One of the most popular speakers at our Impact 2025 conference last month was Mark Barrocas of SharkNinja, who joined us to provide insight into how CEOs think about — and resource — innovation. Headquartered in Needham, Mass., SharkNinja had $5.5 billion in revenue in 2024. The company sells a range of products for the home, from vacuum cleaners to ice cream makers to LED face masks.
Barrocas observed that as companies grow from startup to entrenched giant, they tend to get more professionalized — and less focused on bringing truly new concepts to market. “You have to actually fight to keep innovation in the business,” he says, “because the business will move towards some level of innovation mediocrity, some level of innovation reasonableness.” One way SharkNinja does that is with regular “hack weeks” — and a goal of launching 25 new products every year.
Below is a lightly-edited transcript of the conversation I had with Barrocas at Impact.
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You were in the apparel business before this, working at Perry Ellis, Aramark, and Broder Bros. In 2008, you arrived at SharkNinja as president. What was the company in 2008? How big was it?
We were a small company based in West Newton, Mass. We had about 30 people. The business was doing about $150 million in revenue. …My partner founded the company a couple years earlier, and he and I got together with just the aspiration of, can we both make a living? Not to ultimately have a New York Stock Exchange [listed] public company.
It was really kind of built on this idea of, can we solve consumer problems? We felt like there was this white space in the market for us to develop innovative products and to tell our story. And at the time, back in 2008, we told our story via infomercial.
We basically had two main products. We had a product called the Shark Steam Mop and the Shark Sweeper. We didn’t have any money to advertise, so we would run TV infomercials. You’d wake up at two o’clock in the morning, and you’d see my partner steam mopping. He could sell ice to an Eskimo.
[The company] was really built on this idea that you can develop an innovative product, but if you can’t tell your story, then no one knows about it. The way for us to tell our story was through these 30-minute infomercials ,where a certain portion of people would buy directly from us, and the lion’s share of them would actually go to retail stores to buy the product.
This year, the business will generate nearly $6.5 billion dollars in revenue, over $1 billion in EBITDA. We have a $13 billion market cap on the New York Stock Exchange, and we’ve never acquired a dollar of revenue in the company’s history. We’ve grown for the last 17 years at a compounded growth rate of 21 percent a year.
Now, we have 3600 employees globally. We have about 1200 people in our corporate office in Needham. We have a large staff in London, Frankfurt, Paris, Asia, Mexico City. It’s a rather global business. I mean, nearly 40 percent of our business is done outside of the US.
Having a great product is not enough. Then you’ve got to tell a great story, and telling a great story is not enough.
I’m guessing, if we think about that period of growth that you just described, that it wasn’t just about launching new products, it was probably about figuring out how to market them and get distribution. Talk about just some of what was going on in that period between 2008 and today that you feel like really helped drive the growth.
I think what entrepreneurs underestimate is how challenging it is. …Having a great product is not enough. Then you’ve got to tell a great story, and telling a great story is not enough. Then you’ve got to figure out how to scale and leverage a supply chain, and that’s not enough.
Then you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to sell your product — what type of customer base you’re going to sell your product to, and and that’s not enough. Ultimately, it’s bringing all of those pieces together to create a competitive moat, which, for us in our business, starts with what we call consumer-focused disruptive innovation, [and] creating viral marketing and excitement for our products.
…We sell to everyone. We sell direct-to-consumer. We sell to every major retail store. We’re the only brands in the US that you can find in Walmart and Sephora, and everyone in between. We have a scaled supply chain. And it all was built off of a mission statement that I wrote in 2009, which was “positively impacting people’s lives, every day in every home around the world.”
I think that in a lot of companies, you write a mission statement, you put it on the wall. Everyone walks by it, nobody does anything with it. But really, for the last 17 years, everything we’ve done has laddered up to this beacon of, are we positively impacting people’s lives? And I say Walmart to Sephora, because I think sometimes, people lose sight of…who are you servicing.
We’re not positively impacting rich people’s lives; we’re positively impacting everyone’s lives. You could buy a Ninja product for $59, and you could be moving into your dorm room, or you could buy a Ninja product for $999 and everywhere in between.
Today there’s 14-year old kids that are doing Tik-toks and Instagrams about the Ninja CREAMi or the Ninja SLUSHi, and telling their parents they need to buy it for them. You’ll see… Shark and Ninja boxes as people move into dorm rooms. You move into your first apartment. We want to be there for you.
