How SharkNinja Built $6 Billion Empire of TikTok Gadgets Like Creami

Laid out on a desk in SharkNinja’s mock big-box retailer—replete with fluorescent lights, aisles brimming with vacuums and air fryers, and a brand resembling Walmart’s—had been a number of variations of the top-secret contraption, codenamed the Lily. How did they like the best way the product moved throughout their faces, Barrocas cross-examined the group, some anxiously touching their pores and skin with the machine. “Any issue,” he requested, “on the noise?” But it was the gunk he fixated on: Could his engineers mild up the cartridge to make it extra of a fascinating second on TikTok? How may they flip the excretion into a giant reveal, a satisfying ritual like popping a pimple or pulling a Bioré pore strip off your nostril?

SharkNinja started hawking vacuums on late-night infomercials within the early 2000s. Today it’s nonetheless bent on constructing show-stopping options into its merchandise, such because the black-water tank of its kitchen mop that reveals an obscene quantity of grime. For the FacialPro Glow, because the product would finally be named when it landed on cabinets in early October, the purpose was to get customers to share that pore-declogging second with their buddies or social media followers. “People are extremely voyeuristic when it comes to things coming out of their face,” says Sofie Pavitt, a licensed esthetician and influencer who examined the machine.

This obsession with making merchandise as irresistible as they’re purposeful is what’s turned SharkNinja into the infomercial king for the TikTok age. Unlike customers who need premium manufacturers they’ll flaunt as countertop trophies—an $800 Breville espresso machine, a $2,600 Miele microwave oven—SharkNinja followers are extra eager about a fairly priced product with immediate payoff. Want to cook dinner a pizza with the precise precision essential to blacken the crust? For $300, the corporate claims its Ninja Artisan 5-in-1 Portable Electric Pizza & Outdoor Oven can try this in three minutes, each time, it doesn’t matter what dough you stick in there. Same factor for its reasonably priced espresso makers, which put off that need-a-Ph.D.-to-brew-a-cup-of-coffee feeling whereas making a fairly respectable latte, replete with foam artwork—extra fodder for TikTok.

The firm has used an analogous method for ice cream makers, hair dryers, air purifiers and dozens of different shopper devices. Its technique is to woo prospects from the premium finish prepared to commerce down and prospects from the low finish open to buying and selling up, says Neil Shah, chief business officer. Take converts like Carrie DiLeonardi, a 29-year-old nonprofit employee. Last yr, after she obtained her mother to splurge on shopping for her the $349 Shark FlexStyle hair-dryer-styler combo—virtually half the worth of a Dyson Airwrap—her social media feed was flooded with movies of the Ninja Creami ice cream maker. The $230 machine, which claims to make virtually any frozen dessert in below two minutes, now has high billing on her marriage ceremony registry. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is fun,’” she says. “You can turn anything you want into ice cream.” Says Goldman Sachs Group Inc. retail analyst Brooke Roach of the model: “It’s aspirational, but it’s still attainable.”

SharkNinja—Shark is the a part of the enterprise that sells vacuums and sweetness merchandise; Ninja makes kitchen gadgets—may not but be a family title, however likelihood is you’ve seen one in every of its hit merchandise in a Target or Sephora, or encountered one on TikTok, Instagram or Reddit. Those aware of the model are usually fanatical. The firm’s Ninja Slushi frozen drink maker, which launched in July 2024, bought out 10 instances within the US, with a worldwide waitlist hovering previous 170,000. Its Shark CryoGlow face masks was trending on TikTok within the UK, the place it first launched, in a matter of days. A video of the Shark TurboBlade, a fan that may stand vertically or horizontally, obtained greater than 75 million views on TikTok and Instagram, and its Ninja Luxe Café espresso maker is the No. 1 espresso maker this yr to this point, the corporate says.

Product reviewers are on the prepared each time the model unveils a contraption. “The Ninja Creami Changed the Way I Think About Making Ice Cream at Home,” wrote Bon Appétit journal in a July headline. “Is the Ninja Creami Ice Cream Maker Worth the Hype?” requested the Food Network earlier this yr. The Ninja Creami subreddit presently has about 62,000 weekly guests, who share so many recipes that Reddit customers made a rulebook on the best way to submit them. “The ingredients need to be bullet points and the directions need to be numbered steps,” it particulars. And the corporate—which spends $1 out of each $10 it makes on promoting—has continued to spice up that buzz by enlisting celebrities like David Beckham and Kris Jenner to hawk its items. It reduce a product-placement cope with F1 The Movie; together with SharkNinja’s brand being featured on Brad Pitt’s black-and-gold Mercedes, the model bought a particular assortment of gold hair dryers, followers, vacuums and coolers.

