For industry experts, union members and A-list talent, awards season and red carpet opportunities are year-round. Therefore, stressing over the details — from getting ready to tidying up — is common in any line of work in Hollywood.
That’s where a trusted partner like SharkNinja comes in to take the anxiety out of preparing for even the splashiest of industry events, from an awards ceremony to a premiere. Powered by two global brands, Shark and Ninja, the innovative product design and technology company is a one-stop shop with multiple product categories, including home appliances and beauty tools.
From its line of gadgets for every hair type to its award-winning household devices, such as vacuums and air purifiers, SharkNinja is committed to crafting products that can stand up to every step of the process from start to final touches.
“At Shark, we are dedicated to creating products that empower consumers to focus on what truly matters — living life to the fullest,” says Nick Cedar, SharkNinja’s manager of media strategy and planning. “Our mission is to provide innovative, reliable solutions that simplify everyday routines, allowing people to spend less time worrying about messes and more time embracing life’s beautiful chaos.”
This year, Variety and SharkNinja collaborated to prep and perfect Variety’s annual interview studio at the Toronto International Film Festival. The space featured a SharkNinja touch-up station, which included a stylist who tended to hair needs with SharkTM Beauty products.
“At TIFF, SharkNinja showcased how our products manage the chaos and excitement of such an iconic event,” Cedar says. “As TIFF went on, SharkNinja was committed to taking care of the details so people could focus on enjoying the community. Our products are crafted to handle the consumer demands in these high-profile events with ease, transforming chaos and stress into streamlined, enjoyable experiences.”
SharkNinja’s Product Strategy: A Focus on Consumer Feedback
To set the stage for a spotless and serene space, Shark’s EZ Robot® Vacuum is a go-to product for event coordinators, set decorators and professional cleaners. In any space, big or small, the robot does most of the work by methodically cleaning row by row and room to room, trapping dust, debris and pet allergens. For any difficult-to-reach space, the Shark® WANDVAC™ Cord-Free Handheld Vacuum’s powerful suction takes on any mess.
Keep cool all the while with a Shark® FlexBreezeTM Fan. Ultra-powerful and ultra-portable, it runs quietly, even at the highest of speeds. The fan can transform from pedestal to tabletop mode to become the ultimate vanity accessory. And to keep the space staying fresh, the Shark NeverCharge TM Air Purifier is not only compact in design, but also guards against odors. “Our air purifiers and fans not only enhance comfort and air quality but also create inviting environments,” Cedar shares.
“Shark products significantly enhance customers’ lives by making everyday tasks simpler and more enjoyable,” he shares. “Our range of vacuums, air purifiers and fans are designed to improve comfort and efficiency, allowing people to focus on what truly matters.”
While Shark cleaning products help keep a space immaculate, SharkTM Beauty’s array of salon-quality hair tools, used by Hollywood stylists and set hairdressers, help to support personal care. Designed to minimize heat damage, the compact and easy-to-store SpeedStyleTM Pro FLEX Hair Dryer System creates show-stopping looks on straight and wavy hair with professional power and includes a scalp shield to protect new hair growth.
Meanwhile, the SmoothStyle TM Heated Comb & Blow Dryer Brush is designed to smooth and straighten with heated comb technology for a healthy, voluminous finish. Made with ceramic-coated plates, the versatile tool offers wet-to-dry volumizing in Wet Hair Mode, while its Dry Hair Mode can straighten and smooth locks to perfection.
And the FlexStyleTM Sparkle Air Styling & Drying System — now available in a limited-edition black diamond colorway — allows for all the curling, volumizing, smoothing and drying a red carpet-worthy look demands. Ideal for all hair types, from straight to coily, the system comes with a range of accessories, including the Turbo Concentrator and the QuickSmooth Brush.
“The products are built to last, reducing the need for frequent replacements and aligning with our commitment to sustainability,” Cedar says. “This focus on durability ensures that we provide lasting value to both our customers and the environment.”
After every space is polished and every hair is perfectly in place — thanks to the magic of Shark® inventions — don’t miss the chance to toast the occasion. Savor a brief moment of calm with Ninja SLUSHITM Professional Frozen Drink Maker, which can whip up a cool, refreshing smoothie without any ice, thanks to its proprietary RapidChill Technology.
