45):
Ninja had spent years trying to shift its production out
of China. The rest came from Thailand, Vietnam, and other
countries where new levies would all of a sudden make
it more expensive to produce. There, hundreds of millions of
dollars of vacuums, blenders, and hair products were off the line.
Not to mention the company's rapid growth plans, stock price
and well its whole business model. Reagan warned, Are you done?
(17:08):
Baracus asked, once Reagan caught his breath, Yeah, Reagan said, Okay,
what's the bottom line? Hit? Three hundred and fifty million dollars.
Baraccas then quickly pulled together what he describes as a
swat team of roughly one hundred employees across all departments,
telling them to clear their calendars of any meetings for
days until they could identify three hundred and fifty million
(17:31):
dollars in cost savings to offset the tariff blow. A
sales executive gave the project a code name, Operation Knuckleball,
named after the erratic and unpredictable baseball pitch, which reminded
him of how Trump's tariffs were reverberating across the global economy.
It wasn't long before the Shark Ninja executive group text
thread started blowing up with tariff busting updates. Each time
(17:54):
someone found a line item to cut by negotiating with suppliers,
tweaking the way a product was built, or raising prices,
they'd pipe up in a stream of consciousness chain interspersed
with memes and jeffs within the first eighteen hours, they'd
cut twenty five million dollars in costs. Today was a
top five day of my career. One executive road in
(18:15):
what can only be described as complete earnestness. At a
May town hall in Shark Ninja's London office, Baracus queued
up a video dramatizing their global effort. Images of tanking
stock markets, alarming news headlines, and footage of people working
feverishly in their offices set to David Bowie and Queen's
under pressure. The company had come up with fifteen hundred
(18:37):
ideas to blunt the tariff impact, reaching one hundred million
dollars at that point in cost savings. As the reel ended,
Baracus barreled on stage to Unstoppable by Sea, with the
crowd cheering as if they were watching a daytime game
show host. They would be shifting ninety percent of production
outside of China, had redirected products that were supposed to
be introduced in the US over to Canada and US Europe,
(19:00):
and cut back on promotions to preserve additional cash back.
In Massachusetts, executives held what they referred to as their
own Liberation Day Award ceremony, whose accolades included Margin Guardian
and Marketplace Master, with certificates featuring employee faces pasted on
photos of Trump and his book The Art of the Deal.
(19:21):
Baraka says he hasn't had any direct contact with the
Trump administration over tariffs. As with all things at Shark Ninja,
everything is done with a made for TV pastiche and
results are treated like a game, clocked as either successes
or failures. This binary approach to every outcome is taken
so seriously when managers at the company write update emails
(19:42):
to senior leaders, they're asked to quantify each action and
outcome as a win or a loss, writing losing in
bright red letters at the top of the emails and
outlining things that aren't going well and winning in neon
green at the bottom of the email. There's no yellow,
says Shah, the sales chief. You can't take risks if
you live in the yellow. Baraka says. The maniacal color
(20:05):
coating also makes it easier to act fast, Described by
several members of his staff as putting the micro in
micro management, Shark Ninja's boss is also admittedly neurotic. Yes,
I'm worried about the consumer I'm worried about the economy.
I'm worried about everything, he says. I'm always worried. I'm
always paranoid. When asked if the company is winning or
(20:27):
losing right now, Barakas and Shaw simultaneously answer with a chuckle.
We're always losing. That paranoia, they say, is why they
constantly reevaluate and tweak their products. Shark Ninja regularly has
product evaluation days, where workers stress test things as mundane
as updated assembly instructions. But even this kind of perpetual
(20:50):
tweaking doesn't always lead to guaranteed hits or products that
are as simple as the company pitches. Many of its
contraptions are three in one or eight in one or
what feels like one thousand in one, offering shoppers a
never ending menu of options and a cabinet's worth of parts.
It's Creamy promises a chocolate chip gummy bear milkshake at
(21:11):
the press of a button. In reality, to make a
TikTok worthy Creamy Sensation calls for overnight prep, a multi
part assembly, and a deep study of its thirty five
page recipe booklet. If you can make it that far,
never mind the occasional smell of burnt machine parts and
the jarringly loud whizzing the machine will require a lengthy
(21:31):
and sticky cleanup before you can whip up your next pint.
