Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is what's your problem. My
Speaker 2: guest today is Mark Barochus. He's the CEO of Shark Ninja.
Speaker 2: When Mark started at the company in two thousand and eight,
Speaker 2: they sold a mop and a cordless sweeper, largely via infomercial. Today,
Speaker 2: Shark Ninja sells six billion dollars worth of stuff every year,
Speaker 2: mops and vacuum cleaners, but also ice cream makers and
Speaker 2: air fryers and blenders and hair dryers and this thing
Speaker 2: that's supposedly good for your skin and has lights on
Speaker 2: it and you put it on your face and it
Speaker 2: makes you look like a Lucha Libre wrestler. What I'm
Speaker 2: saying is they sell everything now, and they sell it everywhere.
Speaker 2: I wanted to talk to Mark because Shark Ninja is
Speaker 2: an innovative company, not in the frontiers of science sense,
Speaker 2: but in the making a blender that does something you've
Speaker 2: never been able to do at home before with a
Speaker 2: blender since also in the designing products to go viral
Speaker 2: on social media sense. As our editor said, Shark Ninja
Speaker 2: is like Bell Labs for stuff nobody really needs but
Speaker 2: lots of people clearly want, and so there is a
Speaker 2: lot to learn from the company. In our conversation, Mark
Speaker 2: and I talked about how the company develops new products,
Speaker 2: the trade offs it makes between engineering the perfect product
Speaker 2: and the good enough product at the right price, and
Speaker 2: why the secret to going viral is Schmutz. To start,
Speaker 2: I asked Mark to tell me about the company's first big,
Speaker 2: non obvious leap from selling mops to selling a new
Speaker 2: kind of blender.
Speaker 3: We looked at the blender market and we said, you know,
Speaker 3: what do consumers want to do with blenders. Well, in
Speaker 3: their home they were doing one thing. But outside their home,
Speaker 3: American consumers want to frozen drinks. And you'd go to
Speaker 3: these Mexican restaurants and you'd get a frozen margarita and
Speaker 3: they'd be done in these kind of professional, big blenders,
Speaker 3: and you'd get home and you try to make it,
Speaker 3: and a blender had blades that were on the bottom,
Speaker 3: and so you'd put the ice into the blender and
Speaker 3: the ice would just jump up because we'd never get
Speaker 3: to the blades. And then so you'd add more liquid
Speaker 3: and add more liquid, and by the time you added
Speaker 3: a whole bunch of liquid, you no longer had a
Speaker 3: frozen drink. You had this kind of cold, watery drink.
Speaker 3: And so we said, well, hold on, if this is
Speaker 3: what consumers want, we have to solve the problem of
Speaker 3: making restaurant quality frozen drinks. And we said, why are
Speaker 3: the blades on the bottom, Why don't the blades go
Speaker 3: up the top. And if the blades go up the top,
Speaker 3: you can put a whole bunch of ice in it.
Speaker 3: You can turn the ice to snow. And we ultimately,
Speaker 3: you know, developed this technology and we would buy bags
Speaker 3: of ice in gas stations and we'd walk into the
Speaker 3: Walmart buyer and we would fill the ice to the
Speaker 3: top of the picture. We'd put the blade inside and
Speaker 3: we turned the ice to snow and we'd pour the
Speaker 3: picture of snow onto the table and we'd say, look
Speaker 3: at this fuel, this consistency. Well, the buyer thought we
Speaker 3: were crazy at the time, but that was the secret
Speaker 3: ingredient to making these creamy, restaurant quality frozen drinks. And
Speaker 3: so when we went out and the first time we
Speaker 3: launched this Ninja Master Prep was in two thousand and
Speaker 3: nine on QVC and instantly it sold out. One day,
Speaker 3: we sold like forty thousand units in one day.
Speaker 1: Was the biggest success we had.
Speaker 3: Ever had one day in the company's history, and what
Speaker 3: it was was that the minute we did these demonstrations,
Speaker 3: consumers immediately said, not wow, I've never heard of this
Speaker 3: brand Ninja, you know, or oh, what an interesting blender.
Speaker 3: What they said is they solved my problem. They solved
Speaker 3: my problem. That's what I want to do with a blender. Well,
Speaker 3: that is everything that Shark Ninja stands for today. That
Speaker 3: when the consumer sees what we've developed, whether it's a fan,
Speaker 3: whether it's an air fryer, whether it's an outdoor grill,
Speaker 3: whether it's a skincare mask, whether it's a hairstyle, or
Speaker 3: whether it's a vacuum, what we want is for the
Speaker 3: consumer to look at the product and say, they solved
Speaker 3: my problem.
Speaker 2: I know your partner did infomercials. Did you ever do infomercials?
Speaker 2: Because I suddenly feel like I'm watching an infomercial.
Speaker 1: I did not do infomercials.
