SharkNinja’s business touches everything from vacuums to air fryers to hair straighteners.
But for Mark Barrocas, the company’s chief executive officer, the business ethos can be distilled down to a few key points.
“I went into business with my best friend and we were a small company at the time,” Barrocas said at the WWD Beauty CEO Summit in Palm Beach, Fla., in conversation with WWD executive editor, beauty and Beauty Inc editor in chief Jenny B. Fine. “We had a return rate on our products of about 17 percent, so about one of every five and a half products we sold came back to us. I wrote down the statement, ‘Positively impacting people’s lives every day in every home around the world.'”
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Though it would take time to improve lives (and to do so at a global scale), Barrocas has taken that ethos to 39 different product categories in 30 different countries. “And this year, we’ll do about $7 billion in revenue,” he said.
Those category expansions aren’t driven by a common technology, but rather by an acute understanding of consumer pain points and how to solve them. “We’ve built a team of 1,300 engineers around the world who are able to solve problems that others can’t, and when you put those two things combined, we make everything from robot vacuums to skin care masks to air fryers to blenders,” Barrocas said. “We make outdoor grills, fire pits, coolers and heaters, and the thing that streams through all of it is, ‘What’s the consumer problem that we’re solving?'”
In the case of Shark Beauty, the category expansion started with thinking about collapsing four or five products into a single one. “We came up with the product a number of years ago called the Shark FlexStyle. We saw that consumers were using a hair dryer, a styler, and we thought we could combine these things into one.”
As it pertains to Shark CryoGlow, “You could go to Amazon or other places and find LED masks, and the reality was that the consumer had no idea what to buy,” Barrocas said. He sought to marry the instant gratification of cooling eye patches with the long-term LED benefits, and a category entry was born. “It solved this problem of how we get the consumer to use the product over the period of time that we need them to use it.”
Barrocas sees SharkNinja as an outsider in every category it enters, and that’s how he likes it. “We didn’t know this beauty pyramid,” he said in a nod to the prestige-mass paradigm. “I said, ‘Our business is about developing great products, great quality, great value. We want to sell to everyone.’”
From a cultural standpoint, the organization was built around that thinking, too. “We run what we call hack weeks,” Barrocas said. “We put people in teams of eight or 10, have them think about a new category we want to enter into, and they do nothing during that week. They don’t go to any other meetings, they’re in rooms, thinking about new ideas and new blue sky things for us to do. At the end of the week, it’s like a science fair.”
Two weeks ago, he shut the business down to run an AI hackathon for four days. That mirrors the focus Barrocas takes when fielding crises. In the case of the tariffs, “I got together the 200 senior executives of the company. This was on a Thursday. I said, by the following Friday, we can mitigate the full impact of the tariffs, and we’re going to shut the whole business down and all we’re going to do is work on buy-side initiatives and sell-side initiatives, and operating expense management. Eight days later, we had mitigated 90 percent of the tariff impact, and we actually grew our gross margin last year.”