The brand's metal will be tested this holiday season, when
tariff spurred price hikes, scattered supply chains, and economically hesitant
consumers charge into the busiest shopping period of the year.
In early September, the evening before Goldman Sach's Global Retailing Conference,
(21:51):
Baracus dined with Goldman Sachs CEO and Chairman David Solomon
and a handful of other retail CEOs, where they discussed
just how far Inflame could go and their fears about
the economy. The uncertainty was palpable the next day when
the Shark Ninja CEO took the stage. I've been leading
this company now for seventeen years, and i other than
(22:13):
for a year during COVID, I've never experienced this kind
of frothy consumer environment, Barack has told a room full
of investors, emphasizing the heightened battle playing out for every
consumer facing business beyond home goods. I don't think of
it as we're competing against other appliance companies for that dollar,
he said, We're competing against Olive Garden this gift giving season.
(22:36):
Baracus will pay particularly close attention to sales of that
twinkling led cryo glow mask, now selling at best Buy, Costco,
and Alta. After its initial introduction, the company heard from
users that it needed to make the unboxing process, particularly
what happens once you have the product in your hand,
a bit more intuitive, especially for those who had never
(22:57):
encountered this kind of beauty gadget before. So this spring,
it held a consumer research session at Shark Ninja headquarters
in another one of its faux chambers, this one a
fake living room replete with TJ Max's chik canvas, wal art,
pillar candles, and a staircase leading into a wall, with
a group of researchers waiting behind a double sided mirror.
(23:19):
A Shark Ninja product tester invited an older woman in
a puffer jacket to sit with her on a couch.
The woman confessed her skin was aging and she typically
asked her daughter what skin care products to buy, but
didn't own any beauty devices. I wouldn't even know what
to get, she said, in a thick Boston accent, with
nervous laughter. The researcher handed her the cryo glow, packaged
(23:41):
as if it had just come fresh from the aisle.
The woman investigated it like a foreign object. If I
look a little bit longer, I see more things that
interest me, like skin radiance, tightening under eyes. That's really good,
she said, eventually slipping off the packaging and leaving through
an extensive user manual. Finally, she stuck her fingers through
(24:02):
the nose hole of the mask, not exactly where they're
supposed to be and also a common mistake, eventually fastening
the mask around her head as it emitted red and
blue lights. As the tester asked her to rate the
product and describe her experience, the woman stopped to ponder
how to answer. Eventually she settled on a decision. You know,
(24:22):
it's not something that I need, she said, but it
is something that I might want. After about an hour,
the woman was escorted out. Whether or not she becomes
a customer some day. The people behind the mirror had
what they needed. They began to plot how to redesign
the packaging, and the whole cycle starts again.
The gizmo empire. How a flare for infomercials tik Tok,
and an endless stream of whizbang home appliances turned Shark
Ninja into a six billion dollar behemoth. By Lilly Meyer
and Shelley Banjo read aloud by Mark Liedorf, Mark Barakas
huddled with a group of employees staring at the dead
(00:21):
skin extracted from their colleague's pores. Minutes earlier, the chief
executive officer of Shark Ninja had halted the product meeting
so an underling could go get the gunk vials of
dirt skin and blackheads sucked out by a gadget the
six billion dollar consumer products maker was planning to release
ahead of the holidays. Baracus's team of engineers, marketers, and
(00:43):
researchers had been testing the at home facial device on
one another and other coworkers who serve as guinea pigs
for product developers. With twenty five new gizmos a year,
Shark Ninja asks everyone from its accountants to human resources
reps to double as testers in its twenty eight offices,
enabling the Needham, Massachusetts based company to tweak new and
(01:03):
existing products around the clock. In this case time was tight.
It was late May and the company was six weeks
out from the planned production date. Baraccas still wasn't satisfied.
Laid out on a table in Shark Ninja's mock big
box store replete with fluorescent lights, aisles brimming with vacuums
and air fryers, and a logo resembling Walmart's, were multiple
(01:24):
versions of the top secret contraption code named the Lily.
