How SharkNinja is cleaning up the competition

With more people home-cooking and cleaning than ever before, the appliance company couldn’t be more successful. Andy Martin speaks to European president Matt Broadway about how consumers help to shape its bestselling products

Broadway worked at Dyson for 11 years before leaving in 2018 (SharkNinja)

When Matt Broadway went to Tokyo, he thought he was going to sell vacuum cleaners; he didn’t realise he was going to get nearly hoovered up in an almighty seismic drama. He was in a meeting on the ground floor of a tall building when the earthquake started. Contary to guidelines, he and his colleagues naturally all ran outside. “The road was like a rug,” he recalls. “It was going up and down as the shockwaves rolled through it. The lamposts were dancing around.” Amazingly, there was relatively little damage to the city. “The buildings stood up to it. One old lady out near the airport had a garden wall fall over. It was a vindication of Japanese civil engineering. It was only the tsunami afterwards that caused all the damage at Fukushima.”

That was 2011 and Broadway was marketing director for Dyson. Now he is European president of SharkNinja, who sell more vacuum cleaners than anyone else in the UK, surpassing Dyson. I half-expect him to heap scorn on the enemy (as I probably would in his shoes), but he doesn’t. He is elegantly diplomatic: “I’m fortunate to have worked for two great design-engineering companies.” On the other hand, he adds that he tries to “spend as little of my life as possible talking about Dyson”. I’m the same way, given that Mr Dyson sold the country down the Brexit river before washing his hands, carefully drying them, and then shooting off to Singapore for the sake of sucking up a few more millions.

Broadway modestly puts his career down to good luck and chance. “I never woke up one day and said, ‘I want to do this.’” But he discovered he was good at it. His parents were both teachers; his dad was an organist and his early life was steeped in music. He regrets trying to learn the violin as a child. “If only it had been a drum set. Or a loud wind instrument.” A formative experience, in the realm of producing a lot of hot air, was when, as a choirboy, he was turning the pages and his dad let him pull out the stops on the organ.

Broadway says he was never a “vacuum cleaner geek as such”. He was just interested in selling good products and making them better. “It just so happens that it’s mostly vacuum cleaners.” Not exclusively though. After studies at Warwick University, he found himself in Manchester in 2004, answering an ad in Marketing Week. Soon he was working in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, for James Dyson (pre-Singapore), with a mission to enhance hand-dryers. “I spent more time in public conveniences than is realistic,” he says.

He was at Dyson for 11 years before joining US-based SharkNinja in 2018. “I’m not a design engineer,” he points out. “You wouldn’t want to see a product designed by me – I can’t even draw!” He sees his job as bridging the gap between engineers and consumers and “informing innovation”. “Design has to reflect market reality and the frustrations people really have.”

At SharkNinja they test everything relentlessly at every stage, before and after launch, with hundreds of customers around the world. “Some companies design in labs,” says Broadway. “We work with real consumers in real homes. It sounds obvious, but I’ve never seen anyone else do it like we do.” He is conscious of working in a world in which customer reviewing of products can be critical. “If you’re not up there in the five-star reviews straight off, you can be finished on the day of launch.”  

SharkNinja is, as the name suggests, two companies in one. Shark makes the bestselling vacuum cleaners. They boast a number of crucial innovations, informed by “consumer insight” into improvements. For one thing, pet hairs are not going to clog up your vacuum. The Shark has special “anti-hair-wrap” tech that stops them wrapping around the rotors – and the “Truepet” tool enables you to get those pet hairs off the clingiest fabrics as well. Their "Flexology” system means you can bend the tube to get it under low-level furniture. And it’s all cordless, of course.

Ninja, on the other hand, makes kitchen appliances. Broadway showed me the bestseller countertop “multi-cooker” that can steam, bake, grill, saute and even dehydrate vegetables to make them into crisps – he really has one sitting on his kitchen worktop. He reckons you can “air fry” using 75 per cent less oil than the non-air way. “It’s practically guilt-free,” he says. The Ninja Foodi is already huge in the US and UK and in China and Japan. The aim is to be fully global. “There are different culinary cultures of course,” says Broadway, who has worked in Paris as well as Tokyo. “But the machines are designed to accommodate all those differences. We have chefs from Germany and Japan and France all working alongside one another.”

Both sides of the business have grown during the lockdown period, with more people home-cooking than ever before and also being more scrupulous about cleaning up afterwards. “I’ve been doing more cooking too,” says Broadway. “An interest in culinary innovation is critical to the job. I don’t know what my wife would say though. She is the harshest critic.”

SharkNinja has 230 employees in the UK, with over 100 in their new Thorpe Park offices in Leeds. Broadway is championing a programme they call “WeLead”, designed to support “the recruitment, retention and progression” of women in the typically male-dominated engineering industry. He is also excited about the forthcoming products that are due to be released in the UK in the next year. One is the robotic vacuum cleaner that has already been a success in the US and is popular on the continent. Another is the latest in cutting-edge cookware: a range of non-stick pans with a lifetime no-scratch guarantee. “I’m lucky,” says Broadway. “I get to try stuff out before everyone else. It really works. And my wife loves it.”