The Gizmo Empire

Laid out on a table in SharkNinja’s mock big-box store—replete with fluorescent lights, aisles brimming with vacuums and air fryers, and a logo resembling Walmart’s—were multiple versions of the top-secret contraption, codenamed the Lily. How did they like the way the product moved across their faces, Barrocas cross-examined the group, some anxiously touching their skin with the device. “Any issue,” he asked, “on the noise?” But it was the gunk he fixated on: Could his engineers light up the cartridge to make it more of a captivating moment on TikTok? How could they turn the excretion into a big reveal, a satisfying ritual like popping a pimple or pulling a Bioré pore strip off your nose?

SharkNinja began hawking vacuums on late-night infomercials in the early 2000s. Today it’s still bent on building show-stopping features into its products, such as the black-water tank of its kitchen mop that reveals an obscene amount of dirt. For the FacialPro Glow, as the product would eventually be named when it landed on shelves in early October, the goal was to get users to share that pore-declogging moment with their friends 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 tested the device.

This obsession with making products as irresistible as they are functional is what’s turned SharkNinja into the infomercial king for the TikTok age. Unlike shoppers who want premium brands they can flaunt as countertop trophies—an $800 Breville espresso machine, a $2,600 Miele microwave oven—SharkNinja fans are more interested in a reasonably priced product with instant payoff. Want to cook a pizza with the exact precision necessary to blacken the crust? For $300, the company claims its Ninja Artisan 5-in-1 Portable Electric Pizza & Outdoor Oven can do that in three minutes, every time, no matter what dough you stick in there. Same thing for its affordable espresso makers, which do away with that need-a-Ph.D.-to-brew-a-cup-of-coffee feeling while making a pretty decent latte, replete with foam art—more fodder for TikTok.

The company has used a similar formula for ice cream makers, hair dryers, air purifiers and dozens of other consumer gadgets. Its strategy is to woo customers from the premium end willing to trade down and customers from the low end open to trading up, says Neil Shah, chief commercial officer. Take converts like Carrie DiLeonardi, a 29-year-old nonprofit worker. Last year, after she got her mom to splurge on buying her the $349 Shark FlexStyle hair-dryer-styler combo—almost half the price of a Dyson Airwrap—her social media feed was flooded with videos of the Ninja Creami ice cream maker. The $230 device, which claims to make almost any frozen dessert in under two minutes, now has top billing on her wedding 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 brand: “It’s aspirational, but it’s still attainable.”

SharkNinja—Shark is the part of the business that sells vacuums and beauty products; Ninja makes kitchen items—might not yet be a household name, but chances are you’ve seen one of its hit products in a Target or Sephora, or encountered one on TikTok, Instagram or Reddit. Those familiar with the brand tend to be fanatical. The company’s Ninja Slushi frozen drink maker, which launched in July 2024, sold out 10 times in the US, with a global waitlist soaring past 170,000. Its Shark CryoGlow face mask was trending on TikTok in the UK, where it first launched, in a matter of days. A video of the Shark TurboBlade, a fan that can stand vertically or horizontally, got more than 75 million views on TikTok and Instagram, and its Ninja Luxe Café coffee maker is the No. 1 espresso maker this year to date, the company says.

Product reviewers are at the ready every time the brand unveils a contraption. “The Ninja Creami Changed the Way I Think About Making Ice Cream at Home,” wrote Bon Appétit magazine in a July headline. “Is the Ninja Creami Ice Cream Maker Worth the Hype?” asked the Food Network earlier this year. The Ninja Creami subreddit currently has about 62,000 weekly visitors, who share so many recipes that Reddit users made a rulebook on how to submit them. “The ingredients need to be bullet points and the directions need to be numbered steps,” it details. And the company—which spends $1 out of every $10 it makes on advertising—has continued to boost that buzz by enlisting celebrities like David Beckham and Kris Jenner to hawk its goods. It cut a product-placement deal with F1 The Movie; along with SharkNinja’s logo being featured on Brad Pitt’s black-and-gold Mercedes, the brand sold a special collection of gold hair dryers, fans, vacuums and coolers.