All of which has allowed SharkNinja to greater than double its annual income in solely 5 years and despatched its shares hovering by roughly 103%, as of mid-November, since going public in 2023. This ascent, although, hasn’t been with out controversy. Competitors Dyson Group Plc and iRobot Corp., deriding the corporate as much less innovator and extra copycat, have each sued for patent infringement involving vacuums. (SharkNinja has been embroiled in lawsuits with each corporations. It settled with iRobot final yr and with Dyson this winter.)

But the biggest retailer on the planet doesn’t appear bothered. SharkNinja’s capacity to provide hits has turn out to be so anticipated, executives say the corporate typically doesn’t even want to offer Walmart Inc. and different retailers the specifics of a brand new product earlier than the chains assure them coveted shelf area. (Walmart didn’t reply to a request for remark.) That reliability is fairly exceptional, says Jad Jichi, Ninja vp for world artistic, provided that while you actually give it some thought, “there’s nothing we make that you actually need.”

The enterprise took off, reaching $1 million in gross sales after solely 12 months. In the next years, Rosenzweig—a pure in entrance of the digicam as he talked vacuum suction energy—started showing on TV segments on the Home Shopping Network, the place he carried out gimmicks like hoovering up sand on a carpet or suctioning furnishings off the ground. In 2002 he relocated to Boston, and by the top of that yr, the enterprise, with the assistance of his sister and brother, had grown to $260 million in annual gross sales. “Look at the way it just pulls it in,” Rosenzweig stated enthusiastically in a promotional video, after vacuuming up rows of cereal and Goldfish crackers.

By 2008, trying to herald a extra skilled administration staff, he stated he turned to his buddy Mark Barrocas, a fellow mother or father at his youngsters’ college. The two males had gotten to know one another from the sidelines of the ice-skating rink the place they’d watch their women skate. Barrocas was a pure salesman who’d begun his profession peddling sports-branded T-shirts as an undergrad on the University of Michigan. After a collection of midlevel administration jobs at small clothes manufacturers and a stint working the uniform enterprise of meals service supplier Aramark, he jumped on the likelihood to do one thing extra enterprising.

Barrocas got here on as president, centered on persuading retailers to inventory the corporate’s items, whereas Rosenzweig focused on the merchandise. “In the beginning it was us against the world,” Barrocas says, recounting the primary time the self-described “best friends” had been in a position to get the Shark vacuum cleaner into Bed Bath & Beyond. Landing within the retailer was an enormous victory, he says, however nonetheless, “the aspiration was, stay in business for another day.”

The following yr, “Mark and Mark,” as they had been identified by their staff, determined to develop into kitchen units, with a brand new blender. Unlike a typical blender with blades on the backside, theirs had a column of blades up the center, serving to it crush ice extra shortly. When they pitched it to a significant retailer, as Barrocas tells it, a product supervisor informed him they cherished the machine however would carry it provided that the corporate modified its title. (He demurs at first when requested concerning the machine’s authentic title. “I can’t tell you. It’s embarrassing, and you’ll print it.” He pauses, then says, quietly, “Fiestaville. I don’t know. It sounded good to us at the time.”) The staff renamed the blender Ninja, a nod to the spinning blades, which resembled a weapon.

While Barrocas and Rosenzweig had been on a sourcing journey in China, the Ninja Master Prep bought out inside hours on QVC. It was about 5 a.m. in China when the Marks, in lodge rooms subsequent to one another, heard the information. They began banging on their shared wall, celebrating their firm’s first kitchen success. Not lengthy after, the corporate launched the Shark Navigator Lift-Away, a standing vacuum cleaner with a wholly removable canister. Within two years, it turned the bestselling vacuum within the US, incomes its place alongside mainstays like Hoover and Kenmore. (Not each product reached the identical heights: Just earlier than the Lift-Away, the clunky and flimsy Shark Multi-Vac was a dud.)

By then, the corporate had formally modified its title to SharkNinja, and in 2018 it tried to seek out its method into the Instant Pot increase. People had been going wild for stress cookers, however the meals that got here out was usually soggy. After speaking to residence cooks, who’d put their meals within the broiler to crisp it up after utilizing the stress cooker, SharkNinja launched the Foodi, casting it as a stress cooker that crisps. It was getting the eye of gadget reviewers from the likes of the New York Times’ Wirecutter and New York journal’s Strategist, cementing the model as a contender within the kitchen area.

But that very same yr, Rosenzweig determined he was able to exit the corporate. SharkNinja tapped Goldman Sachs to assist it promote a stake within the enterprise, together with a big swath of Rosenzweig’s shares. They discovered a purchaser in Chinese billionaire CJ Xuning Wang, who’d made his fortune inventing an electrical soy-milk maker. Wang’s personal fairness agency acquired a majority stake in SharkNinja, then folded it right into a holding firm known as JS Global Lifestyle Co. that he quickly listed on Hong Kong’s inventory alternate.

