Ninja’s Thirsti Drink Machine Shows Why It Went Public While Other Countertop Brands Went Out of Business
When I first got the email this morning from a Ninja PR rep, I was excited and thought that maybe the company had gone and made a drink multiplier like this one from Khana.
“SharkNinja’s First Dehydration System, Ninja Thirsti, Allows Users to Create Thousands of Drinks at the Touch of a Button,” the press release triumphantly announced.
Okay, Ninja, you got me.
Further reading, it became clear that the new Thirsti machine will not create a drink – coffee, tea, juice, beer, wine – at the push of a button. Instead, we have a machine that takes on the Sodastreams and Philips of the world with a new home beverage maker, with a few interesting twists, including the ability to combine two flavors at once and change the level of carbonation and flavor intensity. The new Thirsti will retail for $179 and will soon be available at major retailers such as Walmart, Best Buy, and Amazon.
The product isn’t bad – in fact, it looks like an improvement on what you can find in others in the category – it’s not just a do-it-yourself machine like the Cana. But, unlike Cana, Thirsti will ship and be available at a competitive price point (Kana would sell for $900).
In other words, the product is made for today, not tomorrow, with little variation in what’s on the market. And as I write those words, I may have just summed up SharkNinja’s North Star guiding principle because it seems like the company does it over and over again.
They did it when they offered their Creamy countertop ice cream and smoothie maker in 2021, the NY Times compared it to a Pacjojet professional machine in its ability to whip up frozen treats in the same way as a Pacojet professional machine (albeit with a few red flags).
They did it again when they entered the BBQ/smoker space, creating an outdoor grill that looks attractive and smokes, when Home & Garden had to say the following: “Many multi-functional grills on the market, but there is nothing on the market like the Ninja Woodfire Outdoor Grill. It not only heats, but it can grill, bake, ventilate – smoke, exhaust all vegetables, exhaust smoke and exhaust all vegetables.”
And we can’t forget how the company was the first to offer a combination air fryer and pressure cooker in 2018, a year before Instant Pot started offering a combination product.
And these products are, in a sense, why Ninja goes public while others stick with a small market share and, in some cases, go out of business.
If you were to ask anyone in 2019 who would go public in 2023, most would point to Instant Pot, not SharkNinja. But today, it’s SharkNinja that’s growing revenue (it had $3.76 billion in the 12 months ending in March) while Instant Brands is reorganizing its business under Chapter 11 and laying off workers.
The move comes six years after SharkNinja was acquired by Chinese entrepreneur (and Joyoung founder) Wang Xuning, who used private equity funding to strike a deal and create a new company in JS Global Products with SharkNinja at the center. Now, years later and with hundreds of patents to its name, SharkNinja has plans to go public.
The business of countertop appliances is very tough to compete in. Nevertheless, Ninja has thrived due to its willingness to create new mashup concepts of products, often with attractive design options, all packaged with unique and memorable brand names in each line. This is in contrast to companies like Instant Brands, which may sometimes create products that seem to be a departure from their original ideas, or like Gourmia and other copycat brands, whose knockoff products do not have the same quality feel or product line cohesion.
So while Ninja didn’t offer a drink simulator, take your time. They have shown that they can surprise us, and maybe one day, that will be something straight out of the pages of science fiction.
