SharkNinja has climbed the ranks to become a globally recognised brand selling kitchen appliances, beauty tools, and household cleaning devices.
Retail Week spoke to Neil Shah, chief commercial officer, to find out more about its explosive growth and road to success.
While SharkNinja may have only come into global consumer consciousness a couple of years ago, Shah has been at the business since 2007 – when it was just in one market.
Starting as a sales analyst, he gradually took responsibility for supply chain and marketing, eventually becoming chief commercial officer in 2018.
He has seen the company go from $250m (£202m) in revenue in 2008, to its most recent revenue numbers of $5bn (£4bn).
Shah speaks to Retail Week about the importance of the customer, retail partnerships, and developing the brand even further.
SharkNinja is now available in over 40 markets. What factors have led to this?
“People don’t see the years that went into reaching this. It’s a lot of product development, insights, and creating our own approach. There are very few brands that have been able to cross-pollinate to different markets and we’re one of the few consumer product brands to do it successfully.
“We get consumer insights from every market – from how the consumers live, how they use the products, what their pain points are, and what we can do to give them the best possible experience. Being that focused on the customer means we now have an understanding of the problems even if the customers can’t articulate them. For example, creating a vacuum with an anti-hair wrap tool to ensure long hair doesn’t get stuck.”
How do you work with retailers and which products sell best with them?
“We have great partnerships with retailers and we want our products available everywhere. For a lot of brands, they want to get on the retailer shelves and hope the retailers are driving the traffic to get their brand seen. That’s not our business model. Our business model is innovation, telling our stories, and we are then sending pre-sold customers to the stores. So that’s a win-win partnership because retailers want to stack the products and we want to send droves of consumers to the shelf so they don’t have to create demand.
“Whether in Currys, John Lewis, Boots, Argos, or Amazon, every category that we are in, we are one of the most productive brands in that category. For the retailers that is very important because they are dedicating shelf space to us and we want to make sure that they are getting the highest return on investment for their shelf space.”
Are you focused on developing current products or entering new categories?
“Our growth strategy is based on three pillars. One is growth in core categories, which we are already playing in and have a big market share. Next is growth in new categories, and every year we want to enter at least two new categories where we have 0% market share. The last is international growth.
“Every year we launch about 25 new products and these could be air fryers, robots, vacuum cleaners or hair tools. We also launch in new categories – an example is our cryoglow mask as we’d never done business in skincare. It’s really important to have healthy and sustainable growth as a company and for our retail partners because if we launch Cryoglow and it drives a lot of volume but we see a huge decline in our hair care business, that isn’t good. We are very focused on driving growth across all our categories.”
How do you plan to keep growing your profits and sales? Is there a ceiling you can reach?
“I hope it keeps going. I think we’ve always chased consumer satisfaction, and numbers have been great because of consumer satisfaction. These categories are very dormant categories, it’s not growing 30% to 40%, the market has been fairly flat over the last 17 years, but we’ve grown at a compound annual growth rate of 20%. As long as we continue getting those consumer insights, finding those problems, and keep going into new categories, I think we’ll keep delighting our consumers, and they’ll come back for more.
“We also haven’t limited ourselves in terms of being just kitchen appliances or just vacuums or hair tools. For us, it’s anything in and outside of the home that has anything to do with the consumer. If we can solve a problem, it’s open to us and that allows us to think outside the box and go in areas where others might not be willing to go.”
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