InSir James Dyson wants to see a society where science, technology and engineering are held in high esteem. story cover his native UK, Sir James Dyson is known as much for his quirky- looking, superior-function- ing vacuum cleaners as for his long and embattled path to commercial success.
He gave Brits their first bagless vacuum
in 1993 after 13 tough years tinkering in the
tool shed. He slogged through 5,127 prototypes, a couple of lawsuits and dozens of
rejections, and came within a whisker of bankruptcy. His hard work paid off, however,
when the humbly named DC01 became the
best-selling cleaner in the country within 18
months of its introduction. Dyson brought
his bag-free phenomenon to the U.S. in 2003
and quickly became the market leader here—
a position the brand still holds today.
The road less traveled
A rural backwater upbringing among a
family of academics and clergy might be an
unconventional route into a groundbreaking
engineering career, but James Dyson was
always determined to do things differently.
The only kid volunteering to play the bassoon
in the school orchestra and a long-distance
runner before it was cool to be one, he was
already carving his own path.
Under whelmed
by the available job
options after school, he left sleepy Norfolk for
London, about 100 miles away geographically
but a hundred light-years distant culturally,
artistically and technologically. Dyson spent a
year at Byam Shaw School of Art, where he
met his wife, Deirdre, but a fortuitous stint at
the Royal College of Art the next year is what
led Dyson to make the leap from furniture
design to industrial design. He jumped at the
chance to finally get his hands dirty, working
with plastic and stainless steel, his favorite
materials. Thus began a lifelong passion for
functional design—making things work better and look better.
Failure as the mother of invention
It was the humble wheelbarrow that first
felt the force of Dyson’s inventive spirit. While
renovating his house in the early ’70s, he realized that traditional metal wheelbarrows sank
in mud, dented walls and easily rusted. He
went to work on the Ballbarrow. The Dyson
Ballbarrow had a large inflatable ball instead
of a wheel, which, along with chunky feet,
gave it stability. The barrow itself was made
from plastic, which didn’t rust and didn’t dent
walls. Some commercial success, but no cigar.
26 ;e Costco Connection MAY 2012
In 1979, Dyson bought a top-of-the-line
vacuum cleaner and became frustrated with
how it almost instantly clogged and lost suction; even emptying the bag had no effect.
His engineer’s instinct kicked in. He
ripped open the bag and noticed a coating of
dust inside, clogging the pores. A fundamental
flaw with vacuum technology had gone
unchallenged for almost 100 years, making it
ripe for a Dyson revolution. During a visit to
a local sawmill, Dyson noticed how sawdust
was removed from the air by large industrial
cyclones and wondered if the same principle
could work on a smaller scale, inside a vacuum
cleaner. This was the hypothesis he hammered
out in his tool shed for the next 13 years. Cue
the world’s first bagless vacuum cleaner.
Getting to market
Through the late ’80s and early ’90s, Dyson
repeatedly tried to license his
newly patented dual cyclone
technology and hawked his proto-
types to dozens of vacuum manufacturers
around the world, inspiring some illicit copy-
cats in the process. His efforts to sell his idea
were met with a wall of negativity; he
responded in 1993 by manufacturing the
first batch of DC01s himself. A few early
orders were enough to pull him from the
brink of bankruptcy, upscale production
levels and overcome supply problems. One
by one, the big electrical retailers came on
board and, with little advertising or market-
ing support, the little yellow DC01 quietly
scooted to number one in the UK. By the
end of 1997 Dyson was easily outselling
Hoover and Electrolux and had generated
UK sales of £ 100 million (approximately
$160 million).