All of which has allowed SharkNinja to more than double its annual revenue in only five years and sent its shares soaring by roughly 103%, as of mid-November, since going public in 2023. This ascent, though, hasn’t been without controversy. Competitors Dyson Group Plc and iRobot Corp., deriding the company as less innovator and more copycat, have both sued for patent infringement involving vacuums. (SharkNinja has been embroiled in lawsuits with both companies. It settled with iRobot last year and with Dyson this winter.)

But the largest retailer in the world doesn’t seem bothered. SharkNinja’s ability to produce hits has become so expected, executives say the company sometimes doesn’t even need to give Walmart Inc. and other retailers the specifics of a new product before the chains guarantee them coveted shelf space. (Walmart didn’t respond to a request for comment.) That reliability is pretty remarkable, says Jad Jichi, Ninja vice president for global creative, given that when you really think about it, “there’s nothing we make that you actually need.”

The business took off, reaching $1 million in sales after only 12 months. In the following years, Rosenzweig—a natural in front of the camera as he talked vacuum suction power—began appearing on TV segments on the Home Shopping Network, where he performed gimmicks like hoovering up sand on a carpet or suctioning furniture off the floor. In 2002 he relocated to Boston, and by the end of that year, the business, with the help of his sister and brother, had grown to $260 million in annual sales. “Look at the way it just pulls it in,” Rosenzweig said enthusiastically in a promotional video, after vacuuming up rows of cereal and Goldfish crackers.

By 2008, looking to bring in a more professional management team, he said he turned to his buddy Mark Barrocas, a fellow parent at his kids’ school. The two men had gotten to know each other from the sidelines of the ice-skating rink where they’d watch their girls skate. Barrocas was a natural salesman who’d begun his career peddling sports-branded T-shirts as an undergrad at the University of Michigan. After a series of midlevel management jobs at small clothing brands and a stint running the uniform business of food service provider Aramark, he jumped at the chance to do something more enterprising.

Barrocas came on as president, focused on persuading retailers to stock the company’s goods, while Rosenzweig concentrated on the products. “In the beginning it was us against the world,” Barrocas says, recounting the first time the self-described “best friends” were able to get the Shark vacuum cleaner into Bed Bath & Beyond. Landing in the retailer was a huge victory, he says, but still, “the aspiration was, stay in business for another day.”

The following year, “Mark and Mark,” as they were known by their employees, decided to expand into kitchen devices, with a new blender. Unlike a typical blender with blades at the bottom, theirs had a column of blades up the middle, helping it crush ice more quickly. When they pitched it to a major retailer, as Barrocas tells it, a product manager told him they loved the machine but would carry it only if the company changed its name. (He demurs at first when asked about the device’s original name. “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 team renamed the blender Ninja, a nod to the spinning blades, which resembled a weapon.

While Barrocas and Rosenzweig were on a sourcing trip in China, the Ninja Master Prep sold out within hours on QVC. It was about 5 a.m. in China when the Marks, in hotel rooms next to each other, heard the news. They started banging on their shared wall, celebrating their company’s first kitchen success. Not long after, the company released the Shark Navigator Lift-Away, a standing vacuum cleaner with an entirely detachable canister. Within two years, it became the bestselling vacuum in the US, earning its place alongside mainstays like Hoover and Kenmore. (Not every product reached the same heights: Just before the Lift-Away, the clunky and flimsy Shark Multi-Vac was a dud.)

By then, the company had officially changed its name to SharkNinja, and in 2018 it tried to find its way into the Instant Pot boom. People were going wild for pressure cookers, but the food that came out was often soggy. After talking to home cooks, who’d put their food in the broiler to crisp it up after using the pressure cooker, SharkNinja released the Foodi, casting it as a pressure cooker that crisps. It was getting the attention of gadget reviewers from the likes of the New York Times’ Wirecutter and New York magazine’s Strategist, cementing the brand as a contender in the kitchen space.

But that same year, Rosenzweig decided he was ready to exit the company. SharkNinja tapped Goldman Sachs to help it sell a stake in the business, including a large swath of Rosenzweig’s shares. They found a buyer in Chinese billionaire CJ Xuning Wang, who’d made his fortune inventing an electric soy-milk maker. Wang’s private equity firm acquired a majority stake in SharkNinja, then folded it into a holding company called JS Global Lifestyle Co. that he soon listed on Hong Kong’s stock exchange.