How did they like the way the product moved across
their faces? Baraccas cross examined the group, some anxiously touching
their skin with the device. Any issue, he asked on
the noise, but it was the gunk he fixated on.
Could his engineers light up the cartridge to make it
more of a captivating moment on TikTok? How could they
(01:47):
turn the excretion into a big reveal, a satisfying ritual
like popping a pimple or pulling a bore strip off
your nose. Shark Ninja began hawking vacuums on late night
infomercials in the early two thousand. Today, it's still bent
on building show stopping features into its products, such as
the black water tank of its kitchen mop that reveals
(02:08):
an obscene amount of dirt for the facial pro glow,
as the product would eventually be named. When it landed
on shelves in early October, the goal was to get
users to share that poor declogging moment with their friends
or social media followers. People are extremely voyeuristic when it
comes to things coming out of their face, says Sophie Pavitt,
(02:28):
a licensed esthetician and influencer who tested the device. This
obsession with making products as irresistible as they are functional
is what's turned Shark Ninja into the infomercial king for
the TikTok age. Unlike shoppers who want premium brands they
can flaunt as countertop trophies an eight hundred dollar Revel
espresso machine a twenty six hundred dollars Mila microwave oven,
(02:50):
Shark Ninja fans are more interested in a reasonably priced
product with instant payoff. Want to cook a pizza with
the exact precision necessary to blacken the crust three three
hundred dollars, The company claims its Ninja Artisan five to
one portable electric pizza and outdoor oven can do that
in three minutes every time. No matter what dough you
stick in there. Same thing for its affordable espresso makers,
(03:13):
which do away with that need a PhD to brew
a cup of coffee feeling while making a pretty decent
latte replete with foumart more fodder for TikTok. The company
has used a similar formula for ice cream makers, hair dryers,
air purifiers, and dozens of other consumer gadgets. Its strategy
is to woo customers from the premium in willing to
(03:33):
trade down, and customers from the low end open to
trading up, says Neil Shaw, chief commercial Officer, take converts
like Carrie Dellionardi, a twenty nine year old nonprofit worker.
Last year, after she got her mom to splurge on
buying her the three hundred and forty nine dollars Shark
Flex style hair dryer styler Combo, almost half the price
(03:54):
of a dice in air wrap, her social media feed
was flooded with videos of the Ninja Creamy ice cream maker.
The two hundred and thirty dollars device, which claims to
make almost any frozen dessert in under two minutes, now
has top billing on her wedding registry. I was like, oh,
this is fun. She says you can turn anything you
want into ice cream. Says Goldman Sachs Group retail analyst
(04:16):
Brook Roach of the brand, It's aspirational, but it's still
attainable Shark Ninja Shark is the part of the business
that sells vacuums and beauty products. Ninja makes kitchen items.
Might not yet be a household name, but chances are
you've seen one of its hit products in a Target
or Sephora, or encountered one on TikTok, Instagram or Reddit.
(04:38):
Those familiar with the brand tend to be fanatical. The
company's Ninja Slushy frozen drink maker, which launched in July
twenty twenty four, sold out ten times in the US,
with a global wait list soaring past one hundred and
seventy thousand. Its Shark cryoglow face mask was trending on
TikTok in the UK, where it first launched. In a
(04:58):
matter of days. A video of the Shark turboblade, a
fan that can stand vertically or horizontally, got more than
seventy five million views on TikTok and Instagram, and its
Ninja Lux Cafe coffee maker is the number one espresso
maker this year. Today, the company says product reviewers are
at the ready every time the brand unveils a contraption.
