How SharkNinja convinces you that you absolutely need its viral household gizmos

Do you really, truly need a $350 ice cream machine sitting on your kitchen counter all day? 

Celebrity chefs like Alton Brown have railed against kitchen unitaskers, items that serve only a single purpose. “I despise these devices,” Brown said in a 2016 video. “Truthfully, America, it’s your fault.”

True to form, earlier this year on the release day of the Ninja Swirl by CREAMi — a machine whose sole purpose is to make traditional and soft-serve ice cream — many Americans felt they really did need that device. In fact, the company behind it, SharkNinja, sold one of the fancy ice cream makers every eight seconds that day.

The release was just the latest success story for SharkNinja, which has managed to become a social media behemoth by doing what 20 years ago would have been relegated to early morning TV infomercials or a shopping channel like QVC. 

And the company hasn’t stopped there: it releases 25 new products every year, one every two weeks, produced by a team of more than 1,000 engineers around the world who hand off their work as the sun crosses the globe. The devices are designed to make their way into consumers’ homes thanks to the power of TikTok and other platforms.

“We’ve had a lot of success through our products being so easy to interact with, and for me, that’s one of our clear philosophies. That design allows the consumer that enablement to get access to an experience that maybe they weren’t able to get before,” Ross Richardson, SharkNinja’s chief design officer, told Sherwood News in an interview.

It’s the modern-day equivalent of the can’t-miss tchotchke that could convince you to grab your landline off the wall and dial QVC when you saw it demonstrated on TV. It’s what Richardson, a 10-year vet at the company, calls desirability. 

“Desirability, for me, is giving you something that’s super cool but you’ve not been able to get access to — whether you don’t have the skills to dry your hair or cook a steak, or whether just the act of slushying a drink in your kitchen is not something you could do,” he said.

The strategy has helped the company beat sales in the wider appliance market by an average of 10 percentage points so far this year, Nielsen point-of-sale data shows.

The company’s stock has soared more than 300% over the past five years, and is up about 18% so far this year, outpacing the S&P 500’s 12% gain.

“The change rests on treating every launch as a social story rather than a hardware release,” said Nicolas de Resbecq, chief revenue officer at Oppizi, a New York marketing company. “The team puts design and use case on camera first, then lets the engineering catch up.” That’s why SharkNinja’s CREAMi and SLUSHi machines became must-haves, De Resbecq said. “Each appliance produces a dramatic visual payoff that plays perfectly in a 9:16 frame, so creators can open with the reveal, not a long setup,” he said.

That comes at a cost to SharkNinja’s bottom line, though: the firm spends about $1 in every $9 of its annual sales on advertising, some $700 million all told. “Reach comes from sheer scale,” De Resbecq said. 

But simply throwing cash at the problem won’t solve things, which is where SharkNinja comes into its own: by tailoring its marketing to consumers. 

“You’ve got to believe in something to be able to post it on TikTok,” Richardson said. “That emotional connection of offering a piece of design that you know you can love, that you can really get to be part of your life, is, I think, what we’re doing.”

“SharkNinja figured out how to market function as lifestyle, which is exactly what resonates with Gen Z,” e-commerce marketing expert Josh Neuman said. “This generation is not drawn to utility for its own sake. They want tools that say something about who they are, even if it is a vacuum cleaner or an air fryer.”

And it’s in those areas that the company is making major headway, turning what were once boring appliances into something more enviable. Four in every 10 vacuum cleaners sold in the US this year are made by SharkNinja, up from about 29% in 2020, according to Nielsen, while a new line of air movers and cleaners has gone from nothing in 2020 to commanding nearly a third of the market today. One of those, the Shark TurboBlade bladeless fan, was behind a 10x year-on-year increase in interactions on Shark Home’s TikTok channel, which has just over 180,000 followers. A single video of the fan, posted in April, has racked up 33 million views on TikTok.

Lynsey Bleakley, an avowed SharkNinja obsessive from County Down, Northern Ireland, thinks the company’s success is “a combination of good marketing and building solutions for simple things that just weren’t on the market.” Bleakley’s first purchase was a floor steamer and scrubber from SharkNinja in 2021. She quickly followed up with other purchases and now has an air fryer, a set of saucepans, a cordless vacuum, and a vac-mop all made by the company. “They had good reviews, a good warranty, or they appeared when I was searching for a solution,” she said.

Richardson said SharkNinja is often more consumer-focused than its competitors. He explained how the company’s line of vacuum cleaners has anti-hair-wrapping technology, designed to prevent a common pain point for users: hair getting caught up in a roller as it picks up dust. But when they were testing earlier prototypes, customers didn’t even identify that as a noticeable problem.

“We went out and we did a lot of consumer testing, and everybody came back to say they loved the product, nothing wrong with it,” he said. “But we had watched people literally cutting hair off with a pair of scissors, so we went back and challenged them, and they didn’t see the problem. They’re apologizing: ‘I’m really sorry. My daughter’s got long hair; the dog’s got long hair.’” 

Such forgiveness wouldn’t be given to consumer electronics, Richardson reasoned, so why should it be given to household appliances? “We really stand for taking a much higher level of accountability for solving things that maybe either you don’t see or you maybe just accept,” he said.

Customers like Bleakley helped propel SharkNinja to record sales of $5.5 billion last year, up from $3.7 billion in 2022. One potential stumbling block to further success — the company said in its first-quarter results this year that it had a 21% compound annual growth rate going back to 2008 — is the potential imposition of tariffs by President Donald Trump, which would affect much of the company’s sourcing of components from China. SharkNinja expects nearly all of its US-bound products to be sourced from outside China by the end of the year, avoiding the highest tariffs.

“We’re proactively pivoting as things change,” Richardson said. “It’s a dynamic situation. Every morning we wake up, there’s another news story affecting it, and it’s about trying to continue to build value to the consumer through disruptive innovation.” 

And customers will likely keep buying: sales were up 16% to their highest level ever for the quarter ended in June.

Chris Stokel-Walker is a UK-based journalist. His latest book is “How AI Ate the World.”