James Dyson is master of invention and reinvention — first the vacuum and now the hairdryer, with lots of ground-breaking innovation in between.
His eponymous lifestyle brand is today synonymous with game-changing technology and remarkable aesthetics, but rewind some decades to learn how this came to be. The entrepreneur began his career in the 1960s, a time of great turbulence, like today.
“There is political turmoil now, but there was real political turmoil then, with the Cuban Missile Crisis and the assassination of President Kennedy,” Dyson said, during a discussion with Jenny B. Fine, editor in chief of Beauty Inc and executive editor of beauty at WWD. “Meanwhile, in England, it was fairly static, very conservative in an English sense.”
Dyson attended the Royal College of Art and Design, in London, at the height of the Swinging ’60s.
“Swinging had a different meaning in those days,” he said. “I followed in the footsteps of David Hockney and Ridley Scott, and a contemporary friend, who was the late Anton Furst, who got an Oscar for the Batmobile in the ‘Batman’ film.
“It was a time of great cultural revolution and cultural change,” he added. “We’d just gone through the privations of the Second World War and the austerity after [it].”
Dyson grew up with rationing. “Suddenly, in the ’60s, we felt liberated,” he explained. “That anything was possible. We were free of the shackles and could reject the past.”
His first real inspiration was Buckminster Fuller, the American inventor and engineer. “He used engineering to create these huge structures that were light structures for the first time,” said Dyson. “He wasn’t afraid to try new things.”
For instance, there was a house that rotated to face the sun, with Fuller claiming the wind entered — reverse chimney-style — and blew dust from the house. “I don’t believe that bit of it worked,” said Dyson, who wishes he’d invented the jet engine, which had been done by Frank Whittle, who worked it out by trial and error. “He’s a hero.”
Dyson is a proponent of continually metamorphosing one’s self. “Things are moving faster and faster — we have to innovate,” he said.
Innovation — Dyson’s bread and butter — is close to his heart.
“People always criticize engineers because as they’re doing something, they’re thinking of something better,” he said. “You’ve got to stop them at some point, they say, and I don’t believe that. You just keep changing, having better ideas, and keep introducing them as fast as you can.”
He called beauty a “wonderful category — because most people are not really very interested in vacuum cleaners. There are vacuum-cleaner enthusiasts, and I’m a vacuum-cleaner enthusiast, but every man I met 20 years ago didn’t know what make of vacuum cleaner they had and had never used it. That’s completely changed.
“The shock of going into the beauty business was the enthusiasm for beauty products after vacuum cleaners and hand dryers,” said Dyson. “We love it, people are enthusiastic. They notice everything and really care about it. So it’s been a wonderful business to be working in.”
That includes hair care, after an in-depth study of hair science.
“It was a natural thing to do — go into formulations which help you hold your style, protect your hair and make it look good,” said Dyson. “We only do things when we have ideas, a solution to a problem.”
In any category, being first is key. So how does Dyson think about dupe culture? “I try not to,” he said. “At school, we were taught that if you copied someone’s work, that was cheating and you would get expelled.”
But somehow, we accept dupes, Dyson added. “People say: ‘Oh well, copying is good because it creates competition.’ But actually, it does the reverse,” he explained. “Because if every product looks more or less the same, the consumer doesn’t have much choice. So I think plagiarists should come up with their own ideas.”
Sometime, the completion date of a new technology is pushed until later. “But you can never cut it short, because it’s got to be good,” said Dyson. “It’s got to be perfect.”
He never gives up when it comes to technology. “But sometimes you have to give up for commercial reasons,” said Dyson, citing as an example the electric car he’d worked on, starting in 2014, when Tesla was the only other player in the field. At the time, it was estimated that by 2030 only 2 percent of cars would be electric.
“I didn’t believe that,” said Dyson. “I thought people would vote with their feet, and we develop electric motors, we’re developing battery technology and we’re all about air treatment. So I thought well, all we have to do is do a car.”
But Dieselgate happened in the interim, and every car manufacturer realized they must make electric vehicles. “They were all doing them at a huge loss, and as a relatively small company, I couldn’t really afford to compete with [that].”
Getting into the hair business happened because Dyson was developing very small, very fast electric motors. (Think 140,000 rmp, whereas a Formula 1 car motor goes at 16,000 rmp, while a jet engine runs at 17,000 rmp.)
The smaller you make it, the faster it is, using fewer materials and higher efficiency. “We were the first to develop high-speed electric motors,” said Dyson. “We suddenly realized we could put it in the handle of a hairdryer and not have to have that horrible weight at the top.”
It took him and the team 20 years to develop that and a new tiny technology heater through which the air flow comes out in a laminar manner.
Dyson is a big proponent of failure. At his company, perseverance is a core tenant.
“Our education system teaches us to get the right answer the first time,” he said. “It’s all about learning and repeating the correct answer to something. But life simply isn’t like that. So I want to change the education system and give the people who get the most wrong answers more marks, because they’ve got to go through a process of experimentation and work their own way to the right answer — discover the right answer, not hear it, parrot-fashion.
“Failure is an important part of life,” Dyson continued. “Failure is really much more interesting than success, because of my 5,127 [vacuum] prototypes, all of them are failures. And you learn something from them. It’s a great visceral way of learning about things. I think failure is to be applauded at school and in business.”
His company has its own university, since he found England is not producing enough engineers. (The U.K. has 20,000 new ones per year, while China has 2 million.) “We’re just simply getting further and further behind,” he said. “If I have made engineering more interesting and encourage more people to be engineers, then I feel that I’ve achieved something, because engineering is hugely undervalued.”
He pays his students a salary. “I always joke at the graduation ceremony that they’ve learned all sorts of things, including paying tax,” said Dyson.
The students — encouraged to make wrong suggestion — work with Dyson’s engineers and scientists three days per week, then during the remaining two days they’re taught more traditionally.
“They come not because I pay them, [but] because they want to work with real engineers and real scientists,” said Dyson. “They all say doing that inspires them to do the academic work they would otherwise find a struggle. So it works. We have a greater number of first-class honors than any other university in Britain.”
Dyson has “a slight disdain for experience, because the world is changing so fast that what worked in the past is not going to work in the future.”
“I don’t laugh at anyone making an outrageous suggestion,” he continued. “People are encouraged to speak up. If they have a stupid idea, that’s fine. It’s often very interesting, because if you start the wrong way, rather than trying to do it the right way, it sets you off on a different path. It’s not necessarily the solution, but it starts you thinking and going along a different track to everybody else.”
Dyson believes scale comes with both increasing possibilities and responsibilities. “You should promote young people quickly,” he said. “Don’t wait until they are ready for the job. Appoint them before they’re ready for it, so they grow into it and then grow faster. It takes a brave person in an organization to take a risk with somebody.”
Dyson underlines it’s necessary to take risks all the time in business.
Shifting gears, the entrepreneur talked about strawberries. He grows 3 million such plants in a 30-acre glass house on his farm. “I did bring some over, but I’ve eaten them all,” he said.
Having grown up in the country working on his friends’ farms lugging potatoes and picking parsley, farming is in his blood. “I always wanted to have farms,” he said.
So Dyson purchased a big farm and improved it, then others offered him theirs. “We ended up with quite a lot of farms,” he said, adding his employees develop and use robotics, such as drones to spot where to put fertilizer or weed killer and self-driving tractors that can avoid marsh harrier nests. His is circular farming.
Is there any problem he can’t solve? “Hundreds of them,” said Dyson, who does not consider himself a business person, but one who goes where creativity takes him.
Where might that be next? “I can’t tell you that,” he said.