Speaker 2: Is it true that you were going to call the
Speaker 2: thing that became the Ninja the Fiestaville.
Speaker 1: It is true.
Speaker 2: You could have been Shark Fiestaville instead of Shark Ninja.
Speaker 3: We could have been Shark Fiestaville. But you know, there
Speaker 3: was a you know, there was a retailer buyer that said, look,
Speaker 3: I love the product, but the name is a really
Speaker 3: dumb name. And they said, you know, go back and
Speaker 3: come up with something, you know, more more compelling. And
Speaker 3: we actually we looked at the blades. If you've ever
Speaker 3: seen a Ninja blender and you see the blades that
Speaker 3: go up, we kind of looked at them and it
Speaker 3: was like kind of when we were a kid, you know,
Speaker 3: you would take a Chinese star and you throw it
Speaker 3: against a tree or something and it would stick, and
Speaker 3: you know, literally, I think there was probably forty eight
Speaker 3: hours after that meeting where they told this Fiestaville was stupid,
Speaker 3: We said, how what about Ninja?
Speaker 1: And we socialized it and people said.
Speaker 3: Oh, you know Ninja, I don't know, Ninja maybe sounds
Speaker 3: like a dumb name as well.
Speaker 1: Look it ultimately proves to you.
Speaker 3: I mean, Ninja last year finished at a three point
Speaker 3: three billion dollar brand. We never acquired a dollar of
Speaker 3: revenue under the Ninja brand.
Speaker 2: So you've built this giant, multi billion dollar business. I
Speaker 2: read a recent interview with you where you said, you
Speaker 2: still feel like you're always losing. What's going on there.
Speaker 3: I mean, every day we're either gaining loyal consumers or
Speaker 3: we're losing frustrated consumers. And you know, I don't think
Speaker 3: that success is permanent. I also don't think that failure
Speaker 3: is permanent. I think failure is a temporary can condition,
Speaker 3: and I think success is a temporary condition. And I
Speaker 3: think that you earn the right to stay in business
Speaker 3: every day. You earn the right, you know, to generate
Speaker 3: revenue from the consumer's hard earned dollar every day. And
Speaker 3: I think that when I go into the office in
Speaker 3: the morning and I read a one star review about
Speaker 3: our products, I mean, it ruins my day. I mean
Speaker 3: it genuinely does. I mean, at the size of business
Speaker 3: that you are today, and if you get a five
Speaker 3: star review, it like puts wind at your sales. And
Speaker 3: so when I'm saying that I feel like we're losing,
Speaker 3: I feel like there's so much more that we can do.
Speaker 2: I want to talk about your product development process in
Speaker 2: a little bit more detail. And I thought it might
Speaker 2: be useful to talk about a specific product. And I
Speaker 2: wondered if we could do the Ninja Creamy the ice
Speaker 2: cream maker, because in part it seems not obvious like
Speaker 2: this seems like a case that the people of America
Speaker 2: were not clamoring for an ice cream maker to put
Speaker 2: on the counter. Where did that come from? And sort
Speaker 2: of step me through the process of actually making that
Speaker 2: turning it into a product.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 3: So look, product development is like getting little nuggets and
Speaker 3: insights and kind of trying to put all the pieces
Speaker 3: together to what we call create a mouse trap. Okay,
Speaker 3: and that mousetrap has to have.
Speaker 2: Wait, am I the mouse in that metaphorm in potentially potent?
Speaker 2: You're catching me when I buy your product. You might
Speaker 2: want to refixt that.
Speaker 1: And so the question is what is that?
Speaker 3: So we had ethnographic researchers in restaurants and we started
Speaker 3: looking at how do high end restaurants make ice cream?
Speaker 3: I mean they're just opening up a Ben and Jerry's
Speaker 3: thing and scooping it out. No, I mean they're actually
Speaker 3: making ice cream in very very expensive machines in these restaurants,
Speaker 3: and they're controlling the ingredients, and they're tweaking the ingredients
Speaker 3: and doing all these things.
Speaker 1: So that was one data point.
Speaker 3: There was a second data point where I I have
Speaker 3: two children that both have nut allergies, and you know,
Speaker 3: I have another child that has a dairy allergy, and
Speaker 3: so we felt like there was a whole market around
Speaker 3: people that would be willing in their home to kind
Speaker 3: of craft ice cream due to dietary restrictions or allergies
Speaker 3: or things like that. That's a second data point, okay,
Speaker 3: that we know. Third data point was that we know
Speaker 3: that consumers love doing things that kind of bring people together,
Speaker 3: bring families together, and so the ability for you to
Speaker 3: be able to make ice cream, you know, as a
Speaker 3: family is like an exciting thing, like everyone gets involved,
Speaker 3: and so there's like a communal aspect to it. So
Speaker 3: there's those three things that were coming together.
