The mastermind behind the revolutionary Dyson vacuum talks about rejection and his expansion in Asia
James Dyson is the Steve Jobs of vacuum cleaners. The Mark Zuckerberg of air purifiers. The Jeff Bezos of hairdryers. And his vast, all-glass development facility feels like it should be deep in Silicon Valley, rather than a five-minute drive from the quintessentially English town of Malmesbury in the county of Wiltshire.
But Dyson himself—a knight bachelor with a net worth of £3.2 billion—exudes the sort of intellectual British charm bred in expensive public schools around the country. With an added twist of creative genius, of course. Although after spending a day exploring his extraordinary development centre, I am starting to see him as more of a Gandalf-style wizard than a mortal with an unusual aptitude for improving household appliances.
This is because there is something otherworldly about his ultra-high-tech research centre. There are semi-anechoic chambers with triangular padded walls to test the exact sound frequency of tiny motors. All-white padded chambers that check the electromagnetic interference of new products.
Glass boxes that produce prototypes of future products out of little more than a heap of sand. Mechanical claws that run their fingers through a mannequin’s wig to test a hairdryer. Remote-controlled vacuum cleaners that zoom up and down carpets, sucking up small mounds of dust and spilt cereal. And though I know it’s all science, it feels a bit like magic.
But like most extraordinary ventures, the story of Dyson is one of obsession and astonishing levels of dedication. It began in 1978 when James Dyson realised the bag in his vacuum cleaner was not only unnecessary, it was also killing the suction. He decided to find a better system and spent the next 15 years creating 5,126 different prototypes, all of which were rejected by numerous household brands in the UK and the US.
Heavily in debt and supported solely by his wife’s paintings and rug designs, he then produced the 5,127th prototype, which would later become the Dyson DC01. It didn’t lose its suction, thanks to a central plastic cyclone that separates dust from the air, and it also glided along the ground on a large plastic ball rather than a set of unwieldy wheels.
Using the proceeds of the sale of an earlier prototype to a Japanese design firm, he set up a manufacturing company of his own in the UK and the Dyson DC01 became the best-selling vacuum in the UK within 18 months of its launch.
“There is something rather perverse about me,” Dyson says. “If someone says I can’t do something, I immediately think, ‘Of course I can,’ so all those rejections didn’t discourage me. You see, nobody gave me a good reason for not wanting a bagless vacuum cleaner. They would lose sales of bags, yes, but more than that, they didn’t want to take a leap into the unknown. So although it was disappointing that it took so long, it led me to the theory that it was necessary."
I had huge inner doubt and no certainty at all, but that’s the whole point; if you live in certainty it’s very dull, whereas being on a knife edge is very exciting. And luckily I have a determined streak. I think you do need to be a bit obsessive to make something difficult work.