You move into your first home, and you have a family. You ultimately down-size. …That whole life cycle is what we’re building products for. Today, that’s done in 37 different product categories. We built two multi-billion dollar brands. Our Ninja brand this year will do about $3.3 billion in revenue, our Shark brand about $3.2 billion in revenue, and we sell in 26 different countries around the world.
You have to actually fight to keep innovation in the business, because the business will move towards some level of innovation mediocrity, some level of innovation reasonableness.
Do you use the word innovation internally? And how do you think about the buckets of innovation, or the horizons of innovation that you want to be investing in?
We develop 25 new ground up products a year — not changing buttons or knobs, [but] new tooling, new design. These are completely new ground-up products… And I would say that when you’re a small startup, innovation is something that is at the core of the business. You’ve got a small team. That team is all focused on the product, the innovation, whatever you’re trying to deliver to the consumer. As you get bigger and bigger, the innovation culture dilutes.
Why? Because you bring in a head of operations that tells you that it’s important to focus on distribution centers, and you bring in a CIO that talks to you about technology in the business. You have to professionalize the business, but by professionalizing the business, sometimes you dilute the innovation culture in the business.
You have to actually fight to keep innovation in the business, because the business will move towards some level of innovation mediocrity, some level of innovation reasonableness. You know, I’m no longer a 30-year old guy who is willing to go to China 15 times a year as we were building the business, or doing whatever it took in order to be able to grow. All of a sudden, there’s a reasonableness that comes into everything.
Last week, in fact, we just came out of a hack week.
Every six weeks, we kind of shut down the business — large groups of people in the business — and we run cross-functional hacks. We ask people — engineers, product developers, marketers, consumer insights researchers — to just get together, call in sick, do nothing for the week, and just focus on hacking on a problem. You find that extraordinary innovation comes out of these hacks.
You have to somehow build an innovation muscle into the business, because the business will ultimately drive innovation to a level of mediocrity.
We had a project that got served up last week, that at the end of it, everyone was standing clapping in the room [with] how excited we were about this product idea that had come to fruition… This was hacking towards the 2027, roadmap, and when we saw it, everyone in the room said, like, how do we get this for 2026, like, what do we need to do? How quickly can we mobilize the organization? How quickly can we bring in external experts to help us move this along?
At the same time, during those hack weeks, there’s probably four or five that [don ‘t go on], and there was just a lot of good learnings during the week. So the idea of failure during them is kind of part of the process. …Maybe it’s putting something into a parking lot. Maybe it’s, “Hey, the consumer is not ready for that concept right now.” Maybe we don’t have the right technology in place to develop it. Maybe it’s too expensive…
As the organization gets bigger and bigger, you’re going to hear 100 reasons why you can’t schedule the hacks. There’s too much going on. The calendar is too tight. And that is what I mean by the organization kind of driving innovation mediocrity. You’ve got to be able to stand up and say, “No, everyone call in sick,” or we’ll assume that you were sick this week.
OK, so you mentioned 2027. Do you think a lot about years, and the batch of new products that you’re going to launch that year? Is that kind of a key organizing principle?
I think the company that does it the absolute best is Apple. Apple set the standard of every September when the circus comes to town, there’s a new act, right? There’s no announcement in September that says, “Hey, this September, we’ve decided to take a vacation. We’ll be back to you next year…”
We start with a funnel of maybe 60 ideas, and over the course of time, those..ultimately get to a roadmap of 25 products.
…Every single year, when the circus comes to town, there’s a new act. And for us, we look at that the same way. In the holiday selling season, when the consumer goes into the store, the consumer’s got to see [something] new and exciting. We’ve decided that that number of new products that we can effectively bring to market is 25 products a year.
We start with a funnel of maybe 60 ideas, and over the course of time, those 60 ideas kind of whittle down for various reasons, and they ultimately get to a roadmap of 25 products. There might be a whole lot of those other 35 [where] we might say, “Let’s move them to next year” Or, “Let’s watch the technology and see how it emerges.”
But there’s a very kind of rigid roadmap structure… right now, we’re in the process of launching our 25 new products in 2025, [and] we know our 25 new products that we’re launching in 2026, and we’re working now on our 2027 roadmap.
What to you is big enough for a new product? One of the conversations that was happening yesterday was about [launching] something, and it can be $10 million a year [in revenue], and not moving the needle in a big company. How do you think about that?
Investors ask me this question all the time… I think what SharkNinja has effectively done over the years is not just enter categories that have a large market and take a significant amount of market share.
We own 31 percent for example, of the entire cleaning business in the United States. We’re number one market share. We have 40 percent of all blenders in the United States. We’re either number one or number two market share in every category that we’ve entered into. Now that’s one aspect of things, but there’s other categories where we’ve entered where the category really has not existed.