After a decade alongside Rosenzweig—who still holds many of the company’s patents—Barrocas was now fully in charge. (Rosenzweig spends a chunk of his week consulting for the company, including making appearances in its vacuum-cleaner infomercials. “All the dirt’s gone. It’s magic!” exclaims Rosenzweig, an overly enthusiastic, bald middle-aged man now, in a recent 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 new product categories, picked up the pace of manufacturing and went hard on social media. In 2021 the company released the Creami, followed a few years later by the Slushi. Both were geared for maximum Insta-worthy attention on the heels of a pandemic-fueled cooking boom, during which everyone was eager to show off their latest creations. TikTok influencers tried to one-up one another with the craziest recipes. Among them: apple-pie-protein ice cream and breast-milk ice cream.

The company was also getting into beauty. Several years earlier, Dyson had made the unusual jump from vacuums to beauty products, tapping its suction technology to design a more effective hair dryer, and SharkNinja followed suit. Only SharkNinja priced its version significantly less than what Dyson’s was selling for. Then, not long after Dyson came out with its hair-curling Airwrap, SharkNinja introduced its own cheaper version and unleashed it all over social media. Suddenly the brand was reeling in a new customer—younger women who might turn to Shark to turbocharge their beauty routine rather than clean floors. The move also brought SharkNinja to court, where it defended more allegations by Dyson of patent infringement—this time over its hair products. The litigation, which the companies did not provide more detail on, was settled at the same time they resolved their vacuum patent fight.

Sales at SharkNinja boomed, but its stock did not. Barrocas says US investors were losing their appetite for investing in Chinese-owned companies, and Asian investors weren’t familiar with its products, which were mostly sold in the US and Europe. So, in 2023, SharkNinja relisted as a standalone publicly traded company in New York after spinning out of JS Global. (Wang, who became chairman of the board and still owns 39% of the stock, didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

In 2024, Barrocas plunged his company further into beauty. It was typically a more challenging category for new entrants, because existing brands already had devotees and medical devices are tightly regulated. By the time Shark released the $350 CryoGlow LED mask in the US, designed to dim signs of aging and tone down redness, the company had received US Food and Drug Administration clearance to sell the mask, and it had become fluent in TikTok. With only seconds to pull off a sell, it added a light-up feature on the mask that would twinkle when the under-eye cooling pads were activated—a made-for-infomercial moment optimized for the set with a short attention span: The extra lights didn’t make the product work better, but they made it look cooler.

SharkNinja now had a host of new product categories, an expanding set of enthusiasts and runaway growth. But within a few months of the CryoGlow’s arrival, Barrocas suddenly had a problem: President Donald Trump was about to make manufacturing overseas a whole lot more expensive.

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

SharkNinja had spent years trying to shift its production out of China. The rest came from Thailand, Vietnam and other countries where new levies would all of a sudden make it more expensive to produce there. Hundreds of millions of dollars of vacuums, blenders and hair products were on the line, not to mention the company’s rapid growth plans, stock price and, well, its whole business model, Reagan warned.

“Are you done?” Barrocas asked once Reagan caught his breath.

“Yeah,” Reagan said.

“OK, what’s the bottom-line hit?”

“Three hundred and fifty million dollars.”

Barrocas then quickly pulled together what he describes as a SWAT team of roughly 100 employees across all departments, telling them to clear their calendars of any meetings for days until they could identify $350 million in cost savings to offset the tariff blow. A sales executive gave the project a code name: Operation Knuckleball, named after the erratic and unpredictable baseball pitch, which reminded him of how Trump’s tariffs were reverberating across the global economy.

It wasn’t long before the SharkNinja executive group text thread started blowing up with tariff-busting updates. Each time someone found a line item to cut—by negotiating with suppliers, tweaking the way a product was built or raising prices—they’d pipe up in a stream-of-consciousness chain interspersed with memes and GIFs. Within the first 18 hours, they’d cut $25 million in costs. “Today was a top-5 day of my career,” one executive wrote in what can only be described as complete earnestness.

