TRANSCRIPT 🔗
00:00:02
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts.
00:00:05
Speaker 2: Radio.
00:00:06
Speaker 1: News.
00:00:07
Speaker 3: Analysts have been raising their price targets for Shark Ninja after the company released results last week. A & R on the terminal. You can see the company has 15 buy ratings, no holds, no sells. The company also raised its full year 2026 outlook. After third quarter, net sales jumped more than 21% from a year earlier. Joining us now is the company's CEO, Mark Baracus. Mark, great to see you. And I was just looking at some of the various segments you have and.
00:00:32
Speaker 1: What stood out.
00:00:33
Speaker 3: Beauty and home improvement, growing nearly 50%. What is driving some of the growth here?
00:00:39
Speaker 1: Is this new product launches?
00:00:40
Speaker 3: Are you gaining market share, category expansion, something completely different? What underlies the strength?
00:00:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, so thanks so much for having me.
00:00:48
Speaker 4: I mean, consumers are excited about Shark and Ninja products. And as you mentioned, that was our 14th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth. And you said over 21%. And specific to the home environment and beauty space, it's new products that we've launched into the market. Our skincare business is doing great. Our hair care business is doing great. We've had a great business with fans. In fact, we launched a product this summer called the Shark Chill Pill that became a viral success across Europe. And tennis players were using it at the U.S. Open and at Wimbledon, expanding into new markets. Our business internationally grew 25% during the quarter. And we're continuing to expand into new retail channels. I mean, our social commerce business, our TikTok shop business has been great. So you put all of those things together and it's what's really kind of propelling the growth of Shark Ninja.
00:01:42
Speaker 2: You also called out Walmart and other retailers. Are American consumers more resilient and healthier than many would think?
00:01:49
Speaker 4: Well, look, the consumer is definitely under a lot of pressure, as you keep pointing out every day in your telecast.
00:01:57
Speaker 1: And the consumer has.
00:01:59
Speaker 4: To make trade-offs. They're excited about our products. We're helping them clean their homes. We're helping them cook for their families. We're helping them entertain. We're helping them create a much better home environment. So they're choosing our products maybe versus going out to dinner once or twice during the year or during the month. But again, it comes down to disruptive innovation, performance-led, great quality, great value to the consumer, and then the viral marketing that we're putting behind that.
00:02:32
Speaker 3: Speaking of viral marketing, one of the kind of beauty segments that has really grown in popularity, Mark, is the rise of K-beauty. And there are a lot of devices that have become more popular, too. And they're trying to penetrate the U.S. and internationally further. You can buy things on Amazon, for example. Olive Young, the big Korean beauty chain, now has different kind of stations in Sephora. How big of a risk and challenge is that to Shark Ninja's beauty segment?
00:02:59
Speaker 4: Well, listen, I mean, we face competition over the last 18 years. I mean, Shark Ninja has grown at a compounded annual growth rate of 21% a year for the last 18 years. We're in 41 different product categories. We sell in 36 countries around the world. Beauty is one category that we're in, but we're in 40 other categories that the consumer buys in and around their home. Specific to beauty, we have an incredible pipeline of new innovation. We're launching a new product in hair just before the holiday selling season this year. We have a lot of great products that are.
00:03:35
Speaker 1: Coming in skin.
00:03:36
Speaker 4: In 2027, you're going to see Shark Ninja expand into places like Wellness.
00:03:41
Speaker 1: So we think there's still a lot of.
00:03:43
Speaker 4: Innovation that we have in our pipeline to be able to keep growing in that beauty category.
00:03:49
Speaker 2: I want to shift gears a little bit and ask you about, we saw a blue sweep. Are you expecting a change in tariff policy? Because you've benefited from tariff refunds this quarter, but I think margins would have otherwise declined without them.
00:04:01
Speaker 4: Listen, you know, we have to play the deck of cards that are handed to us. I mean, we started with tariffs in our business during the first Trump administration and It accelerated during the second administration. And we've built a very high-quality, low-cost, fast-turned supply chain. We're trying to do everything we possibly can to make sure that we keep prices down for consumers. But in the end, we're going to play the deck of cards that are handed to us, and we'll have to see what happens with tariff rates as we move forward. You know, for the holiday season this year, we are not taking any price increases. We feel like right now it's just so important to give the consumer the best performance at the best value.
00:04:45
Speaker 3: Speaking of the deck of cards that you've been dealt, we're all dealing with the new deck and that is an agentic one. You talked about how important it is to have these moments of virality beyond the TikTok shop or elsewhere. How does your marketing change when a consumer is no longer just scrolling TikTok and seeing Shark Ninja products, but instead is going to its muse or its agent of choice saying, hey, I want to find a new hair blow dryer or a new blender, can you recommend one to me? How are you sort of gaming the agentic AI transformation this world is going through?
00:05:16
Speaker 4: Well, let's start with, you know, there is more organic content about Shark Ninja than any brands in our space. There's more third party endorsements about Shark Ninja than any brands in our space. So, you know, we feel really good with the fact that consumers are asking for our products by name. So if a consumer goes to Muse, they might be asking, you know, what's the right shark blender, you know, shark vacuum or ninja blender for me to buy? You know, we think that's still the most important thing. I mean, how does the consumer ask for our products by name? But we're doing a tremendous amount to position ourselves right.
00:05:53
Speaker 1: With the LLMs, you know, with content.
00:05:56
Speaker 4: We've just added agentic search to our website, to our D2C site. We're seeing a really nice conversion bump, you know, with Salesforce, you know, on that particular aspect of our D2C site. So, you know, the agentic world is changing tremendously. You know, Muse is one piece of it. OpenAI is another piece of it, our own website. Amazon, you know, is embracing it as well as, you know, Walmart.com and others. So we're seeing it across the board, but again, it still comes back to, is the consumer going to search on a Shark product or a Ninja product, ask for it by name, and then serve up the right product for them?
00:06:34
Speaker 2: I want to stick with Danny's point. Ever since we entered this agentic AI universe, is there any segment that you saw grow a little bit more exponentially because of that? Maybe people are searching them more or musing them more. Did I just make that into my own adjective?
00:06:48
Speaker 3: Yes.
00:06:49
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:06:50
Speaker 4: We're seeing some really nice growth in our vacuum space. We're the number one brand of vacuums in the United States. We're the number one brand in the U.K., We're looking at the way consumers are searching for vacuums, looking for products for large homes or homes with carpet or homes with pets that have pet hair challenges. That's a category in particular where we're seeing a lot of very unique searches coming from optimizing our content. We have products for those specific use cases. And so that's an area that we're really honing in on. But all of our 41 categories, you know, are going to experience this as we move forward.
00:07:30
Speaker 3: Hey, Mark, thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate your time this morning. Mark Barocas of Shark Ninja.