…Are you a company that is focused on just taking share, or are you a company that’s focused on both taking share and enlarging the size of the market that you’re in?
When we entered the at home ice cream market with the Ninja CREAMi, the total at home ice cream market from NPD was $30 million. There was a large US retailer that said to us, “Why are you even doing this? Even if you get 50 percent market share, you’re going to have a $15 million business.” What we said is, “We think we can enlarge the size of the market.”
So your company has to look at, are you a company that is focused on just taking share, or are you a company that’s focused on both taking share and enlarging the size of the market that you’re in? Today, the at home ice cream market in the United States is $200 million, and SharkNinja controls 80 percent of the market. So we grew the size of the market, and we’re able to take a dominant market share position.
Give me just a little bit of insight to that. We have an at home ice cream maker; I think it’s a Cuisinart. We’ve owned it probably for 10 or 15 years. It very rarely gets used. So what changed about that market that got it so big?
…We we get inspiration from lots of areas. … If you go into really high-level restaurants, Michelin star restaurants, they make ice cream with an $8,000 machine.
We also found, by talking to consumers, that there was an increasingly larger and larger amount of dietary restrictions — people that couldn’t drink milk, allergy issues, kids that couldn’t have ice cream because of nut allergies or egg allergies, or things like that.
…The problem with the example of what you have is, you’re basically limited to chocolate or vanilla ice cream. It’s an event. It’s a real chore. We said, we need something really easy that allows you to turn almost anything into ice cream.
When I say almost anything, you can take a can of Dole pineapple, you can pour it into this. You could freeze it in the freezer for 24 hours. You put it there, you whip it up, and it’s like you have this amazing pineapple whip. You can take melon, you put a little bit of sweetener, you put some water, you freeze it, you blend it up. You can basically turn anything into ice cream.
But here’s the amazing thing about the world today: we put the product out, and we started marketing the product on social media… [and] all of a sudden, consumers started coming up with their own recipes.
Instead of drinking a protein shake, they took their protein shake, they turned it into ice cream, and they had a 230 calorie pint of ice cream that they were eating. We found that people were eating ice cream for breakfast. We found that people were eating ice cream every single day. We found that people in the beginning of the week were prepping seven or eight pints of ice cream, putting them in the refrigerator or in the freezer, and then making them every day.
Today, the Ninja CREAMi has 1.2 billion impressions on social media. In the month of August over the summer, 99.5 percent of the content on social media globally on the Ninja CREAMi had nothing to do with SharkNinja. It wasn’t our advertising. It wasn’t our messaging. It wasn’t anything. It was simply consumers telling 10 million of their closest friends what’s their favorite recipe that they’ve done… And that’s really what built SharkNinja.
In 2009, I sat in front of a big US retailer. My partner and I just wanted to go in and sell. We’ve got to come out with an order. And this retailer said, “No, we want to hear your strategy.” We said, “Strategy? We don’t even know how to use PowerPoint.” So we said, “We’ve got to come up with a strategy.”
And we sat there, and at the end of it, we said, “We’re going to win one five-star review at a time.” And the retailer looked at me, and he said, “That’s the dumbest idea in the world. Who’s going to write a review about your products you make, like cleaning products?” But nonetheless, you go back and you look — what built the SharkNinja business is one five-star review at a time.
It was the start of Amazon reviews. It was the start of online reviews. People were no longer going to Consumer Reports [to find out] which was the vacuum cleaner to buy, and Consumer Reports would only tell you [about] six vacuums, and if you weren’t one of the six vacuums, you didn’t get on the list.
Now, it was the power of the consumer having real understanding and consumers being able to tell other consumers what to buy and what to invest in. That changed the whole trajectory of our business.
If you’re launching 25 new products every year, what is the number that you think are not still going to be in your product portfolio next year, in two years?
We’ve developed a higher hit rate through lots of consumer insights, [and] testing before a product goes into the market in 1200 consumer homes… so we’re not launching a product into the market like crossing our fingers and hoping. Now that said, things hit and they go viral that you don’t expect, and things that you think are amazing…don’t resonate as much.
We shoot for a double that we want to hit. And a few products a year wind up being a home run for us. But in general, within two years of the 25 products launching, most of those products are still in the market.
Let’s take some questions from the audience. There’s a question about product life cycles and upcycling, and, I guess, circularity. How do you manage, or how do you think about upcycling products that consumers might only use for a short period of time?