Speaker 2: Let me ask just before we got farther there. I mean,
Speaker 2: you mentioned there was an expensive restaurant machine, right, Is
Speaker 2: it right that part of the story is like it
Speaker 2: was going off patent, they had some particular intellectual property
Speaker 2: in it was going into the public domain. Is that right?
Speaker 3: There's lots of machines out there that you can buy
Speaker 3: in restaurants.
Speaker 1: I mean the point was, yes.
Speaker 2: What there was not some intellectual property opportunity that was
Speaker 2: some part of this.
Speaker 3: No, in fact, in fact that Ninja Creamy has a
Speaker 3: lot of intellectual property within it. But it was it
Speaker 3: was how is something made outside of the home that
Speaker 3: tastes so great that the consumers not able to do
Speaker 3: it inside of the home. Now here's something very interesting
Speaker 3: for you to know. It was never the idea of
Speaker 3: Shark Ninja to develop protein ice cream, Like we created
Speaker 3: this hardware.
Speaker 1: Okay, this Ninja creamy product.
Speaker 2: Well wait before protein ice cream is like the end
Speaker 2: of the story, right, I feel like there's a few
Speaker 2: more things that have to happen first. Like one is,
Speaker 2: you have to figure out how to turn the eight
Speaker 2: thousand dollars restaurant machine into a two hundred dollars machine. Right,
Speaker 2: how do you do that?
Speaker 3: First of all, we start with a target price of
Speaker 3: what we we'd love to sa sell it. Now, sometimes
Speaker 3: that target price is you know, complete pie in the
Speaker 3: sky where we go to the engineers and we'd say,
Speaker 3: we'd love to be able to sell this product for
Speaker 3: one hundred and ninety nine dollars. And after the engineers,
Speaker 3: you know, get back off the floor and tell you
Speaker 3: how dumb you are, because you know the motor is
Speaker 3: going to cost this and the PCBA is going to
Speaker 3: cost this. In the ways we say okay, like let's
Speaker 3: now start figuring it out, like how large could the
Speaker 3: size of the pint be? You know, in order to
Speaker 3: be able to kind of control all these variables. Product
Speaker 3: development is about managing all of these different you know, requirements.
Speaker 3: It's not about developing the best product always. It's about
Speaker 3: that trade off, its tradeoffs, and it's about developing the
Speaker 3: best performance at the best quality, at the best value,
Speaker 3: and it's the combination of those things. Sometimes product development
Speaker 3: is actually a vanity exercise. There are times where I
Speaker 3: go on to Kickstarter and I look at a product
Speaker 3: and the product is amazing, Okay, is it is incredible
Speaker 3: what they've done.
Speaker 1: And then you look.
Speaker 3: At the price tag and you're like it's eighteen hundred dollars. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and you're like, listen, for eighteen hundred dollars, you're dealing
Speaker 3: with such a small of a small consumer base. So
Speaker 3: going back to the creamy example, we had to sit
Speaker 3: there and for literally months and months it was trade
Speaker 3: off conversations.
Speaker 2: My understanding. So it comes out in twenty twenty one
Speaker 2: in the pandemic, you have this thesis about everybody's home
Speaker 2: and cooking, which was correct, but it doesn't seem like
Speaker 2: the Creamy really took off when it came out.
Speaker 3: Yes, and we started in the second half of twenty
Speaker 3: twenty two focusing it much more on social media. We
Speaker 3: started seeding it to lots of people.
Speaker 2: This is your marketing strategy, right, This is a good
Speaker 2: time to talk about that. Like you guys do as
Speaker 2: much creator marketing as let's say, anybody to a first approximation, right,
Speaker 2: tell me about what you did with the Creamy and
Speaker 2: how that sort of reflects more broadly the way you
Speaker 2: do creator marketing and social media marketing.
Speaker 3: Well, let's start with the end result is to have
Speaker 3: consumer organic flywheel going.
Speaker 1: That's the end results.
Speaker 2: You don't have to keep paying creators forever for a
Speaker 2: given produmt No.
Speaker 3: And by the way, it becomes so authentic when thousands
Speaker 3: of consumers are sharing their insights and are sharing their
Speaker 3: best recipes. But you have to light the organic flywheel.
Speaker 3: And so you light the organic flywheel by getting creators, chefs,
Speaker 3: other key opinion leaders that are doing things with the
Speaker 3: product to start to spur excitement. Now, fortunately for us,
Speaker 3: by the time that started in the second half of
Speaker 3: twenty twenty two, we already had lots of units.
Speaker 1: Out in the market.
Speaker 3: So we started investing tremendously at that point in social
Speaker 3: media influencers, social media marketing, and by Christmas of twenty
Speaker 3: twenty two, that started activating the people that had bought
Speaker 3: the product. At the end of twenty twenty one and
Speaker 3: into twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: Two, activating mean it got them to start.
Speaker 3: Posting exactly, sharing recipes, posting, troubleshooting, unboxing.