After a decade alongside Rosenzweig—who nonetheless holds lots of the firm’s patents—Barrocas was now totally in cost. (Rosenzweig spends a piece of his week consulting for the corporate, together with making appearances in its vacuum-cleaner infomercials. “All the dirt’s gone. It’s magic!” exclaims Rosenzweig, an excessively enthusiastic, bald middle-aged man now, in a current CNBC spot. “Watch as I empty the canister to truly reveal what was hiding deep inside. Whoa, look at that!”)

Under Barrocas, SharkNinja barreled into dozens of latest product classes, picked up the tempo of producing and went arduous on social media. In 2021 the corporate launched the Creami, adopted a couple of years later by the Slushi. Both had been geared for max Insta-worthy consideration on the heels of a pandemic-fueled cooking increase, throughout which everybody was keen to indicate off their newest creations. TikTok influencers tried to one-up each other with the craziest recipes. Among them: apple-pie-protein ice cream and breast-milk ice cream.

The firm was additionally stepping into magnificence. Several years earlier, Dyson had made the bizarre leap from vacuums to magnificence merchandise, tapping its suction expertise to design a simpler hair dryer, and SharkNinja adopted swimsuit. Only SharkNinja priced its model considerably lower than what Dyson’s was promoting for. Then, not lengthy after Dyson got here out with its hair-curling Airwrap, SharkNinja launched its personal cheaper model and unleashed it throughout social media. Suddenly the model was reeling in a brand new buyer—youthful ladies who may flip to Shark to turbocharge their magnificence routine fairly than clear flooring. The transfer additionally introduced SharkNinja to courtroom, the place it defended extra allegations by Dyson of patent infringement—this time over its hair merchandise. The litigation, which the businesses didn’t present extra element on, was settled on the identical time they resolved their vacuum patent battle.

Sales at SharkNinja boomed, however its inventory didn’t. Barrocas says US traders had been dropping their urge for food for investing in Chinese-owned corporations, and Asian traders weren’t aware of its merchandise, which had been largely bought within the US and Europe. So, in 2023, SharkNinja relisted as a standalone publicly traded firm in New York after spinning out of JS Global. (Wang, who turned chairman of the board and nonetheless owns 39% of the inventory, didn’t reply to a request for remark.)

In 2024, Barrocas plunged his firm additional into magnificence. It was sometimes a tougher class for brand new entrants, as a result of current manufacturers already had devotees and medical units are tightly regulated. By the time Shark launched the $350 CryoGlow LED masks within the US, designed to dim indicators of ageing and tone down redness, the corporate had acquired US Food and Drug Administration clearance to promote the masks, and it had turn out to be fluent in TikTok. With solely seconds to drag off a promote, it added a light-up function on the masks that may twinkle when the under-eye cooling pads had been activated—a made-for-infomercial second optimized for the set with a brief consideration span: The additional lights didn’t make the product work higher, however they made it look cooler.

SharkNinja now had a bunch of latest product classes, an increasing set of fans and runaway progress. But inside a couple of months of the CryoGlow’s arrival, Barrocas all of the sudden had an issue: President Donald Trump was about to make manufacturing abroad an entire lot dearer.

Just after Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement in April, the Zen vibe was interrupted. SharkNinja’s then-chief monetary officer, Patraic Reagan, rang Barrocas in a panic. The inventory market had gone haywire, and the inventory plunged greater than 20%.

SharkNinja had spent years making an attempt to shift its manufacturing out of China. The relaxation got here from Thailand, Vietnam and different international locations the place new levies would rapidly make it dearer to provide there. Hundreds of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} of vacuums, blenders and hair merchandise had been on the road, to not point out the corporate’s fast progress plans, inventory value and, effectively, its complete enterprise mannequin, Reagan warned.

“Are you done?” Barrocas requested as soon as Reagan caught his breath.

“OK, what’s the bottom-line hit?”

“Three hundred and fifty million dollars.”

Barrocas then shortly pulled collectively what he describes as a SWAT staff of roughly 100 staff throughout all departments, telling them to clear their calendars of any conferences for days till they may determine $350 million in value financial savings to offset the tariff blow. A gross sales govt gave the challenge a code title: Operation Knuckleball, named after the erratic and unpredictable baseball pitch, which reminded him of how Trump’s tariffs had been reverberating throughout the worldwide economic system.

It wasn’t lengthy earlier than the SharkNinja govt group textual content thread began blowing up with tariff-busting updates. Each time somebody discovered a line merchandise to chop—by negotiating with suppliers, tweaking the best way a product was constructed or elevating costs—they’d pipe up in a stream-of-consciousness chain interspersed with memes and GIFs. Within the primary 18 hours, they’d reduce $25 million in prices. “Today was a top-5 day of my career,” one govt wrote in what can solely be described as full earnestness.