About 70 percent of the products, 80 percent of the products, that come back to us, we re-manufacture those products, we repair them, we refurbish them, and we sell them as certified refurb products. And so we’re bringing those products back into circulation.
It started out as a rather small business for us… Today, you can go on to Amazon, you can go on to a lot of our dot-com platforms, and you can see certified refurb SharkNinja products, and it’s become an increasingly bigger and bigger part of our business. In Europe, where repairability is a much bigger aspect of things, you could bring our products back into stores, and stores will repair the products at the store to maintain the lifecycle of the products.
The US retailers haven’t yet adapted that, so we have to do the re-manufacturing ourselves and put them back into circulation. …Over the next few years, I think you’re going to see a lot more of [that], and you’re also going to see a lot more acceptance of consumers buying certified re-manufactured products.
Let’s take this next question. How do you know when or if you’re diluting your brands by making too much stuff?
There’s first a very big question that you have to ask yourself and be honest with yourself, and that is, what gives you the right to make that product? If you have groupthink in your company, you all drink the Kool Aid, and you’re like, “Oh, of course, we have the right to do it.” Or the Walmart buyer said that you should go into this category. That doesn’t give you the right… Why does the world need you? What are you bringing to a consumer that they can’t ordinarily get right now from somebody else? And you have to keep pressure-testing that and answering that over and over and over again.
Then you have to figure out, will the consumer listen to your story? And I’ll give you a good example of that. Shark is the number one vacuum brand in the US. We’re the second largest vacuum brand in the world. Shark was making vacuums and robots and steam cleaners and mops and fans and air purifiers, and we decided that we wanted to get into the beauty business. We started with hair care, and we developed our first product four years ago, called the Shark FlexStyle. We said, “We have something interesting to tell in this category. We’re bringing this very unique, multifunctional product.” We think even though we’re a cleaning brand, we think the consumer will listen to our hair care product. …We tested it over and over and over again with about 1200 consumers around the world, and we felt like we had a product that brought real value, real performance, real quality, to the consumer.
It’s ultimately, today, the number one hair styler in the United States. We went to the market, and fortunately, the consumer was willing to accept us into this hair care space. We grew the business… And we said, “OK, now that we’re in places like Sephora and Ulta and we’re in your bathroom, where else can we go?” And we looked around and we said, wow, there’s a big med spa business. Four or five years ago, if you wanted to go to a med spa, you’d have to go to Miami, New York, or LA. Today, in Newton, Massachusetts, there’s med spas. You can go and you can get LED treatments and all kinds of stuff.
One of the inspirations for our innovation is, is the consumer doing something outside the home that they’re not doing inside the home? We decided that skin care was a great next place for us to go. …We developed a product called the Shark CryoGlow. It’s an LED infrared cryo face mask.
The overall market for LED face masks in the United States was $30 million last year. This year, we’ll do $70 million in business in the United States with the Shark CryoGlow. And the consumer accepted us in this in this skin space.
Now, I tell the story because if we went from Shark, the cleaning brand, right into skin, I don’t think the consumer would have accepted us. I think we needed to go into hair. We needed to have multiple hair care products. And that then opened the door and gave us license to go into the next category… Now that we’re in skin, can we go into scalp? Can we go into dental? Can we go into nails? Doors open up for your brand as you’re successful with one thing. [But] you can’t leap three steps ahead. You got to bring the consumer along with you.
Investors say to me, “You’re in 37 product categories. Are there any more product categories to go into?” My answer is, I think there’s an infinite number of consumer problems to solve…
…You find many companies where they innovate and then they take a break, and they go on hiatus for a couple of years. They don’t innovate. And it’s that consistency and repetitiveness of innovation that keeps you relevant with the consumer.
Let’s take [another question from the audience]… “I’m surprised you mentioned Apple as an innovative reference. Your company does so much more than them. Talk about the structure of your innovation team. Is it multiple departments?” And also, what is it called? Do you call it R&D?
… I’m referencing Apple because of the consistency of innovation. People can knock Apple [because] they haven’t gone into a whole lot of new categories since Steve Jobs passed away, and you’re right about that. Eventually, I believe that will catch up to them — that you have to go start going wider. But there’s another part, which is the consistency of innovation.
I think that you find many companies where they innovate and then they take a break, and they go on hiatus for a couple of years. They don’t innovate. And it’s that consistency and repetitiveness of innovation that keeps you relevant with the consumer. If you don’t have a new story to tell, then your business gets into a break-fix business, a replacement business. When the consumer breaks their blender, they’ll have a new blender.