Speaker 1: Unboxing is a really exciting thing.
Speaker 3: I mean, people, there's a whole cottage industry of influencers
Speaker 3: that just go on and do that. We don't pay
Speaker 3: that just do unboxing of our products.
Speaker 2: Just to make this clear, this is literally people who
Speaker 2: open products and take them out of the box and
Speaker 2: that's the video. I will say, I love returning things.
Speaker 2: I have dreamed of making reboxing videos for other dads
Speaker 2: who love returning things, but I haven't done it.
Speaker 3: And on the unboxing it's like going through first use,
Speaker 3: like getting the consumer all the way through the unboxing
Speaker 3: process to the first use. As we got into twenty
Speaker 3: twenty three again that started accelerating. I mean, we started
Speaker 3: finding more and more use cases. The beginning of twenty
Speaker 3: twenty three is when protein ice cream really started so.
Speaker 2: Was it protein ice cream that really sent the creamy
Speaker 2: through the roof with that? What did it?
Speaker 3: Protein ice cream was a huge catalyst of being able
Speaker 3: to do it. And what protein ice cream did was
Speaker 3: it started this massive creator group of just developing their
Speaker 3: own ideas. There are you know, influencers that have channels
Speaker 3: of just will it creamy?
Speaker 2: And are you still putting money into it at this
Speaker 2: point when this is happening. Are you like seeing this
Speaker 2: and be like, oh, yeah, let's put a lot of
Speaker 2: money into protein ice cream.
Speaker 3: So we were putting a lot of money into it
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty three. Okay, here's the interesting thing that
Speaker 3: turned and it turned on us, I would say the
Speaker 3: second half of twenty four where there was so much
Speaker 3: organic content being developed that we no longer had to
Speaker 3: put our own marketing money behind it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I have my own creamy journey and we booked
Speaker 2: you before this happened. So it's just a coincidence. First
Speaker 2: of all, you're starting the viral marketing flywheel. Worked on
Speaker 2: my teenage daughters who know everything they know from TikTok.
Speaker 2: They asked for a creamy for Christmas. It's great, we
Speaker 2: made gelato together. Your dream come true, and then it broke. Wow, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it just broke. It just broke. Do you want to
Speaker 2: guess how it broke?
Speaker 1: Tell me, I'm anxious to hear.
Speaker 2: Okay, my daughter, I think she put the bowl in wrong.
Speaker 2: I mean, she's a teenager. I don't feel like I had.
Speaker 2: But there's an interesting question to me, which is to
Speaker 2: what extent I guess to some extent it's my fault
Speaker 2: because I'm the dad or whatever. To what extent is
Speaker 2: that my fault? To what extent is that my daughter's fault?
Speaker 2: And to what extent is it your fault? Because it like,
Speaker 2: it's not like we dropped it. It was not like
Speaker 2: a gratuitous thing, and like it seems like it was
Speaker 2: kind of easy to break it.
Speaker 3: Frankly, Well, here's what I would say, Like it's all
Speaker 3: my fault.
Speaker 2: Okay, I mean I'm not saying that.
Speaker 3: I'm truly not no, no, because listen, I mean, if
Speaker 3: we understand now, like what your daughter did in terms
Speaker 3: of you know, maybe she pushed it in the wrong
Speaker 3: way and maybe you know, she got some resistance and
Speaker 3: she overshot it.
Speaker 2: It's clearly a mistake other people have made.
Speaker 3: Okay, And you know what I would say, is that like,
Speaker 3: from the time we develop a product, as we're getting
Speaker 3: consumer feedback on the product, that product is evolving and changing. Okay,
Speaker 3: we're making constant upgrades to those products. Now, I'll give
Speaker 3: you a good example. When we came out with our
Speaker 3: first blender, we drop spoons and forks into the blender
Speaker 3: and to make sure that like that wasn't going to
Speaker 3: break the blender, because you know what, something could slip
Speaker 3: out of somebody's hand and it goes into there. And
Speaker 3: from a reliability standpoint, the product should be able to
Speaker 3: stand up to kind of what we call.
Speaker 1: Like reasonable consumer abuse. Okay, now I don't know what
Speaker 1: your your daughter did was reasonable.
Speaker 2: Consumer it was reasonable. I think it was reasonable. The
Speaker 2: bull get stuck seems like a thing. Although I will say,
Speaker 2: let me say the end of this, I'd actually not
Speaker 2: dealt with it, because of course you don't deal with
Speaker 2: it whatever. And I was like, oh, I'm interviewing the
Speaker 2: guy this week. I better deal with it and see
Speaker 2: what happens. And so a couple of days ago, I whatever,
Speaker 2: I filled out that just the thing online and it
Speaker 2: was a Christmas gift and like we didn't have the
Speaker 2: receipt and I was like, oh, it's gonna be a
Speaker 2: pain of this. It actually was good, at least so far.