At a May city corridor in SharkNinja’s London workplace, Barrocas cued up a video dramatizing their world effort: pictures of tanking inventory markets, alarming information headlines and pictures of individuals working feverishly of their places of work, set to David Bowie and Queen’s Under Pressure. The firm had give you 1,500 concepts to blunt the tariff influence, reaching $100 million at that time in value financial savings. As the reel ended, Barrocas barreled onstage to Unstoppable by Sia, with the gang cheering as in the event that they had been watching a daytime sport present host. They could be shifting 90% of manufacturing outdoors of China, had redirected merchandise that had been presupposed to be launched within the US over to Canada and Europe, and reduce on promotions to protect extra money. Back in Massachusetts, executives held what they known as their very own “Liberation Day” award ceremony, whose accolades included “Margin Guardian” and “Marketplace Master,” with certificates that includes worker faces pasted on pictures of Trump and his e book The Art of the Deal. (Barrocas says he hasn’t had any direct contact with the Trump administration over tariffs.)

Barrocas says the maniacal shade coding additionally makes it simpler to behave quick. Described by a number of members of his workers as placing the micro in micromanagement, SharkNinja’s boss can also be 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 requested if the corporate is successful or dropping proper now, Barrocas and Shah concurrently reply with a chuckle: “We’re always losing.”

That paranoia, they are saying, is why they continually reevaluate and tweak their merchandise. SharkNinja often has product analysis days the place staff stress-test issues as mundane as up to date meeting directions. But even this type of perpetual tweaking doesn’t at all times result in assured hits—or merchandise which are so simple as the corporate pitches. Many of its contraptions are 3-in-1, or 8-in-1, or what looks like 1,000-in-1, providing customers a unending menu of choices and a cupboard’s value of elements. Its Creami guarantees a chocolate chip gummy bear milkshake on the press of a button. In actuality, to make a TikTok-worthy Creami sensation requires in a single day prep, a multi-part meeting and a deep research of its 35-page recipe booklet. If you may make it that far (by no means thoughts the occasional odor of burnt machine elements and the jarringly loud whizzing), the machine would require a prolonged and sticky cleanup earlier than you may whip up your subsequent pint.

The model’s mettle can be examined this vacation season, when tariff-spurred value hikes, scattered provide chains and economically hesitant customers cost into the busiest buying interval of the yr. In early September, the night earlier than Goldman Sachs’ Global Retailing Conference, Barrocas dined with Goldman Sachs CEO and Chairman David Solomon and a handful of different retail CEOs, the place they mentioned simply how far inflation may go and their fears concerning the economic system.

The uncertainty was palpable the subsequent day, when the SharkNinja CEO took the stage. “I’ve been leading this company now for 17 years, and I—other than for a year during Covid—I’ve never experienced this kind of a frothy consumer environment,” Barrocas informed a room filled with traders, emphasizing the heightened battle enjoying out for each consumer-facing enterprise, past residence items. “I don’t think of it as we’re competing against other appliance companies for that dollar,” he stated. “We’re competing against Olive Garden.”

This gift-giving season, Barrocas pays significantly shut consideration to gross sales of that twinkling LED CryoGlow masks, now promoting at Best Buy, Costco and Ulta. After its preliminary introduction, the corporate heard from customers that it wanted to make the unboxing course of—significantly what occurs after getting the product in your hand—a bit extra intuitive, particularly for many who had by no means encountered this type of magnificence gadget earlier than. So this spring, it held a shopper analysis session at SharkNinja headquarters in one other one in every of its fake chambers—this one, a faux front room replete with TJ Maxx-chic canvas wall artwork, pillar candles and a staircase main right into a wall.

With a gaggle of researchers watching behind a double-sided mirror, a SharkNinja product tester invited an older girl in a puffer jacket to sit down together with her on a sofa. The girl confessed her pores and skin was ageing and she or he sometimes requested her daughter what skin-care merchandise to purchase however didn’t personal any magnificence units. “I wouldn’t even know what to get,” she stated in a thick Boston accent with nervous laughter.

The researcher handed her the CryoGlow, packaged as if it simply got here contemporary from the aisle. The girl investigated it like a international 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 stated, finally slipping off the packaging and leafing by way of an in depth consumer guide. Finally, she caught her fingers by way of the nostril gap of the masks—not precisely the place they’re presupposed to be, and in addition a typical mistake—finally fastening the masks round her head because it emitted pink and blue lights. As the tester requested her to price the product and describe her expertise, the lady stopped to ponder the best way to reply. Eventually, she settled on a call: “You know, it’s not something that I need,” she stated. But, “it is something that I might want.”

After about an hour, the lady was escorted out. Whether or not she turns into a buyer sometime, the folks behind the mirror had what they wanted. They started to plot the best way to redesign the packaging. And the entire cycle begins once more.