If we’re not doing anything to put our products into retirement before their usable life, then you’re relying on the market, and you’re relying on a break-fix business. No one really needs an iPhone 17 if they bought an iPhone 15. But ultimately, there’s some feature on it that [causes you to say], “I’ve got to get rid of this iPhone 15.”
That’s no different than what we see in things like air fryers or vacuum cleaners or robots or outdoor grills or coolers… There’s a number of different elements of innovation. We have an R&D team, we have an advanced development team, we have a new product development team, we have a new product implementation team.
…We have 1300 engineers around the world. But the exciting thing about our engineering organization [is] the ability for us to run 24 hours a day, six days a week. When an engineer in Boston is working on a project or on a CAD [drawing] and they go to sleep, the CAD passes to China, and the engineers in China work on it. When they’re done with it, the CAD passes to London, and those engineers work on it.
Every one of our products is worked on by a team of people around the world, and it allows us to be able to innovate at much, much faster than any of our competitors.
Let’s see if we can squeeze in a couple more questions. Talk about the starting point of these hack weeks. [Do] you walk into a room and there’s whiteboards and blank sheets of paper, or do you have some consumer insights data, some new technology that the R&D team has been looking at?
Both. First of all, we’ve developed a big internal consumer insights team that is constantly in consumer homes, mining social media, chat comments, mining online reviews. Even within five-star reviews, there could be negative sentiment…
I’ve given this example many times. We went into 100 consumer homes, and we watched them vacuum, and they turned over the vacuum cleaner — eight of them — and they took a knife or a scissor, and they cut the hair off the brush roll. They pulled the hair off the brush roll, and they threw it in the garbage. At the end of the cleaning session, we said to them, “Is there anything you’d change about your vacuum cleaner?” And they said, “No, it works great.”
We said, “Well, hold on a minute. We saw you turn the vacuum over. We saw you kind of almost cut your finger off, slicing the hair off the brush roll. It was disgusting. You threw the hair away.” They start apologizing. They start saying, “I have two daughters with long hair.” “We have pets.” They’re not saying there’s a problem with the product. They’re saying it’s a problem with them…
Well, that for us is [the starting point] of an idea. How could we create a vacuum brush roll that doesn’t [do that]? We take that idea back to one of these hack weeks. The engineers invariably, when we have these concepts, say, “Oh, that can’t be done.”
And 18 months later, we launch [the] Shark [with a] self-cleaning brush roll, and it’s the number one vacuum cleaner in the United States. So it comes from insights. It comes from maybe a technology idea… It comes from the consumer doing something outside of the home that they’re not able to do inside of the home.
And then the power of getting engineers and product developers and marketers and consumer insights people all in a room together, and having them sit and do nothing for four days — you get an amazing diversity of ideas. You get amazing things that come out of it…
There’s a question about your biggest failure, and what did you learn from that?
There are five times more failures than successes. … If I go back to 2009, we made a vacuum cleaner where we became enormously enamored with the technology. My partner and I would put a pile of sand on the table. This vacuum cleaner would suck up all the sand, never lose any suction. The product is called the Shark MultiVac. You probably can still find it online. It was the biggest failure we’ve ever had. …We bought a huge amount of inventory [of] this product. All the retailers bought it.
We were a very small company at the time. The product got into the market. People were saying to us in the beginning, “It looks odd.” It didn’t look odd; it looked horrific. It was like an erector set. The consumer had to pop this thing off. They couldn’t figure out how to pop it back on. …Anyway, we realized very quickly, this product is a huge failure.
Very quickly, we went to the retailers, and we said to them, “We’re going to discount the MultiVac. This was even before Christmas. It was before they came to us and told us it was a failure.
Now, here’s an interesting concept about dealing with retailers, or any partner. If you go to a partner first and tell them you want to do something different with your product, you’re a partner. If they come to you and tell you there’s a problem, there’s a problem. You’re a loser. The difference between a partner and a loser could be a day. So you’ve got to proactively go to them.
At this point, the retailer didn’t know we were losers. [SharkNinja is] taking the product down from $199 to $169. Anyway, it took us three years to liquidate the Shark MultiVac. We lost $10 million on this product when at the time, our business only made $20 million. It was a massive, massive failure.
Now, most companies would say, “Never talk to me about the Shark MultiVac again. Eradicate it from our dictionary.” There was something really interesting about the concept…it was just the way we executed. A year later, we took the idea and we developed it into a product called the Shark Lift-Away.
The Shark Lift-Away is, for the last 12 years, the number one selling vacuum cleaner in the world, and it all came from the biggest failure in the company’s history. There was something in that failure that we knew was still good, and we turned it into one of our biggest successes.
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