(05:19):
The Ninja Creamy changed the way I think about making
ice cream at home, wrote Bon Appetite magazine in a
July headline. Is the Ninja Creamy ice cream maker worth
the hype? Asked the Food Network earlier this year. The
Ninja Creamy subreddit currently has about sixty two thousand weekly visitors,
who share so many recipes that Reddit users made a
(05:40):
rule book on how to submit them. The ingredients need
to be bullet points and the directions need to be
numbered steps, it details, and the company, which spends one
dollar out of every ten it makes on advertising, has
continued to boost that buzz by enlisting celebrities like David
Beckham and Chris Jenner to hawk its goods. It cut
a product placement to with f One, the movie. Along
(06:01):
with Shark Ninja's logo being featured on Brad Pitt's black
and Gold Mercedes. The brand sold a special collection of
gold hair dryers, fans, vacuums, and coolers, all of which
has allowed Shark Ninja to more than double its annual
revenue in only five years and sent its share soaring
by roughly one hundred and three percent as of mid
November since going public in twenty twenty three. This ascent, though,
(06:24):
hasn't been without controversy. Competitors Dicing Group and I Robot,
deriding the company as less innovator and more copycat, have
both sued for patent infringement involving vacuums. Shark Ninja has
been embroiled in lawsuits with both companies. It's settled with
I Robot last year and with Dyson this winter, but
the largest retailer in the world doesn't seem bothered. Shark
(06:47):
Ninja's ability to produce hits has become so expected, executives
say the company sometimes doesn't even need to give Walmart
and other retailers the specifics of a new product before
the chains guarantee them coveted shelf space. Walmart didn't respond
to a request for comment. That reliability is pretty remarkable,
says jad Jishi, Ninja, vice president for Global Creative, given
(07:09):
that when you really think about it, there's nothing we
make that you actually need. Mark Rosenswig came from a
long line of sewing machine entrepreneurs his grandparents operated their
company out of Montreal. A few years after Rosenswig graduated
from the University of Pennsylvania in the early nineteen nineties,
he joined his parents, who were running the family's business.
(07:32):
Within a few years, Rosenswig started a side hustle, manufacturing
irons and sewing machines in Europe and Asia, then selling
them in North America. Rosenswig called the new company euro
Pro Operating. Though his first breakout brand was Shark, named
after the silhouette of his dirt sucking vacuum. The business
took off, reaching one million dollars in sales after only
(07:53):
twelve months. In the following years, Rosenswig, a natural in
front of the camera as he talked to vacuum sucks power,
began appearing on TV segments on the Home Shopping Network,
where he performed gimmicks like hoovering up sand on a
carpet or suctioning furniture off the floor. In two thousand
and two, he relocated to Boston, and by the end
(08:13):
of that year, the business, with the help of his
sister and brother, had grown to two hundred and sixty
million dollars in annual sales. Look at the way. It
just pulls it in, rosen's Wig said enthusiastically in a
promotional video after vacuuming up rows of cereal and goldfish crackers.
By two thousand and eight, looking to bring in a
more professional management team, he said, he turned to his
(08:36):
buddy Mark Baracos, a fellow parent at his kid's school.
The two men had gotten to know each other from
the sidelines of the ice skating rink, where they'd watched
their girls skate. Baraccas was a natural salesman who'd begun
his career peddling sports branded T shirts as an undergrad
at the University of Michigan. After a series of mid
level management jobs at small clothing brands and a stent
(08:58):
running the uniform business of food service provider Aramark, he
jumped at the chance to do something more enterprising. Baracus
came on as president, focused on persuading retailers to stock
the company's goods, while Rosenswig concentrated on the products. In
the beginning, it was us against the world, Baracas says,
recounting the first time the self described best friends were
(09:21):
able to get the Shark vacuum cleaner into bed, bath
and beyond Landing in the retailer was a huge victory,
he says, but still the aspiration was stay in business
for another day. The following year, Mark and Mark, as
they were known by their employees, decided to expand into
kitchen devices with a new blender. Unlike a typical blender
with blades at the bottom, theirs had a column of
(09:43):
blades up the middle, helping it crush ice more quickly.
When they pitched it to a major retailer, as Baracus
tells it, a product manager told him they loved the machine,
but would carry it only if the company changed its name.
He demurs at first when asked about the device's original name.
I can't tell tell you it's embarrassing and you'll print it.