Speaker 2: I went online a few hours later later that night
Speaker 2: somebody was like, Okay, send us a picture of these things,
Speaker 2: and I did that and they're like, okay, we're gonna
Speaker 2: send you a new one. So, as far as I know,
Speaker 2: a new one is on the way. And actually my
Speaker 2: other daughter, not the one who cause I broke it,
Speaker 2: she was like, wow, you got to tell the guy.
Speaker 2: It's great. So I think a reasonable resolution.
Speaker 3: But look, it goes to the example of what I
Speaker 3: said to you in the beginning about winning and losing,
Speaker 3: like you had an experience, and regardless of whether it's
Speaker 3: your fault or it's our fault, you know, I want
Speaker 3: you as a consumer for life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it would be better if it hadn't broke, right, Like,
Speaker 2: there are lots of other things where you got to
Speaker 2: put the bull in right, But if you put the
Speaker 2: bull in wrong, it just doesn't turn on. It's not
Speaker 2: like broken and stuck forever right. Right, Although presumably this
Speaker 2: is one of your trade offs. I imagine the engineers
Speaker 2: were like, oh, we could fix this, but it would
Speaker 2: add twenty dollars to the cost or something, and not
Speaker 2: to say that you should have chosen the other trade
Speaker 2: offf to be clear, I'm not I don't know, but
Speaker 2: I imagine they knew that it could break in this
Speaker 2: way and they couldn't fix it, or they couldn't fix
Speaker 2: it at a reasonable price or without lowering the quality
Speaker 2: or something right in the.
Speaker 3: End, I mean, And I'm sure that the person who
Speaker 3: you randomly sent this in didn't know that you and
Speaker 3: I were speaking.
Speaker 2: No, absolutely that I didn't tell them, no, of course not.
Speaker 3: And so the fact that they made it right, you know,
Speaker 3: kind of lives up to our positively impacting people's life.
Speaker 2: The breaking was worse than an expected, but the resolution
Speaker 2: was better than I expected, and the ice cream is
Speaker 2: quite good. Like, we'll get a new one and we'll
Speaker 2: make more ice cream.
Speaker 3: And my hope is that your daughter is like, hey,
Speaker 3: like the Ninja brand really stood by.
Speaker 2: It still to come on the show what Shark Ninja learned?
Speaker 2: When they say their employees into ordinary people's houses to
Speaker 2: watch them vacuum. Tell me about the ethnographic research that
Speaker 2: you do, like, in particular, who are the people who
Speaker 2: do it, what's their background and sort of why are
Speaker 2: they particularly good at their jobs.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So you know, Steve Jobs always had you know, a
Speaker 3: famous line right of like you know.
Speaker 1: You wouldn't do focus groups.
Speaker 3: And I don't think it's really a question of like
Speaker 3: not doing focus groups. I think that the consumer doesn't
Speaker 3: know what's possible, right, They just know the world that
Speaker 3: exists with them.
Speaker 1: So when we go into one hundred consumer homes.
Speaker 3: And we watch them vacuum, and eight of those consumers
Speaker 3: turn the vacuum over, take a knife or a razor blade,
Speaker 3: slice the hair off the brush, roll, pull the hair out,
Speaker 3: throw it in the garbage, and at the end of
Speaker 3: the cleaning session, we say, is there anything you do
Speaker 3: to improve your vacuum?
Speaker 1: They say, no, I think it works great.
Speaker 3: And we said, well, what about when you nearly sliced
Speaker 3: your hand off and you pulled the hair out, And
Speaker 3: they start apologizing for it. They start saying, oh, we
Speaker 3: have two daughters with long hair, we have pets in
Speaker 3: the house. That's just they've learned to live with the
Speaker 3: problems of their existing products.
Speaker 1: They don't know what's possible. They don't notice it.
Speaker 3: There and say to our researchers, Hey, I'd love if
Speaker 3: the vacuum didn't wrap hair for fifteen years. Every two
Speaker 3: weeks they slice the hair off the brush roll and
Speaker 3: they throw it away.
Speaker 2: I feel like you don't need to be like that
Speaker 2: insightful to get that one. Like I feel like not
Speaker 2: to be a modest I feel like I might notice
Speaker 2: that one. Like, what's a subtler thing, you guys.
Speaker 1: We'll think about this.
Speaker 3: Before we came out with Shark's self cleaning brush roll
Speaker 3: about four years ago, there were eighty years of vacuums
Speaker 3: that did not have this technology.
Speaker 2: Fair Enough, I didn't notice it. I didn't come out
Speaker 2: with a self cleaning brush roll. But I imagine the
Speaker 2: people who you have going out into people's homes noticed
Speaker 2: much subtler things than that. And I'm curious about the
Speaker 2: subtler end of what they're doing.
