SharkNinja is formalizing the fan activity already surrounding its products into two dedicated creator programs: “First Fans,” open to its more than 4,100 global employees, and “SharkNinja Storytellers,” built for consumers who post about their experience with the brand’s products. 

The company said in an announcement that brand and creator content around SharkNinja and its Shark and Ninja product lines generated more than 19 billion impressions across more than 200,000 posts this year, content mostly from its community rather than its own marketing.

“First Fans” gives employees training, resources, and rewards to post about the products they work on, with monthly content challenges and, for those eligible, affiliate commissions. “SharkNinja Storytellers” opens the same creator track to consumers, offering rewards, commissions, and perks as participants build their content, with the most active members getting early looks at unreleased products and input into their development.

“At SharkNinja, we don’t think of our fans as an audience; they’re part of our community,” said Michelle Crossan-Matos, the company’s Chief Brand and Experience Officer. “We’re defining a new marketing playbook that brings together our celebrity partners, creators, team members and consumers.”

The company named several early participants. Molly Bomann, a U.S. Demo Chef who previously ran a student-led test kitchen at Purdue University, tests recipes using products still in development. Mariana Menezes, a Quality Engineer on SharkNinja’s Product Integrity Team, posts Portuguese-language content on curly hair, fitness, and daily life to roughly 18,000 followers and plans to fold in more SharkNinja products. Consumer creator Brittany Deroche said she uses a Ninja CREAMi to make treats for her family and described content creation as a creative outlet.

The programs extend a social strategy SharkNinja executives recently laid out. On the company’s Q2 call in August, CEO Mark Barrocas said SharkNinja had developed AI tools that improved its ability to capture organic social content about its products to more than 60% accuracy across the broader ecosystem of users, influencers and creators, up from a baseline limited mostly to posts using the company’s own hashtags, since less than 20% of user content includes them. Barrocas called that expanded visibility into organic conversation increasingly central to both marketing and product development decisions. 

Executives also pointed to social commerce, including a TikTok Shop rollout that had reached seven countries by the end of the quarter with plans to more than double that by the holidays, as a growing path for both new and existing product discovery, and said domestic and international social media tactics were already driving demand generation across markets.

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