At a May town hall in SharkNinja’s London office, Barrocas cued up a video dramatizing their global effort: images of tanking stock markets, alarming news headlines and footage of people working feverishly in their offices, set to David Bowie and Queen’s Under Pressure. The company had come up with 1,500 ideas to blunt the tariff impact, reaching $100 million at that point in cost savings. As the reel ended, Barrocas barreled onstage to Unstoppable by Sia, with the crowd cheering as if they were watching a daytime game show host. They would be shifting 90% of production outside of China, had redirected products that were supposed to be introduced in the US over to Canada and Europe, and cut back on promotions to preserve additional cash. Back in Massachusetts, executives held what they referred to as their own “Liberation Day” award ceremony, whose accolades included “Margin Guardian” and “Marketplace Master,” with certificates featuring employee faces pasted on photos of Trump and his 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 color coding also makes it easier to act fast. Described by several members of his staff as putting the micro in micromanagement, SharkNinja’s boss is also 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 asked if the company is winning or losing right now, Barrocas and Shah simultaneously answer with a chuckle: “We’re always losing.”

That paranoia, they say, is why they constantly reevaluate and tweak their products. SharkNinja regularly has product evaluation days where workers stress-test things as mundane as updated assembly instructions. But even this kind of perpetual tweaking doesn’t always lead to guaranteed hits—or products that are as simple as the company pitches. Many of its contraptions are 3-in-1, or 8-in-1, or what feels like 1,000-in-1, offering shoppers a never-ending menu of options and a cabinet’s worth of parts. Its Creami promises a chocolate chip gummy bear milkshake at the press of a button. In reality, to make a TikTok-worthy Creami sensation calls for overnight prep, a multi-part assembly and a deep study of its 35-page recipe booklet. If you can make it that far (never mind the occasional smell of burnt machine parts and the jarringly loud whizzing), the machine will require a lengthy and sticky cleanup before you can whip up your next pint.

The brand’s mettle will be tested this holiday season, when tariff-spurred price hikes, scattered supply chains and economically hesitant consumers charge into the busiest shopping period of the year. In early September, the evening before Goldman Sachs’ Global Retailing Conference, Barrocas dined with Goldman Sachs CEO and Chairman David Solomon and a handful of other retail CEOs, where they discussed just how far inflation could go and their fears about the economy.

The uncertainty was palpable the next 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 told a room full of investors, emphasizing the heightened battle playing out for every consumer-facing business, beyond home goods. “I don’t think of it as we’re competing against other appliance companies for that dollar,” he said. “We’re competing against Olive Garden.”

This gift-giving season, Barrocas will pay particularly close attention to sales of that twinkling LED CryoGlow mask, now selling at Best Buy, Costco and Ulta. After its initial introduction, the company heard from users that it needed to make the unboxing process—particularly what happens once you have the product in your hand—a bit more intuitive, especially for those who had never encountered this kind of beauty gadget before. So this spring, it held a consumer research session at SharkNinja headquarters in another one of its faux chambers—this one, a fake living room replete with TJ Maxx-chic canvas wall art, pillar candles and a staircase leading into a wall.

With a group of researchers watching behind a double-sided mirror, a SharkNinja product tester invited an older woman in a puffer jacket to sit with her on a couch. The woman confessed her skin was aging and she typically asked her daughter what skin-care products to buy but didn’t own any beauty devices. “I wouldn’t even know what to get,” she said in a thick Boston accent with nervous laughter.

The researcher handed her the CryoGlow, packaged as if it just came fresh from the aisle. The woman investigated it like a foreign 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 said, eventually slipping off the packaging and leafing through an extensive user manual. Finally, she stuck her fingers through the nose hole of the mask—not exactly where they’re supposed to be, and also a common mistake—eventually fastening the mask around her head as it emitted red and blue lights. As the tester asked her to rate the product and describe her experience, the woman stopped to ponder how to answer. Eventually, she settled on a decision: “You know, it’s not something that I need,” she said. But, “it is something that I might want.”

After about an hour, the woman was escorted out. Whether or not she becomes a customer someday, the people behind the mirror had what they needed. They began to plot how to redesign the packaging. And the whole cycle starts again.