Leading the Fight: Mark Barrocas battles Dyson inside and outside the courtroom
Meet Mark Barrocas, the American who wants to help you tidy your house, style your hair and prepare delicious meals in your kitchen – and also in your garden.
Dyson is perhaps Britain’s best-known vacuum cleaner and chic hair styler brand. But SharkNinja, the New York-listed company of which Barrocas is CEO, wants to win over British consumers.
Founded in 1994, the company also provides hairdryers and stylers in its “pursuit of extreme consumer delight and unwavering trust.”
Alleged similarities between SharkNinja and Dyson products have led to legal battles between the two companies. But at the company’s offices in the hip Battersea Power Station complex in south-west London, Barrocas is unwilling to dwell on his rivalry with the iconic Dyson operation.
He’d rather talk about the Shark FlexStyle hair curler and the SharkNinja cordless vacuum cleaner than the tensions between his company and Sir James Dyson’s home appliance empire.
As Barrocas puts it, “We are a boundlessly curious organization” that tries to make things that are “beyond extraordinary.” Understatement is not his thing. He enthusiastically demonstrates to me how to lift the main unit of his cordless vacuum cleaner off the frame and carry it around.
He provides a slick commentary on his actions, saying: ‘Previously, if you lived in a house with stairs, you plugged in your vacuum cleaner, did the bottom three steps, unplugged it, went to the top and did the top three steps. . But there was always a piece in the middle that you couldn’t reach.’
This design sounds hugely appealing to anyone embarking on a Bank Holiday spring cleaning but wants to get the chores done with ease. The cordless cleaner is lightweight and effective, qualities highlighted in countless TikTok videos showcasing the product. Previously relying on late-night infomercials, the company now views social media as a crucial advertising tool.
SharkNinja operates in 32 markets. America is number one. But Britain is the second largest, meaning that Barrocas and his 500 engineers and other staff in Britain have spent a lot of time and ingenuity crafting products that meet Britain’s national preferences.
He explains that in Britain we like our vacuum cleaners to have power and sound, although not as much as in America. The Japanese prefer quiet and compact appliances that fit into their smaller homes.
SharkNinja also produces air fryers – a recent British obsession – and outdoor ovens. The Woodfire Grill is a combination of grill, smoker and air dryer, which has done well in Great Britain. Despite the weather, we like to enjoy ourselves in our gardens. SharkNinja was founded in 1994 as Euro-Pro by Canadian businessman Mark Rosenzweig and changed the name to SharkNinja in 2015.
Barrocas joined the company in 2008 as president and became CEO when it made its Wall Street debut in July 2023 after spinning off from JS Global, a Chinese device maker. SharkNinja’s chairman is Chinese billionaire Wang Xuning, who owns a 42 percent stake in the company.
Unlike Sir James Dyson, Barrocas has no technical background. His resume includes stints at Aramark, a supplier of workplace uniforms, and at Broder Bros, a clothing company.
But he does not see the lack of an engineering degree as a disadvantage. He says his strengths lie in understanding consumers and their needs, and discovering what they really want before they even realize it.
He notes: ‘Take the vacuum cleaner. Before wireless models were commonplace, most people simply accepted that stairs were difficult to navigate.”
They also accepted that hair had a tendency to get tangled in the machines.
“We went into people’s homes and watched them take a knife or scissors, cut the hair off the brush roll, and then pull it out,” Barrocas says. “We asked them if they wanted to change anything and they said, ‘No, it works fine.’ Then we created an anti-wrap technology.”
When the company has an idea, the company relies on large amounts of data and customer feedback and will make changes to the products in response. Barrocas says, “Ten years ago, engineers told us that once something went into production, the train had left the station, there was no way to repair it.”
But today’s approach is different. The group can make hundreds of changes before dropping off sample products in customers’ homes and then coming up with a “final” version. Barrocas argues that products like his should be treated more like software or app development, where many updates and adjustments can occur.
He notes, “It’s frustrating when you put a lot of work into it and the customer comes back to you and says it’s not right. But it’s so much better to hear that before you’ve made a million of them.’
He waited six months before telling his then bosses that he was frustrated with the traditional blender.
‘The original blender has blades on the bottom. But what Americans want to do is put a lot of ice in it and turn it into frozen drinks,” he says.
“The problem is that if you have blades at the bottom, the ice just jumps up, so you get a little bit of mixing at the bottom, but not higher up.”
As a smoothie fanatic, he had a keen interest in creating a better solution. The resulting blender – with blades at different levels – looks scary, but is a bestseller. This attention to detail has paid off. When Barrocas joined SharkNinja, annual turnover was £160 million. This year they are expected to reach £3.5 billion.
The shares fell after last summer’s IPO, but are up 50 percent this year to $62.55: analysts at UBS are targeting $76. The company is now valued at almost £7 billion. Dyson is worth £21 billion. But the difference in size has not stopped the legal battle between the two.
Dyson sued SharkNinja in 2014 for patent violations on handheld vacuum cleaners. Four years later this was rejected and a judge ruled that the two designs in question were ‘clearly different’. Late last year, Dyson filed papers in the High Court in a £10 million claim, accusing the US group of infringing its patents with its £299 Shark FlexStyle hairdryer and styler.
Dyson is also accusing Shark Ninja in the US of copying technology for its Airwrap hair stylers, which cost from £400. Dyson is more expensive, but enthusiasts swear by its quality.
This battle to clean our stairs and produce bouncy beach wave hair may have only just begun in our homes – and on the court.
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