He pauses, then says quietly, Fiesteville. I don't know. It
(10:07):
sounded good to us at the time. The team renamed
the blender Ninja, a nod to the spinning blades, which
resembled a weapon. While Barakas and Rosenswig were on a
sourcing trip in China, the Ninja master preps sold out
within hours on QVC. It was about five am in
China when the Marks in hotel rooms next to each
other heard the news, they started banging on their shared wall,
(10:30):
celebrating their company's first kitchen success. Not long after, the
company released the Shark Navigator lift Away, a standing vacuum
cleaner with an entirely detachable canister. Within two years, it
became the best selling vacuum in the US, earning its
place alongside mainstays like Hoover and Kenmore, not every product
(10:50):
reached the same heights. Just before the lift Away, the
clunky and flimsy Shark Multivac was a dud. By then,
the company had officially changed its name to Shark Ninja,
and in twenty eighteen it tried to find its way
into the instant pot boom. People were going wild for
pressure cookers, but the food that came out was often soggy.
(11:11):
After talking to home cooks who'd put their food in
the broiler to crisp it up after using the pressure cooker,
Shark Ninja released the Foodie, casting it as a pressure
cooker that crisps. It was getting the attention of gadget reviewers,
from the likes of The New York Times, Wirecutter and
New York Magazine's strategist, cementing the brand as a contender
in the kitchen space, but that same year Rosenswig decided
(11:34):
he was ready to exit the company. Shark Ninja tapped
Goldman Sachs to help it sell a steak in the business,
including a large swath of Rosenswig's shares. They found a
buyer in Chinese billionaire C. J. Schuning Wang, who'd made
his fortune inventing an electric soy milkmaker. Wong's private equity
firm acquired a majority stake in Shark Ninja, then folded
(11:55):
it into a holding company called JS Global Lifestyle that
he soon listed on Hong Kong's stock exchange. After a decade.
Alongside Rosenswig, who still holds many of the company's patents,
Baraccas was now fully in charge. Rosen's Wig spends a
chunk of his week consulting for the company, including making
appearances in its vacuum cleaner infomercials. All the Dirt's gone,
(12:19):
It's magic, exclaims rosens Wig, an overly enthusiastic, bald, middle
aged man. Now in a recent CNBC spot, watch as
I empty the canister to truly reveal what was hiding
deep inside. Whoa look at that? We'll be right back
with the Gizmo Empire. Welcome back to the Gizmo Empire.
(12:45):
Under Baracus, Shark Ninja barreled into dozens of new product categories,
picked up the pace of manufacturing, and went hard on
social media. In twenty twenty one, the company released the Creamy,
followed a few years later by the Slushy. Both were
geared for maximum instaworthy attention on the heels of a
pandemic fueled cooking boom, during which everyone was eager to
(13:07):
show off their latest creations. TikTok influencers tried to one
up one another with the craziest recipes, among them apple
pie protein ice cream and breast milk ice cream. The
company was also getting into beauty. Several years earlier, Dyson
had made the unusual jump from vacuums to beauty products,
tapping its suction technology to design a more effective hair dryer,
(13:30):
and Shark Ninja followed suit. Only Shark Ninja priced its
version significantly less than what Dyson's was selling for then.
Not long after Dyson came out with its hair curling
air wrap, Shark Ninja introduced its own cheaper version and
unleashed it all over social media. Suddenly the brand was
reeling in a new customer, younger women, who might turn
(13:52):
to Shark to turbocharge their beauty routine rather than clean floors.
The move also brought Shark Ninja to court, where it
defended more allegiations by Dyson of patent infringement, this time
over its hair products. The litigation, which the companies declined
to comment on, settled at the same time they resolved
their vacuum patent fight. Sales at Shark Ninja boomed, but
(14:13):
the company's stock did not. Barakas says US investors were
losing their appetite for investing in Chinese owned companies, and
Asian investors weren't familiar with its products, which were mostly
sold in the US and Europe. So in twenty twenty three,
Shark Ninja relisted as a standalone, publicly traded company in
New York after spinning out of JS Global. Wang, who
(14:36):
became chairman of the board and still owns thirty nine
percent of the stock, didn't respond to a request for comment.
In twenty twenty four, Barakas plunged his company further into beauty.
It was typically a more challenging category for new entrants
because existing brands already had devotees, and medical devices are
tightly regulated. By the time Shark released the three hundred
(14:58):
and fifty dollars Cryoglow lu D mask in the US,
designed to dim signs of aging and toned down redness,
the company had received US Food and Drug Administration clearance
to qualify as a medical device maker, and it had
become fluent in TikTok with only seconds to pull off
a cell. It added a light up feature on the
mask that would twinkle when the under eye cooling pads
(15:19):
were activated, a made for infomercial moment optimized for the
set with a short attention span. The extra lights didn't
make the product work better, but they made it look cooler.
