Masters of Scale The insights that fuel SharkNinja’s biggest innovations
Aug 14, 2025
Mark Barrocas, CEO of SharkNinja, shares insights from his $6 billion consumer product empire. He discusses the journey from selling vacuum cleaners on late-night infomercials to innovative hits like the Ninja Creami. Emphasizing the importance of educated consumers, he illustrates how feedback fuels product development and adaptability. Barrocas also highlights lessons learned from past product failures and the integration of AI to enhance innovation and customer service within the company.
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Founding Pivot From EuroPro To Shark Ninja
- Mark Barrocas and Mark Rosenzweig joined in 2008 to rescue a struggling company called EuroPro and focused on product development.
- They aimed to develop one hit product a year to make a living and built engineering capability to do it.
Start With Deep Consumer Problems
- Shark Ninja built around ethnographic research and consumer problems rather than incremental changes.
- They mine social media, online reviews, and in-home observation to find deep consumer needs.
Blender Breakthrough: Blades On Top
- They redesigned the blender by moving blades to the top to crush ice into snow and replicate restaurant-quality frozen drinks.
- That 2009 Ninja blender quickly became a hit and by 2013 was the top-selling blender in the U.S.