It’s summertime, which means it’s time for our annual grilling episode. In years past we’ve talked to the leaders of Big Green Egg, Traeger, and Blackstone, and it’s always fascinating how those companies have all the same kinds of problems and ideas as any of the tech companies we have on the show.
In fact it’s funny — in what can only be described as a perfectly Decoder situation, I really wanted to have Blackstone CEO Roger Dahle back on the show this year because his griddle company is such a success that he’s in the process of buying Weber, the biggest name in the space. But he’s stuck in antitrust review so he couldn’t come on the show. Grilling episodes man — they’re the best.
Anyhow, all that meant that I finally had the opportunity to have SharkNinja CEO Mark Barrocas on the show. We’ve wanted to have SharkNinja on the show for years now, mostly because it has the best name of any company I think we’ve ever had on Decoder. It perfectly describes the structure of the company: there’s Shark, and there’s Ninja. And just in time for our grilling episode, the Ninja division of Mark’s business just launched its first ever grill, the FlexFlame, earlier this year.
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But as you’ll hear Mark and I really get into, SharkNinja is really a product design company more than anything. It has what you could only describe as a kind of relentless approach to product development — SharkNinja launches 25 brand new products a year across dozens of categories in countries around the world. So while we do spend a lot of time talking about the decision to launch the FlexFlame grill and what the business of grilling looks like for SharkNinja, you’ll hear Mark and I talk a lot about the company’s broader philosophy around product development across all of its different categories.
That’s because a lot of that philosophy, which was developed back in the late 2000s for markets like vacuum cleaners and blenders, is now being applied to everything from slushy machines and pizza ovens to LED face masks. You’ll hear Mark explain that they have a product engineering and design team of more than 1,300 people around the world dedicated to figuring out new twists on household staples. It’s also remarkable how many of the products are built around fan technology, which comes up a few times in this conversation.
In fact, a key component of the new FlexFlame grill is a fan that lets it do a lot of different things. But the grill industry, as you might know, is a fiercely competitive market with a lot of brand loyalty, and product features alone might not be enough. I can’t tell you how many furious reader comments and emails we received when the CEO of Big Green Egg took a shot at Weber on last year’s grill episode. People love their grills, and they will fiercely defend them.
So I really wanted to ask Mark how his style of product development worked in the context of gas grills — and whether he’s envisioning Ninja’s outdoor grilling products as premium devices you keep for a long time, or as ones that might rust and get replaced after a few years as you would an iPhone.
Mark and I also spent a good deal of time at the end talking about marketing. SharkNinja spends more than $700 million a year on advertising, a great deal of which now goes to product placement and content creators on Instagram and TikTok. You’ll hear Mark recount his history of selling products on television infomercials back in the 2000s, and how that’s now evolved into having his appliances become viral sensations online.
Mark has a lot of thoughts about the state of the creator economy, which is already in the process of getting totally upended by cheap and limitless AI video, and whether he sees it teetering on the edge of a crash that could transform how he markets and sells his most popular products.
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