How a Cat in a Shark Costume Provided the Best Marketing Roomba Could've Hoped For

Sometime around Halloween 2012, a Houston woman named Helen Arnold set out to buy a shark costume for her dog, a pit bull named Sharkey. When she could find only a small-sized outfit, Arnold decided to let her cat Max wear it instead. Max, as things turned out, not only tolerated being dressed as a shark, but the chill Siamese also had taken to riding around atop the Roomba robot vacuum that Arnold had bought. With kitty all suited up, Arnold began to post videos. This is how Max the Roomba Cat broke the internet. Among the tens of millions of Americans who took note of the videos was one Colin Angle, who immediately felt a bond with Max—and for good reason. Angle is the co-founder of iRobot, maker of the Roomba. Through the long years of building his company, “there's a lot of really weird things that we didn't anticipate happening,” Angle told Adweek. “Cats riding Roombas was definitely one of them.” In fact, if there’s anything more surprising than a vacuum-surfing cat, it’s the success of iRobot and its signature product. When the Roomba hit the market in 2002, the company figured it might move 15,000 units if it were lucky. To date, it’s sold over 35 million of them. Armed with two MIT degrees, Angle founded iRobot in 1990 along with computer scientist Helen Greiner and robotics professor Rodney Brooks. “Our journey to Roomba was not straight,” Angle said of the company’s lean first years. “It was a lot of: How can we create any kind of robot to allow us to make payroll and survive the next day?” A Clean Sweep When it debuted in 2002, Roomba ("the Intelligent FloorVac") felt like science fiction come to life (1), but the vacuum had taken iRobot co-founder Colin Angle (2) many years to develop. The Roomba's capabilities were a confluence of technologies from industrial robots including Genghis (3), a crawling bot invented at MIT by iRobot co-founder Rodney Brooks, and the PackBot (4), shown here scouring the 9/11 site in New York. Though it was made to clean floors, the Roomba is just as famous as the free ride for Max the YouTube cat (5), and it has also inspired spin-off products like Braava, the mopping robot (6). iRobot’s first revenues came from industrial contracts. It built the prototype rover that gave rise to NASA’s Sojourner mission in 1997. For Johnson Wax, iRobot created a contraption that cleaned shopping center floors. Hasbro hired the firm to create the animatronic capabilities for its My Real Baby doll in 2000. Strangely enough, it took iRobot doing all these industrial projects to perfect the components that eventually went into the Roomba. “Not many companies would be crazy enough to say, 'Hey, let's all mash these technologies together to create a robot to clean your home,'” Angle said. “But that was us.” And it still is. Roomba’s ninth-generation model features a piezoelectric sensor to detect dirt and a powerful motor that makes it a dope ride for cats. Angle still marvels at how Max wound up providing his brand with better marketing than he could have afforded at the time. “I have great appreciation for shark cat,” he said. Buy a Cybersuck Today! Much like Kleenex or Band-Aid, Roomba—a mashup of “room” and “rumba”—is so wholly synonymous with its category that it’s impossible to imagine the product carrying any other name. But the truth hurts: Roomba was very nearly called the Cybersuck. That was the best name the internal team could come up with, anyway. Weighed with doubts, Angle ended up paying a branding firm $16,600 to come up with a better name. “That still sticks in my craw,” he said, “but of course it was completely worth it.”