The Mark Rosenzweig SharkNinja Story
In 1994, SharkNinja was established by Mark Rosenzweig. SharkNinja provides excellent and impressive cleaning solutions and small household appliances.
Mark Rosenzweig grew up in Montreal, Canada, with a family who has a hundred years’ experience in business. As an inventor, entrepreneur, innovator, creator, and disruptor, Mark became a natural-born tinkerer.
Upon his graduation from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991, Mark badged a B.A. in Psychology and BSc. in Economics (Wharton School).
Mark later came back home in 1994 and then became part of Jolson Corp, the sewing business of his family. Mark worked as a sales manager at the time. Mark’s grandparents established Jolson Corp. in 1954. They offered domestic sewing machines within Montreal with the help of a deal network in Canada. Mark’s grandparents eventually enlarged their sewing machine family business and industrial sewing machines were added, which were offered for sales to the apparel manufacturing industry in Canada.
Mark’s enthusiasm for innovative small appliances pushed him to seek opportunities to build his personal entrepreneurial business for manufacturing and selling products across the United States and Canada. Mark established his own brand name and had all these business processes and operations under it and was able to manage and build loyalty for the business.
At his house, Mark continually invented more appliances that were made as a replacement for the common steamers and sweepers that had little or no change since their invention.
Mark’s goal was to get the cleansing steam to disinfect, rather than just using toxic chemicals. He was putting babies into consideration such that when proper cleaning has been done, the kitchen floor should be accessible to the babies without toxins. This motivated him to develop the transformational and effective solutions, developed to stand the test of time.
Thanks to his parents, Aviva and Max, who encouraged him to establish Euro-Pro, an organization established to build amazing and innovative products everyone would be interested in. The Euro-Pro brand took care of the first products sales and a few domestic ironing systems were put in place in Italy and the steam presses followed, other products include food processors and domestic sewing machines. The first full fiscal year recorded $1 million sales in 1996.
Other products under the Shark brand include vacuum cleaners and heated kitchen appliances as well as high-operational blending blades were among the expansion of Euro-Pro North America and Bravetti brands.
The products attracted a huge audience due to the infomercial strategy and effective media strategies innovated by Mark. There were also shopping networks and national television infomercials that featured these products as more retail partners bought the products. As the host of these marketing strategy, Mark consistently sold the product and brand stories.
The company eventually recorded a growth of $100 million in the fiscal year 2000 and by 2003, it was already at $250 million. In fact, Stanley Rosenzweig, Mark’s brother had to join Mark at Euro-Pro using his substantial experience with bigger multinational organizations, to assist Mark in pushing the business to Boston as well as restructure and take it to another success level.
Entrepreneurs and investors became passionate by their vocations. This would have been an ordinary hobby for many of them if it was not a profession. Mark’s passion was his drive to consistently create new things, which motivated him to use his idea to develop effective innovations and products which he continuously patent since 2003. For vacuum cleaners and filter sensor, Patent 7303613 was used, while for deep fryer, patent 7500427 was used, for compact cyclonic bagless type of vacuum cleaner, patent 7341611 was used. From 2003 to 2017, Mark was able to patent numerous innovations collectively with his creative teams and independently.
Another innovation that was invented in 2007 was the “no loss of suction” vacuum technology and the Shark steam mops, which at the end of 2009 fiscal year, increased the sales of the company to more than $400 million. In 2009, Mark Barrocas, a very good friend to Mark, joined the company, Euro-Pro, and became the President at the time.
Collectively, the two Marks concentrated on innovative development of products and were able to successfully create a high-quality manufacturing organization, with the addition of an entire vacuum cleaner and Ninja kitchen appliances, which pulled more than $500 million in 2010 fiscal year and by 2013 fiscal year, Euro-Pro hit $1 billion.
The growth of the organization forced an increase in employment of more than 1,000 associates by SharkNinja at the end of the fiscal year 2017, with the addition of heated ninja appliances and robotic vacuums, amounting to close to $2 billion.
Mark’s passion for his professional work never stopped him from providing supports to different philanthropic establishments and is particularly interested in helping new medical research at Women’s Hospital, Mass General Hospital, Brigham, as well as with the American Heart Association. Mark’s interests in skiing, biking, and tennis never ends. He currently lives in Boston with his lovely family.