SharkNinja

Challenges

SharkNinja is one of the world's largest consumer product brands, producing everything from vacuums and fans to blenders and air fryers, with new products entering the market constantly. A library that size needs a digital asset management (DAM) program people actually use, not just a place files are stored.

When Kristi Morrison-Clear joined SharkNinja as DAM Manager in early 2024, the program was not delivering that. Awareness of the DAM itself was low, and the people who did know it existed were not confident using it. When the DAM came up at all, it was not spoken of positively.

The problem was bigger than any one person could clear alone. SharkNinja's DAM team, working with Stacks as its fractional DAM partner, faced a growing library that needed constant ingestion and cleanup, a taxonomy that needed to keep pace with the product line, no consistent way to measure whether any of it was working, and no internal champions yet to carry the message across the organization.

Objectives

Build Awareness and Trust

Before anything else, SharkNinja's users needed to know the DAM existed, understand what it was for, and see it discussed in a positive light. That meant training content, consistent communication, and visible wins.

Assess Maturity and Set a Realistic Path

Rather than guess at priorities, the program needed an honest baseline. The team wanted to know exactly where SharkNinja's DAM stood against a recognized maturity model, so the roadmap that followed would be realistic and sequenced correctly, not aspirational.

Make Adoption Measurable

Improvement efforts are hard to defend to leadership without numbers. SharkNinja needed a small set of KPIs, tracked consistently, so progress could be shown and the next round of investment could be justified with data instead of anecdotes.

Keep Pace With the Library Itself

None of the above matters if the library underneath it is a mess. SharkNinja needed a partner who could handle the unglamorous, constant work, tagging new assets, keeping the taxonomy current, cleaning up metadata, so the roadmap had something solid to stand on.

Solution

A Roadmap Built on a Maturity Baseline, Not a Guess

The first step was identifying the internal barriers to adoption, then assessing the DAM program against the DAM Capability Model to establish an honest maturity baseline. From there, SharkNinja and Stacks built a roadmap of actionable, quarterly SMART goals rather than a single long-range plan, so each quarter had a defined destination the team could actually reach, with each quarter's goals scoped into a trackable set of tasks.

Ingestion, Taxonomy, and Training at Scale

Executing that roadmap meant steady, unglamorous work, week over week. In 2024 alone, Stacks ingested and tagged over 10,300 new assets into the platform, and in 2025 that scaled to more than 135,000 assets uploaded with key metadata, driven by continued ingestion of UK and EU assets and continued adoption.

The partnership also covered the structural work: aligning SharkNinja's taxonomy to its product data system, a full rights management overhaul so usage rules were clear and enforceable, and ongoing taxonomy maintenance as new product lines and fields came online. On the people side, training materials made the roadmap's awareness goal real: on-platform user guides, a dedicated distributor guide, and quick-reference one-sheets, plus ongoing admin support and troubleshooting to keep the platform usable day to day.

Tracking, Advocates, and Visible Wins

Day-to-day, the roadmap and governance tasks were tracked on a simple Kanban board (Ready, In Progress, Complete), giving the team a fast read on what was moving and what was stuck. To spread awareness past the DAM team, the team identified internal advocates, users Kristi calls DAMbassadors, who already liked the platform and were willing to champion it in their own areas of the business.

SharkNinja set the direction and drove adoption from the inside; Stacks brought the fractional bandwidth to execute against it. Neither half works without the other.

Benefits

Triple-Digit Growth in Less Than a Year

From February to October 2024, SharkNinja's DAM program saw a 531 percent increase in logins, a 444 percent increase in searches, and a 3,754 percent increase in downloads. The turnaround was not a platform swap or a redesign. It was a program that finally had a roadmap, a way to measure itself, people inside the company who believed in it, and a partner executing the work behind all three.

Behind those percentages was steady, shared execution: tens of thousands of assets ingested and enriched across 2024 and 2025, a taxonomy kept aligned to SharkNinja's product system as new lines launched, a completed rights management overhaul, and the training materials that helped the message spread. The trend held: average monthly downloads grew from roughly 8,600 in 2024 to nearly 36,700 in 2025.

The SharkNinja team continued to lead the program from the inside, with Stacks providing the fractional partnership to keep pace with it.

The full story of how SharkNinja assessed maturity, built the roadmap, and grew adoption is documented in the five-part guide series, SharkNinja’s Path to DAM Success and Maturity.