SharkNinja had prominent product placement in “F1 The Movie” last year, and the deal paid off well enough to convince the brand to move to a real-life relationship with McLaren Racing.
Last summer, the Massachusetts-based appliances company was one of the brands that appeared in the Apple Original Films feature as a sponsor of the fictional team APXGP alongside other brands like Expensify, Geico and EA Sports. SharkNinja, which combined its two brands into one overarching identity in 2015, had its logo appear on the drivers’ fire suits and race cars.
In the real world, SharkNinja also released a suite of branded products around the movie, a bundle called the APXGP Performance Collection that later sold out, according to Laura Dyer, senior vice president of global marketing for the company.
Dyer said that, in some ways, judging the performance of the sponsorship was tougher than measuring more direct, one-to-one marketing attempts like digital media advertising. But SharkNinja researched its brand awareness and brand sentiment metrics around the time of the film’s June 2025 release, and the results showed that the movie sponsorship “did us a lot of good.”
“It was very great. It’s been really brilliant for us to be able to take that from that cultural moment and then extend it into real life, and that was our intention with this partnership,” Dyer said. “We saw just so much fan love from being in that movie, more than we even expected.”
The film grossed $634M worldwide, 70% of which came from outside the U.S., according to Box Office Mojo data. Before the film debuted, the company “hoped it would be big, but you never really know until it’s out in the world,” said Dyer, who added that “we got such a great reception, we were like, ‘OK, we have to harness this fandom and do something in the real world.’”
From the week when the film was released to today, SharkNinja’s stock is up 106%. The title sponsor of the fictional team, Expensify, has had a rougher go with its stock price since the movie’s release, down 4% over that span. But that company declined to comment on how it felt the sponsorship performed when contacted by SBJ in recent weeks.
SharkNinja said it sold out of its APXGP Performance Collection that it released around “F1: The Movie” SharkNinja
Race teams are known to be piranhas when it comes to hunting sponsorship. Dyer admitted that SharkNinja was contacted by several of the real-life outfits in F1 but ended up choosing McLaren because the team “really aligned on what success looked like — we’re a very social-first company and (McLaren CEO Zak Brown) really knows and understood our vision.” McLaren is one of the front-runners in F1 and is the reigning champion, although Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team is poised to upset McLaren this year.
In addition to sponsoring McLaren’s F1 team, the deal also involves SharkNinja getting assets with the Arrow McLaren IndyCar team and McLaren’s new team in the World Endurance Championship. The deal was announced last month.
The assets of the agreement are largely based around social media content, and the messaging will be about how the two companies have “all those things we have in common like marginal gains, performance, design, the power of engineering,” Dyer said. The partnership was visible last weekend at the U.S. Grand Prix, where SharkNinja brought blow dryers, an AutoBarista espresso machine and a Slushi frozen drink maker, according to a post on its Instagram page.
SharkNinja will also become part of the McLaren Racing Accelerator Program. According to Dyer, SharkNinja’s engineering team will have several meetings a year with McLaren’s R&D team to see if it can collaborate or help out with the development of products across the home, kitchen and beauty verticals.