How SharkNinja Creates Products Consumers Love — Really Love

SharkNinja introduces 25 different household products each year in multiple categories — from too-cool-for-school kitchen tools and appliances to beauty, vacuum cleaners and outdoor items. That’s a lot of introductions in one year (unless you’re Procter & Gamble or another company of that size), but SharkNinja actually starts with approximately 70 product ideas each year, then winnows them down to the eventual winners using extensive research and development resources. It’s all worth the investment for the company, which has consistently outperformed its category in growth: “The small appliance industry has grown at about 1% compound annual growth rate for the last 17 years,” said SharkNinja CEO Mark Barrocas. “SharkNinja has growth at a CAGR of 20%. Both the Shark and Ninja brands generated $3 billion in revenue last year, and they are available in retailers ranging from Sephora to Walmart, with price points ranging from $59 to $999. “It all starts with the brand and its relationship with the consumer,” Barrocas added, speaking at the NRF Big Show 2026 session, Designing for Devotion: The Power of Consumer-Obsessed Product Innovation, a fireside chat with Wall Street Journal Retail Reporter Sarah Nassauer. Success also means being willing to put aside ideas that don’t work: “We put everything through a framework that asks: What gives us the right to be in this category? Why does the world need us?,” said Barrocas. “In a lot of categories, we might work for eight to 10 years to find that the world doesn’t need us, that we’re not making anything better, cheaper or incredibly unique.” To minimize those dead ends, SharkNinja starts by identifying “real consumer problems — some known, some unknown,” said Barrocas. “We have a large team of ethnographic researchers combing social media and going into consumer’s homes” to watch them performing household chores. Barrocas described the evolution of SharkNinja vacuum cleaners designed not to wrap hair around the circular brush holder. “The researchers went into 100 consumer homes to watch them vacuum, and halfway through, the consumer had to flip the vacuum cleaner over and use a scissors or sharp knife to cut through the hair that had gotten wrapped before continuing. The consumers had become accustomed to doing this; they didn’t see it as a problem — but for us, that became the inspiration for innovation, and 18 months later, we came out with a vacuum that doesn’t wrap hair, and it became a best-seller.” Before any product it makes actually goes on the market, however, SharkNinja engages in even more testing and refining. “From the time we put a product into tooling to the time it goes to market, we might change it 200 times,” said Barrocas. Additionally, SharkNinja tests potential products in “1,000 consumer homes globally for a four-week consumer test, and the participants are on message boards discussing it all the time,” said Barrocas. ‘We Tell a Great Story’ The other main pillar of SharkNinja’s success is its social media strategy. “It’s not good enough to just make a good product — you need to tell a great story,” said Barrocas. “A lot of our marketing has gone viral — we have 9X the social media engagement than our nearest competitor. We’re built on growing our business one five-star review at a time.” The combination of unique, high-performance products and extensive consumer engagement has created strong bonds between customers and their SharkNinja products — bonds that persist despite the many changes that have taken place in the retailing landscape over the years. “It all starts with the brand and its relationship with the consumer,” said Barrocas. “18 years ago, our largest account was Sears; 14 years ago, it was Bed Bath & Beyond. It’s not our job to pick the winners and losers in retail — our job is to develop disruptive products and create viral consumer demand; then it’s up to the consumer to decide where they buy the products. We have a robust DTC business and are looking at new channels of distribution, like TikTok Shop, but basically it’s about creating demand for our products and making them available wherever the consumer wants to shop.” Smart Supply Chain Decisions Support Global Growth While tariffs — both the actual ones imposed and those that were just threatened — continue to give many brand executives anxious stomachs, SharkNinja had taken dramatic steps to diversify and strengthen its supply chain following the COVID pandemic, an investment that is now paying off. “We spent the last four and a half years moving [production for] 36 million units out of China, into other Asian and Southeast Asian countries,” said Barrocas. “I honestly believe that, as painful as that was to do, we’re now a better company from a supply chain perspective, with a diversified supply chain and redundant suppliers for a lot of our key products. We still do produce products in China, but they are for markets outside the U.S.”