Speaker 3: Sure, I mean, I'll give you a great example. In
Speaker 3: twenty seventeen, we came out with a product called the
Speaker 3: Ninja Foodie. At the time, all the rage in kitchens
Speaker 3: was pressure cooking. People were pressure cooking pressure cooking. It
Speaker 3: had like completely reinvented itself.
Speaker 2: It you're not saying the name, but that's what we're
Speaker 2: talking about.
Speaker 1: Pressure cooking. And so if you go online. These pressure
Speaker 1: cookers were.
Speaker 3: Getting very good reviews, I mean four point five stars,
Speaker 3: you know, four point four stars, and so there wasn't
Speaker 3: an obvious problem. We went into consumer homes and we
Speaker 3: observed that many people were taking the food out of
Speaker 3: their pressure cooker and were then putting it into the
Speaker 3: oven under the broiler, and they said, well, a chicken
Speaker 3: is very tender, but it comes out and it's like
Speaker 3: it's it's not crispy, and it's like a little like
Speaker 3: dull looking. It doesn't look all that appealing.
Speaker 2: A broiler finishes a nice move, like if you're cooking stick,
Speaker 2: it's up under the broiler at the end. It's a move, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: And so so there was an example where where we
Speaker 3: came back and we said, wow, there's a problem. What
Speaker 3: if we had a pressure cooker that could crisp? And
Speaker 3: that was the original Ninja FOODI. It became a huge
Speaker 3: success for us. Okay, the Ninja Foody kind of launched
Speaker 3: a whole new line of cooking products for us. It
Speaker 3: ultimately became a very very successful business for us. But
Speaker 3: that all came out of that little insight. If you
Speaker 3: would have comed consumer reviews, you would have never seen
Speaker 3: it in there. If you would have asked consumers, you'd
Speaker 3: have never seen it in there. It's watching people in
Speaker 3: their homes doing little things and then saying, well, what
Speaker 3: if we could combine the whole process for them. Now
Speaker 3: here's what's something interesting about it. Let's go back to
Speaker 3: your point on product development. In product development, there was
Speaker 3: always an approach that we called TOA, and toe TOA
Speaker 3: was referred to as the threshold of acceptability on a product. Okay, So,
Speaker 3: for example, a TOA on a vacuum cleaner might be noise. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I see, you're never We're never going to have something silent,
Speaker 3: But you know, how do we make it so that
Speaker 3: it just gets to a TA level?
Speaker 2: Quiet enough on any on any dimension? What is the
Speaker 2: good enough bar?
Speaker 3: Exactly where a consumer is not going to go online
Speaker 3: and write a review and say, oh my god, I
Speaker 3: unboxed this product and I can't believe how quiet it is. Okay,
Speaker 3: it's so it's just TOA is what you're going to
Speaker 3: put into it. Then you've got something called toe. Toe
Speaker 3: is threshold of excellence. Threshold of excellence is, for example,
Speaker 3: in a vacuum cleaner, we do an amazing job cleaning. Okay,
Speaker 3: and in particular cleaning carpets. When you use our product
Speaker 3: for the first time on carpets, the amount of dust
Speaker 3: and dirt that is in your dust cup, it's a wow.
Speaker 3: Consumers love seeing their dust cups filled up. They like
Speaker 3: these big dust cups and then they love to empty
Speaker 3: them and say, oh my god, I can't believe what
Speaker 3: was in my carpet there before I bought a Shark vacuum,
Speaker 3: And so a toe is something that the consumer is
Speaker 3: going to go online and write a review and say,
Speaker 3: I use my Shark and it is unbelievable.
Speaker 1: Okay, I can't believe what its like.
Speaker 2: I get it. So, but like I feel like you're
Speaker 2: going somewhere with this, like land this idea for that.
Speaker 3: So now there is a thing called TOV and TOV
Speaker 3: is threshold of viral or threshold of virality, and that
Speaker 3: did not exist pre two thousand and four, and so
Speaker 3: from two isn't it for onward? We now as we're
Speaker 3: developing a product, we now look at it from first
Speaker 3: principles of how is this product going to drive virality.
Speaker 1: We developed a product that.
Speaker 3: Just came out last holiday season called the Shark Facial
Speaker 3: pro Glow. It's an at home facial product. This is
Speaker 3: a product that you go around your face and you
Speaker 3: put these topicals on and it extracts the dirt from
Speaker 3: your pores and then it hydrates and moisturizes you. What
Speaker 3: we found is that what people love is looking inside
Speaker 3: of the dirty canister. Okay, after it's extracted and they
Speaker 3: see gunk.
Speaker 2: So it's all this schmutz was just in my face.
Speaker 2: That is the virus.
Speaker 1: I love schmutz. Okay.
Speaker 3: They love schmutz in a in a vacuum cleaner, dust cup.
Speaker 3: They love it in a facial you know, gunk tag.
Speaker 2: That's your real secret, at least on the other Shark side.
Speaker 2: That is your secret to billion dollars success. People love schmud.
