The most impressive thing about SharkNinja is how it manages to keep expanding and entering new product categories. Over the years, the two brands that make up the name (Shark and Ninja), have made vacuum and steam cleaners, blenders and air fryers, carpet cleaners and floor cleaners, hair care products and, as of the most recent launches, coffee machines.
What’s particularly interesting about the company isn’t so much that it’s launched so many different types of products, it’s that it has done so effectively each time, without diluting or confusing people as to what the brands are about, and it has never pulled out of a product category.
A drive to win and putting the customer first sits behind the company’s mantra and everything it does. I sat down with some of the company’s top executives to learn more about how SharkNinja works.
Customers first
Speaking at IFA 2024, Shark’s CEO, Mark Barrocas, said the plan was to grow the company “one five-star review at a time,” emphasizing the importance of quality.
As Barracas explained, SharkNinja didn’t want to follow the pattern that many other companies set, launching a product and then hoping to fix flaws and issues in the second generation, and SharkNinja fixes problems before a product goes on sale.
That involves products being put in real homes before they go on sale, with the feedback generating changes that go into the product prior to shipping it out.
“We put the consumer first, and we actually really do put the consumer first,” explains Tom Brown, president of the UK and Europe. “You know, we don’t launch a product until it’s been through a thousand homes, and we already know the star rating of a product before we launch because we get the thousand consumers to give us a star rating like they were reviewing it online.”
This level of work clearly shows through. Certainly, with the SharkNinja products I’ve reviewed, I’m always impressed at how intuitive and easy they are to use. Take the company’s air fryers, for example, which eschew huge numbers of buttons and programs in favour of a more straightforward interface that just works the way you’d expect.
The literature that comes with the products makes them stand out, with brilliant quick-start guides and helpful stickers that give important information right where you need it. Again, this is all from real consumer feedback.
“All of those stickers are really placed based on the consumer feedback that we get where the consumer might have got one before we launch,” explains Brown. “The reality is that most people don’t read a manual. Most people take [the product] out of the box, they put the packaging out for recycling, and then they plug it in and expect it to immediately do what they think it should do, and that’s why we put these stickers on the products themselves.”
In some cases, the company has to go even further to ensure that a product performs as expected, such as with its new air purifiers.
“The purification products, for example, have a huge filter inside, but that filter has to be wrapped to transport it into the country,” explains Brown. “So, we make sure that consumers don’t just plug it in and turn it on when the filter inside is still wrapped in plastic and it would never work.
“We actually stop people being able to plug it in and turn it on without literally having to remove two stickers that say remove the packaging from around the filter.”
Developing new products
What I’ve noticed about SharkNinja in the years that I’ve been reviewing the company’s products, is that each one typically comes into a product category offering something different to the competition.
As the company’s website states, SharkNinja works “incessantly to pioneer unparalleled products that solve existing problems, extraordinary problems and even problems [consumers] don’t know they have”.
A good example of this, talked about by Barrocas at his IFA keynote address, is the Anti Hair Wrap technology that is available on its vacuum cleaners. Observing how people were cleaning, SharkNinja noticed that people would regularly have to flip their vacuum cleaners over and cut away hair that had got tangled; yet, consumers were all happy with their vacuum cleaner’s performance and saw the messy clean-up job as just something that they had to do.
From that, Anti Hair Wrap was developed, and once consumers saw the problem the technology fixed, they all wanted it. Today, the industry is playing catch-up, and it’s relatively rare to find a competitor’s vacuum cleaner without similar technology.
SharkNinja also takes a great interest in online reviews.
“We read every single review that’s written about our products, every single one, and when you read the reviews online you really learn a lot about consumers,” said Brown.
All of the information that the company gathers doesn’t just help improve products in existing categories but lets the company invent brand new categories, such as with outdoor electric grills that culminated in this year’s excellent Ninja Woodfire Pro Connect XL Electric BBQ Grill & Smoker.
“What was really interesting that we saw last year was we thought that we were fighting with barbecues,” said Brown. “But in the end, we really grew the market last year, and that’s because consumers were buying this [the Ninja Woodfire] as well as the barbecue.”
With the new product, the Pro Connect XL, came something else new for the company: a connected app for one of its cooking products. I’ve seen plenty of home appliances that have an app for an app’s sake; the Pro Connect XL avoids this trap, as it’s there because consumers wanted it.
“The reason that we have [the app] is, again, based on consumer insight,” says Brown. “We would hear back from consumers saying, ‘I’m kind of new to this, you know, I’ve not had an outdoor electric grill before that does so many things, and I’m not yet trusting that when it says it’s eight minutes left to go, is it really eight minutes or is it four minutes?’”
“And they said it would be great to have some kind of connected device where they could see if their chicken or their lamb shoulder or whatever was, was cooked, and that really… made us say, we know how to do app technology because we’re in the robot business, and really that was the start of that.”
Fixing problems
There are times when things go wrong, but SharkNinja always seems quick to address issues. A good example is with the launch of the Woodfire Connect XL outdoor grill, where some of the initial products launched with an RCD plug that would trip when igniting the woodchips.
“It was very limited to a small number of units. Unfortunately, we got a little bit behind that one,” explains Brown, “but I think in situations like this, we are really fast, highly agile. You know, we don’t operate like a big corporate [company], so as soon as there is anything the teams were all over it.”
Indeed, looking into the issue, customers that did report the issue were largely impressed and satisfied with the speed of response and the quick way that products were replaced without issue. Many other big companies could learn a lot from this kind of customer response.
Getting the price right
When you look at the competition, it tends to be that as future products come out, they get more expensive and more complicated to use, but that isn’t the case with SharkNinja. It’s not that the products are cheap, just that they’re priced about where you’d expect them to.
Again, a lot of pricing comes down to consumer feedback, and products priced as “affordable innovation”.
“Before we launch, we ask consumers what they think the product is worth, and what they would be prepared to pay for it” says Brown. “And that’s often really interesting because sometimes we are way off in terms of what we think: maybe we are too low or maybe we’re too high.”
“So, we really listen to the consumer because we are positioned as affordable innovation. We want to innovate, and we will only launch products that have innovation, but it’s got to be affordable.”
Diversification and growth
The sad truth of many consumer companies is that they focus on a single product, ride its growth and then are hit by the inevitable flattening off or decline in sales. SharkNinja’s strength comes from its ability to consistently enter new markets, and often dominate them. Constantly targeting new markets and launching products is part of the company’s DNA.
“One of the keys to continual growth is because [of] constant states of innovation. We’ve come out and stated that we will launch a minimum of one new category every year and a minimum of 25 new products,” said Brown.
It’s not just entering the categories, but taking all of the things that I’ve mentioned in this article already, to launch new products that are different. The new Ninja Luxe Café coffee machines, for example, might look like manual espresso machines but they can also pour filter coffee and, depending on the model, cold brew, give feedback on the best grind size to use and make hot and cold foam. There’s not a competitor that can do all of those features.
