‘It has to be five stars’: Howard Nuk looks to supercharge SharkNinja’s design engine

“The amount of consumer testing that we do across every single phase is just mind-boggling,” he said. “If it’s going to test at 4.5 stars, and they’re like, ‘Oh, it can get to five stars as a product because we can make this one change that requires a tool change,’ guess what? The company does it. And I’ve never been at a company that has done that.”

Nuk joins SharkNinja at a time when the company is growing its breadth of products and overall customer base. The company earlier this month reported its second-quarter earnings that showed net sales increased 15.7% year-over-year to more than $1.44 billion. And it upped its forecast for the rest of the year, expecting to grow 13-15% instead of 11-13%.

Looking ahead, SharkNinja’s growth strategy includes expanding into new categories and aiming for more viral hits, like the Ninja Slushi that was a top seller last year. It also looks to gain share across existing categories like kitchen, outdoor, cleaning and beauty, and accelerate its international growth.

Modern Retail sat down with Nuk to discuss his new role and what’s ahead for SharkNinja, from a product design standpoint. From Nuk’s perspective, he said that sometimes that means scrapping a prior investment in order to make improvements on a product.

“The benefit is that you have a five-star product that everyone loves. And honestly, if it sells better, we can make that up, no problem,” he said.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

This is a novel C-suite role. What is an advanced design and development officer, and how will you integrate into the company?
“With my team, I see each lead as a startup founder for a different category. For example, there’s the Slushi category, the treats category, fans, vacuums, blenders, cooking. There are so many categories, which is part of the reason I’m so excited to work here. I get to play across all of them, which is kind of a dream for a designer. As startup founders, the leads aren’t just hacking and designing something. Their job is to come up with the entire customer journey and the reason for being. Why should this product exist? That means thinking through the customer, the experience, the design, the prototype. Then there’s, ‘How much can we sell this for? What’s the size of the market? How much margin can we make?’  And then driving that all the way through into industrial design and manufacturing, and then all the way back around, to understand where we are from when we started to make it better.  

It’s a very, very unique kind of team. And I’m really excited to just take that and supercharge it.” 

How do the design process and product testing work at Shark Ninja?
“They’re always thinking about what’s next. They’re always thinking about what’s wrong and saying, ‘How can I fix it?’ And it’s all about hacking the solution. They don’t just sit there and go, ‘Well, let’s come up with a theory on how we might do it.’ No, no, no. It’s like, ‘Let’s hack away,’ whether it’s 3D printing or sketching something, or creating a very quick prototype and testing it out with their peers, testing it out with leadership or testing it out with [Subject Matter Experts] that we bring on. We actually have test consumers that we test so many different things on. And then they just iterate and iterate and iterate. 

This is a very different kind of mindset to industrial design and a very different mindset to manufacturing engineering, right? Because industrial design is a lot about affordances and consumer feedback. Manufacturing is hardcore, like, ‘Let’s go in and make sure this thing can be made at the right cost. How many can be made at the right quality?’ This kind of sits in between.”

How do you know when early concepts are working or not working, and what metrics are most important in the design process?
“Ideas are so important to nurture. And if they’re presented wrong, they could just be killed. If they’re shown in the wrong color, it could be killed. And so it’s pressure tested with consumer validation or, oftentimes, subject matter experts. We bring them in — people who understand that particular category, maybe even better than we. We come up with an idea.

 And so when you’re looking at ideas, it’s like, ‘This is a great product to do!’ But then it’s like, ‘Well, it’s probably going to cost like $1,000 per product. And then it serves maybe 20 people.’ That’s another metric. Or, does it cost $200 and serve 2 million people? That’s really important for us to understand, from a business perspective. Can the business support it? Do we have the right to play in this category? And can we win and be successful? 

We’re not just going to go out and make something way out in left field. It’s all building upon our categories as we have it. And growing that strength and growing that right to play in those spaces.” 

Looking ahead, what are the opportunities for new categories for SharkNinja?
“One category we are really bullish on is beauty. It’s one of the highest-growth segments for us. We have the Cryoglow product, which has been just a viral sensation. And you think about the technology that’s in there: You’ve got cryo to de-puff and you have LED, and it’s also a medically certified product. And we did that in 21 months. That’s unheard of!

I’ve worked on everything end-to-end in my product years, and medical has been one of them. Oftentimes, the certification and designing for that is so conservative — it takes five years or 10 years to get a product out. We did that in 21 months, so that’s proof of the agile engine that is this company.”

What sustainability or environmental considerations that are a factor in your product development strategy?
“I would never join a company that just pushes out product for the sake of product. And that was one of the questions I had for [CEO Mark Barrocas] when I was originally talking to him. The focus here is to make product last longer, and the company has done a very, very good job of that over the last 20 years. If you look back at the history versus where we’re going and at all the product we’re making, the quality is really stepping up.

It lasts longer. That’s the most important thing. If it breaks, you immediately throw it away. That’s trash. That’s landfill. But it’s also landfill if there’s painted plastic, or if it’s glued together and you can’t break the parts apart. So, another focus of ours is making sure refurbishing is possible, and also fixing products that do break. Being able to service products is super, super important to us. For everything new we do, we want to make sure it brings that true, long-term value for people, so they don’t give it away after a year. That’s factored into all of our design research.”