Speaker 3: That's that's exactly. But I mean we'll develop business cards
Speaker 3: with that.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's talk about a few things that haven't worked
Speaker 2: for you or that you haven't figured out. I mean,
Speaker 2: you tell the story of sort of success after success,
Speaker 2: But what's something you did that didn't work.
Speaker 3: Back in twenty ten, we were just getting started in
Speaker 3: the vacuum business and we developed the Shark multi vacuum.
Speaker 3: We became enamored with this had massive suction power in
Speaker 3: this very small compact vacuum. The reality was is that
Speaker 3: it was like an erector set. Okay, if you've typed
Speaker 3: in Shark multivac, you could still probably see it. Okay,
Speaker 3: we couldn't scrub the Internet of the Shark multivacs.
Speaker 2: Erector set meaning too complicated.
Speaker 3: Too complicated, not easy. Its aesthetically unpleasing. You know, nothing
Speaker 3: good about it other than the fact that from a
Speaker 3: performance standpoint.
Speaker 1: It was a okay in the way.
Speaker 2: In the way you did it interesting. So it's like
Speaker 2: it was an amazing vacuum, but it sucked. Is the
Speaker 2: interesting justa position?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 3: Yes, we launch it into the market and it is
Speaker 3: a disastrous failure.
Speaker 1: Okay, at a time when our.
Speaker 3: Business was much much smaller, we we knew it was.
Speaker 1: Going to be a failure right away.
Speaker 3: We went to retailers proactively, We cleaned it up. We
Speaker 3: said we're going to liquidate the price down. It took
Speaker 3: us about a year to sell through all the inventory.
Speaker 3: But we looked at that and we did a post
Speaker 3: mortem of that, and instead of saying never speak about
Speaker 3: the Shark multi vac again, we said, like, there's something
Speaker 3: in this thing that's amazing, but the way we executed
Speaker 3: it was totally wrong. And so we ultimately said, there's
Speaker 3: something is exciting why every vacuum is designed to just
Speaker 3: clean floors. We want to develop vacuums that clean the
Speaker 3: floor but also allow you to go above the floor everywhere,
Speaker 3: and in all other vacuums that was done with a hose.
Speaker 3: And so it gave birth to a product called the
Speaker 3: Shark lift Away. The sharklift Away was developed in twenty eleven.
Speaker 3: It became the number one selling vacuum cleaner in the
Speaker 3: United States in twenty thirteen, and the sharklift Away is
Speaker 3: still the number one selling vacuum cleaner in the United States.
Speaker 3: And this all came from all the technology that was
Speaker 3: in that Shark multivac. So I pointed out because when
Speaker 3: you say like failing, we fail every day, Like I
Speaker 3: don't have to go beyond today, okay to give you
Speaker 3: examples of failing.
Speaker 1: Okay, what failed today? What failed today?
Speaker 3: We were developing product we're launching in Spain, and we
Speaker 3: realized that the packaging that we sell in Spain doesn't
Speaker 3: have anything in Spanish. But we just launched in Spain
Speaker 3: last holiday season, I mean three months ago. Our business
Speaker 3: is growing fast. We didn't take a step back and say, hey, well,
Speaker 3: I mean our packaging is not in Spanish. I mean
Speaker 3: we're not catering to the Spanish consumer. I walked out
Speaker 3: of a meeting three hours ago where this insight was
Speaker 3: served up by none other than our sales leader in
Speaker 3: Spain that was trying to work around this, and we
Speaker 3: stopped the meeting and we said time out, like we
Speaker 3: need to fix this, like we need to fix this yesterday.
Speaker 3: So you look at that and you say, like, how
Speaker 3: did we get to a place where we launched the
Speaker 3: product into the market and you know we don't have
Speaker 3: Spanish language on the packaging.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now here's the thing.
Speaker 3: Like I said to you in the beginning, failure is
Speaker 3: all temporary, Okay, failure is a temporary condition.
Speaker 1: Like we're going to change this.
Speaker 3: We're going to react quickly, We're gonna move, We're gonna
Speaker 3: get it done, We're going to get.
Speaker 1: It into the market.
Speaker 3: I know consumers in Spain are loving our products and
Speaker 3: they're engaging with us tremendously on social media, but you
Speaker 3: know they're seeing Spanisanish language social media and then the
Speaker 3: products showing up in their house it's showing up in
Speaker 3: their house in English or in French or in German
Speaker 3: or something.
Speaker 1: And so so we got it. We got to do
Speaker 1: right by the consumer.
Speaker 2: What's a category that you want to get into but
Speaker 2: you haven't figured out?
Speaker 1: I mean there's so many.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, what's your white whale, what's like,
Speaker 2: what's There's got to be one that you're like, come on,
Speaker 2: I really want to make X. What's X.
Speaker 3: There are a number of things in the roadmap. I
Speaker 3: think the wellness category is ripe for disruption.