Shark Ninja now had a host of new product categories,
an expanding set of enthusiasts, and runaway growth. But within
a few months of the Cryoglow's arrival, Baracas suddenly had
(15:41):
a problem. President Donald Trump was about to make manufacturing
overseas a whole lot more expensive. Baracus's office is oddly
free of most Shark Ninja trappings. There are no sky
high piles of the discarded air fryers, ovens, vacuums, and
other plastic products that are littered across the corporate headquarters.
(16:01):
Absent are the cardboard boxes that border on workplace hazard.
For an executive who always seems like he's in a hurry,
Barakas's office is eerily quiet and exceptionally spacious, with dim lighting,
fish tanks, crystals, and at least three hour glasses. Near
an electric fireplace. Chimes go off at the top of
the hour to let him know it's time to cut
(16:22):
a meeting. Short fire water chimes, he says for Fung Shwei.
Just after Trump's Liberation Day announcement in April, the zen
vibe was interrupted. Shark Ninja's then chief financial officer, Patrick Reagan,
rang Barakas in a panic. The stock market had gone
haywire and the stock plunged more than twenty percent. Shark
(16:45):
Ninja had spent years trying to shift its production out
of China. The rest came from Thailand, Vietnam, and other
countries where new levies would all of a sudden make
it more expensive to produce. There, hundreds of millions of
dollars of vacuums, blenders, and hair products were off the line.
Not to mention the company's rapid growth plans, stock price
and well its whole business model. Reagan warned, Are you done?
(17:08):
Baracus asked, once Reagan caught his breath, Yeah, Reagan said, Okay,
what's the bottom line? Hit? Three hundred and fifty million dollars.
Baraccas then quickly pulled together what he describes as a
swat team of roughly one hundred employees across all departments,
telling them to clear their calendars of any meetings for
days until they could identify three hundred and fifty million
(17:31):
dollars in cost savings to offset the tariff blow. A
sales executive gave the project a code name, Operation Knuckleball,
named after the erratic and unpredictable baseball pitch, which reminded
him of how Trump's tariffs were reverberating across the global economy.
It wasn't long before the Shark Ninja executive group text
thread started blowing up with tariff busting updates. Each time
(17:54):
someone found a line item to cut by negotiating with suppliers,
tweaking the way a product was built, or raising prices,
they'd pipe up in a stream of consciousness chain interspersed
with memes and jeffs within the first eighteen hours, they'd
cut twenty five million dollars in costs. Today was a
top five day of my career. One executive road in
(18:15):
what can only be described as complete earnestness. At a
May town hall in Shark Ninja's London office, Baracus queued
up a video dramatizing their global effort. Images of tanking
stock markets, alarming news headlines, and footage of people working
feverishly in their offices set to David Bowie and Queen's
under pressure. The company had come up with fifteen hundred
(18:37):
ideas to blunt the tariff impact, reaching one hundred million
dollars at that point in cost savings. As the reel ended,
Baracus barreled on stage to Unstoppable by Sea, with the
crowd cheering as if they were watching a daytime game
show host. They would be shifting ninety percent of production
outside of China, had redirected products that were supposed to
be introduced in the US over to Canada and US Europe,
(19:00):
and cut back on promotions to preserve additional cash back.
In Massachusetts, executives held what they referred to as their
own Liberation Day Award ceremony, whose accolades included Margin Guardian
and Marketplace Master, with certificates featuring employee faces pasted on
photos of Trump and his book The Art of the Deal.
(19:21):
Baraka says he hasn't had any direct contact with the
Trump administration over tariffs. As with all things at Shark Ninja,
everything is done with a made for TV pastiche and
results are treated like a game, clocked as either successes
or failures. This binary approach to every outcome is taken
so seriously when managers at the company write update emails
(19:42):
to senior leaders, they're asked to quantify each action and
outcome as a win or a loss, writing losing in
bright red letters at the top of the emails and
outlining things that aren't going well and winning in neon
green at the bottom of the email. There's no yellow,
says Shah, the sales chief. You can't take risks if
you live in the yellow. Baraka says. The maniacal color
(20:05):
coating also makes it easier to act fast, Described by
several members of his staff as putting the micro in
micro management, Shark Ninja's boss is also admittedly neurotic. Yes,
I'm worried about the consumer I'm worried about the economy.
