Leading the fight: Mark Barrocas is fighting Dyson inside and outside the courtroom
Meet Mark Barrocas, the American who wants to help you clean your house, do your hair and create delicious meals in your kitchen and also in your garden.
Dyson may be Britain’s best-known brand of stylish vacuum cleaners and stylers. But SharkNinja, the New York-listed company of which Barrocas is chief executive, wants to win over UK consumers.
The company, founded in 1994, also supplies hair dryers 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 modern Battersea Power Station complex in south-west London, Barrocas does not want to dwell on its rivalry with the iconic Dyson operation.
He is more interested in talking about the Shark FlexStyle hair curler and the SharkNinja cordless vacuum cleaner than in the tensions between his business and Sir James Dyson’s appliance empire.
As Barrocas says: “We are an infinitely curious organization” that seeks to do things that are “shockingly extraordinary.” Underestimation is not his thing. He demonstrates to me, with considerable brio, how the main unit of his cordless cleaner can be lifted from its frame and carried.
He provides a deft commentary on his actions, saying, “Before this, if you lived in a house with stairs, you would plug in your vacuum cleaner, do the bottom three steps, then unplug it, go up to the top, and do the first three.” . But there was always a middle ground that couldn’t be reached.’
This design sounds very appealing to anyone who is embarking on some holiday spring cleaning but wants to get household chores done with ease. The cordless cleaner is lightweight and effective, qualities highlighted in numerous TikTok videos featuring the product. The company used to rely on late-night infomercials, but now sees social media as a crucial advertising vehicle.
SharkNinja operates in 32 markets. The United States is number one. But Britain is the second largest country, which means Barrocas and its engineering staff and 500 other employees in the UK have invested a lot of time and ingenuity in making products that suit the UK’s national preferences.
He explains that in Britain we like our vacuum cleaners to be powerful and noisy, although not as much as in the United States. The Japanese prefer quiet, compact appliances that fit into their smaller homes.
SharkNinja also produces air fryers (a recent British obsession) and outdoor ovens. Woodfire Grill is a combination grill, smoker and air dryer, which has been successful in Britain. Despite the weather, we love entertaining in our gardens. SharkNinja was founded as Euro-Pro in 1994 by Canadian entrepreneur Mark Rosenzweig, and changed its 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 being spun off from JS Global, a Chinese home appliance maker. SharkNinja’s president is Chinese billionaire Wang Xuning, who owns a 42 percent stake in the company.
Unlike Sir James Dyson, Barrocas has no engineering background. His CV includes stints at work uniform supplier Aramark and at Broder Bros, a clothing company.
But he doesn’t consider not having an engineering degree to be a drawback. He maintains that his strengths lie in understanding consumers and their needs, discovering what they really want, before they realize it themselves.
He comments: “For example, the vacuum cleaner: before cordless models were common, most people simply accepted that it was difficult to climb stairs.”
They also accepted that hair tended to get caught in machinery.
“We would go to people’s houses and watch them take a knife or scissors, cut the hair off the brush, and then pull it out,” Barrocas says. ‘We would ask them if there was anything they would like to change and they would say ‘no, it works great.’ “Then we created an anti-wrapping technology.”
When it has an idea, the company relies on a lot of data and customer feedback and will make changes to products in response. Barrocas says: “A decade ago, engineers told us that once something goes into production, the train leaves the station, there is no way to fix it.”
But the current approach is different. The group can make hundreds of changes before putting test products in customers’ homes and then creating a “final” version. Barrocas maintains that products like his should be treated more like software or app development, where there can be a lot of updates and tweaks.
He comments: “It’s frustrating when you work a lot and the client comes back and tells you it’s no good.” But it’s much better to hear that before you win a million from them.
He waited six months before mentioning to his bosses at the time that he was frustrated with the traditional blender.
‘The original blender had blades on the bottom. But what Americans want to do is put a lot of ice in them and turn them into frozen drinks,” he says.
“The problem is that when you have blades on the bottom, the ice just jumps up, so it mixes a little bit on the bottom, but not higher.”
As a smoothie fan, I had a vested interest in creating a better solution. The resulting blender, with blades at different levels, looks scary but has been a bestseller. This attention to detail has paid off. When Barrocas joined SharkNinja, its annual sales were £160 million. They are expected to reach £3.5bn this year.
The shares fell after last summer’s IPO, but this year they are up 50 percent to $62.55: UBS analysts are targeting $76. The company is now valued at almost £7 billion. Dyson is worth £21bn. But the size disparity has not stopped legal battles between the two.
Dyson sued SharkNinja in 2014 for what it said were patent violations of handheld vacuum cleaners. Four years later this was thrown out and a judge said the two designs in question were “clearly different”. Then, late last year, Dyson filed papers at the High Court in a £10m lawsuit accusing the US group of infringing its patents with its £299 Shark FlexStyle hairdryer and styler.
Dyson also accuses Shark Ninja in the US of imitating the technology of its Airwrap stylers, which cost from £400. Dyson is more expensive, but devotees swear by its quality.
This fight to clean our stairs and produce beach-wavy hair may have only just begun in our homes and in the courts.
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