Speaker 2: Okay, what does that word mean in the context of
Speaker 2: your business?
Speaker 3: So we got into skincare, and like, our skincare business
Speaker 3: is growing tremendously globally.
Speaker 1: I think that opens.
Speaker 3: Up the next doors for us SCALP, you know, other
Speaker 3: places in the beauty space. Like people's feeds are not
Speaker 3: just about skin care. Let's look in like, what are
Speaker 3: people engaging with. They're engaging with health, they're engaging with wellness,
Speaker 3: they're engaging with kind of what are ways to kind
Speaker 3: of improve the quality of my life. I think sleep
Speaker 3: is a really interesting category for us to consider and
Speaker 3: think about.
Speaker 1: So here's the thing.
Speaker 3: If I had one core technology, I would be landlocked.
Speaker 3: If I took that core technology, I applied it to
Speaker 3: a bunch of different things, and I was done.
Speaker 1: Okay, there was no other place for me to put it.
Speaker 3: My core technology is I want to go find the
Speaker 3: next consumer problem to solve, and I think there's an
Speaker 3: unlimited number of problems to solve.
Speaker 2: We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
Speaker 2: Let's finish with the Lightning round. Slightly more random. What's
Speaker 2: the most things in one that you think a home
Speaker 2: appliance could be.
Speaker 1: We have a product that's a thirteen and one, so.
Speaker 2: You have right now on your website the Ninja fourteen
Speaker 2: in one possible cooker pro.
Speaker 3: Okay, so fourteen is now the new benchmark. I'm confident
Speaker 3: we can go to sixteen.
Speaker 2: What's one appliance or device you wish you guys had invented?
Speaker 1: I mean, you know in the iPhone.
Speaker 2: I mean this is something iPhone good one. I like
Speaker 2: your thinking big, is this something.
Speaker 3: That good people can't live without? I mean, look, I
Speaker 3: think there's a lot of people that can't live without
Speaker 3: their Ninja creamy, and we've read consumer reviews. If I
Speaker 3: can't live without it, but I think I think the
Speaker 3: iPhone does a pretty good job of that.
Speaker 2: That is an extremely strong answer. What's a tip for
Speaker 2: me if I want to tell real user reviews from
Speaker 2: fake reviews.
Speaker 3: Look, I think there's an authenticity element that you can see,
Speaker 3: you know, as people are talking about a product, or
Speaker 3: particularly when they're writing about a product.
Speaker 1: I think that people can.
Speaker 3: Read through, you know, somebody that is reading off of
Speaker 3: a script versus somebody that has had some aha moment.
Speaker 2: What's one thing you learned selling T shirts as a
Speaker 2: student at the University of Michigan.
Speaker 1: The consumer.
Speaker 3: I mean, if you do right by the consumer, you know,
Speaker 3: and the consumer feels like they're getting value, they are
Speaker 3: going to keep coming back to you. I mean, I
Speaker 3: remember I was selling T shirts. They were five dollars
Speaker 3: a piece at J. C. Bennett, Okay, and you know,
Speaker 3: there were other brands at the time that were selling
Speaker 3: you know, fifteen twenty dollars T shirts and I was
Speaker 3: And I remember, like I never aspired to sell like
Speaker 3: the highest end things. I aspired to, you know, have
Speaker 3: something that delivered extraordinary value to the consumer. And even
Speaker 3: at that time, I remember I was buying Haynes Beefy
Speaker 3: t T shirts.
Speaker 2: Those were good T shirts. I remember hits me fifty.
Speaker 3: They were good quality, and I remember there was a
Speaker 3: competitor at the time that was selling fifty to fifty
Speaker 3: polyester cotton T shirts and minds were Haynes BFT at
Speaker 3: five dollars screen printed.
Speaker 2: Actual shark versus actual Ninja battle to the death, who wins?
Speaker 3: And that's like asking like which one of your kids
Speaker 3: would win or something.
Speaker 2: Come on, but it's not the metaphor. Not the metaphor
Speaker 2: set aside the company.
Speaker 1: Look a Ninja's pretty cunning. I mean so yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's hard to go.
Speaker 2: How much water is there? Seems like the obvious question
Speaker 2: to be right, like the more water, the worse for
Speaker 2: the ninja. Thank you for your time. It was delightful
Speaker 2: to talk with you.
Speaker 1: Same here. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2: Mark Barochus is the CEO of Shark Ninja. Today's show
Speaker 2: was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang and Leo Rose. It
Speaker 2: was edited by Lydia Jenekutt, and it was engineered by
Speaker 2: Sarah mcgare. You can email us at problem at pushkin
Speaker 2: dot fm. Please do email us. You can also find
Speaker 2: me on LinkedIn. I'm on x at Jacob Goldstein. Thanks
Speaker 2: for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode
Speaker 2: of let's Your Problem.