I'm worried about everything, he says. I'm always worried. I'm
always paranoid. When asked if the company is winning or
(20:27):
losing right now, Barakas and Shaw simultaneously answer with a chuckle.
We're always losing. That paranoia, they say, is why they
constantly reevaluate and tweak their products. Shark Ninja regularly has
product evaluation days, where workers stress test things as mundane
as updated assembly instructions. But even this kind of perpetual
(20:50):
tweaking doesn't always lead to guaranteed hits or products that
are as simple as the company pitches. Many of its
contraptions are three in one or eight in one or
what feels like one thousand in one, offering shoppers a
never ending menu of options and a cabinet's worth of parts.
It's Creamy promises a chocolate chip gummy bear milkshake at
(21:11):
the press of a button. In reality, to make a
TikTok worthy Creamy Sensation calls for overnight prep, a multi
part assembly, and a deep study of its thirty five
page recipe booklet. If you can make it that far,
never mind the occasional smell of burnt machine parts and
the jarringly loud whizzing the machine will require a lengthy
(21:31):
and sticky cleanup before you can whip up your next pint.
The brand's metal will be tested this holiday season, when
tariff spurred price hikes, scattered supply chains, and economically hesitant
consumers charge into the busiest shopping period of the year.
In early September, the evening before Goldman Sach's Global Retailing Conference,
(21:51):
Baracus dined with Goldman Sachs CEO and Chairman David Solomon
and a handful of other retail CEOs, where they discussed
just how far Inflame could go and their fears about
the economy. The uncertainty was palpable the next day when
the Shark Ninja CEO took the stage. I've been leading
this company now for seventeen years, and i other than
(22:13):
for a year during COVID, I've never experienced this kind
of frothy consumer environment, Barack has told a room full
of investors, emphasizing the heightened battle playing out for every
consumer facing business beyond home goods. I don't think of
it as we're competing against other appliance companies for that dollar,
he said, We're competing against Olive Garden this gift giving season.
(22:36):
Baracus will pay particularly close attention to sales of that
twinkling led cryo glow mask, now selling at best Buy, Costco,
and Alta. After its initial introduction, the company heard from
users that it needed to make the unboxing process, particularly
what happens once you have the product in your hand,
a bit more intuitive, especially for those who had never
(22:57):
encountered this kind of beauty gadget before. So this spring,
it held a consumer research session at Shark Ninja headquarters
in another one of its faux chambers, this one a
fake living room replete with TJ Max's chik canvas, wal art,
pillar candles, and a staircase leading into a wall, with
a group of researchers waiting behind a double sided mirror.
(23:19):
A Shark Ninja product tester invited an older woman in
a puffer jacket to sit with her on a couch.
The woman confessed her skin was aging and she typically
asked her daughter what skin care products to buy, but
didn't own any beauty devices. I wouldn't even know what
to get, she said, in a thick Boston accent, with
nervous laughter. The researcher handed her the cryo glow, packaged
(23:41):
as if it had just come fresh from the aisle.
The woman investigated it like a foreign object. If I
look a little bit longer, I see more things that
interest me, like skin radiance, tightening under eyes. That's really good,
she said, eventually slipping off the packaging and leaving through
an extensive user manual. Finally, she stuck her fingers through
(24:02):
the nose hole of the mask, not exactly where they're
supposed to be and also a common mistake, eventually fastening
the mask around her head as it emitted red and
blue lights. As the tester asked her to rate the
product and describe her experience, the woman stopped to ponder
how to answer. Eventually she settled on a decision. You know,
(24:22):
it's not something that I need, she said, but it
is something that I might want. After about an hour,
the woman was escorted out. Whether or not she becomes
a customer some day. The people behind the mirror had
what they needed. They began to plot how to redesign
the packaging, and the whole cycle starts again.
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