“We invite consumers to explore how SharkNinja is redefining home, kitchen and outdoor experiences, making both everyday tasks and iconic moments simpler and more enjoyable,” Cedar concludes.
SharkNinja’s Market Strategy: Addressing the Discerning Consumer
SharkNinja’s success is built on a deep understanding of its consumers and a commitment to innovation. The company’s CEO Mark Barrocas highlights the importance of listening to customer feedback and incorporating it into product development.
Barrocas acknowledges that consumers are becoming more discerning with their spending, saying, “I think the consumer's been under a lot of pressure for the last couple of years... they're making real decisions and trade-offs about where they're gonna spend their hard earned dollars.” While SharkNinja’s combination of high quality, high value products have been appealing during this period, Barrocas says “I don’t think we’re immune” to the more discerning consumer.
SharkNinja is prioritizing research and development, along with advertising and marketing to counter the persistent macro pressure being felt in names across the retail space. Social media plays a role as well. Users on Tiktok have popularized “hacks” for some of SharkNinja’s products – like using the Ninja Slushie for everything from kid’s orange juice to frozen rose. “What’s great about these products is that the consumer can kind of make it their own,” Barrocas says. “It’s really about the versatility and value of what you’re delivering to the process.
SharkNinja’s Expansion Strategy: Entering New Categories with a Bang
SharkNinja’s commitment to innovation is evident in its continuous expansion into new product categories. The company’s strategy involves entering new categories with a bang, launching products that are both innovative and affordable.
At IFA in Berlin, SharkNinja unveiled its latest range of products under the Shark Home, Shark Beauty and Ninja brands, with 20 SKUs confirmed to launch in Australia and New Zealand. These launches are part of SharkNinja’s strategy to grow within existing categories and expand into new categories including coffee machines and robot vacuums.
The Ninja Luxe Café all-in-one espresso, filter coffee and rapid cold brew maker (select models only) is designed to offer a café-quality experience at home and guide users through the entire brewing process. The coffee range also includes the Ninja Sip Perfect Travel Mug, which cools hot drinks within minutes.
The new Shark Power Detect robot range automatically senses mess levels, hidden dirt, stains, edges, and floor types, for hands-free and effortless deep cleaning. SharkNinja also introduced ReverseClean technology to its Power Detect upright, cordless stick and cordless auto empty vacuums. Unlike many traditional vacuums that miss debris on the backstroke, this technology ensures an efficient clean.
In benchtop cooking, Ninja is set to launch its Double Stack air fryer in late 2024, designed for those with limited bench space, before expanding the range with the Ninja Double Stack XL air fryer with smart cook system and built-in digital probe.
Building on the success of the Ninja Creami ice cream maker, households can now enjoy slushies with the Ninja Slushi Frozen Drink Maker, bringing commercial-grade frozen beverages to the home kitchen.
Ninja also announced the new Ninja Blast Max Portable Power Pro offering three programs for smoothie creations – blend, crush and smoothie – that doesn’t require liquid when blending, and Ninja Foodi 8-in-1 PossibleCooker multi-cooker that can slow cook, steam, sear/sauté, cook rice, and more.
SharkNinja managing director for Australia and New Zealand, Aby Shukla said, “At SharkNinja, we’re dedicated to positively impacting people’s lives in every home around the world. To maintain our rapid expansion across Australia and New Zealand, as well as new categories, we have an exciting and innovative product pipeline ahead.
“Our latest innovations, such as our new Power Detect vacuum line-up and Slushi frozen drinks maker address everyday challenges with consumer problem solving solutions. We’re excited to offer these products to our market, which uphold Shark and Ninja’s reputation for performance, quality, and value.”
SharkNinja: A Company Built on Consumer Feedback and Innovation
SharkNinja’s success is a testament to its commitment to consumer feedback and innovation. The company’s approach to product development is driven by a deep understanding of its customers’ needs. Every aspect of the product development process, from design to testing, is informed by consumer insights.
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.
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 Barrocas 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 EMEA at SharkNinja. “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.”
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”.
SharkNinja: A Company That Listens to Its Customers
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.”
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 a few 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.
SharkNinja: Affordable Innovation
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.”
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.
