Somewhere right now, a parent is dumping a handful of spinach into a Ninja Creami. It’s not a recipe SharkNinja’s engineers dreamed up. It’s a hack cooked up by the brand’s own customers — the kind of unscripted ingenuity that turned a countertop ice cream machine into one of TikTok’s most reliable viral hits during the pandemic.
But that success came with a limit. By the time Kaitlyn Hebert, global CMO of SharkNinja, sat down to plan the Creami’s next act, the machine had already won over the two audiences most inclined to buy it: gym-goers chasing high-protein, low-cal treats, and parents looking for a five-minute fix for the kids. Everyone else had heard of the Creami. Almost none of them had bought one.
The same problem was playing out one aisle over. Ninja’s Auto Barista products sat in a category built on heritage and price tags that ran $5 to $7 a cup — a market that had never bothered to talk to anyone outside its existing customer base.
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