Dyson banks on brand power, R&D in expansion efforts
‘Great ideas and great engineering’
It’s hard not to think of vacuum cleaners when t he name Dyson Ltd. comes up in conversation, but the U.K.based company has released a slew of other products in its 31- year history including bladeless fans, hand dryers and robotic cleaners.
Dyson may not be the first to market, but, just like Apple Inc., it tends to come in with premium- tier offeri ngs with corresponding price tags, boasting that its engineering is better than its competitors and that makes up for lost time.
Indeed, Dyson wants consumers to stop thinking of it as a mere vacuum company and start thinking of it as a problem- solving technology company, one that spends billions of dollars on research and development and has the wherewithal and brand power to open physical stores and tackle the biggest challenges, such as trying to build an electric vehicle from scratch in about four years.
Dyson last fall said it will spend US$2.7 billion to make a zero- emissions electric vehicle by 2020. The company said its expertise in engineering, motors, airflow and new battery technology will help it succeed where others have failed. Even those companies such as Tesla Inc. that have products have been plagued by endless delays.
“It ’s an i ndustry t hat needs to be disrupted. James ( Dyson) has been talking about pollution in the cities caused by vehicles for more than 25 years and it’s a problem we want to solve,” said Jim Rowan, Dyson’s chief executive who came to the company in 2012 after nearly five years as BlackBerry Ltd.’s chief operating officer of global operations.
“We start with a problem, look to see the engineering talent we’ve got and then think we can make a differentiated offering that we can bring to the market.”
Dyson currently has almost 4,000 engineers and scientists and spends nearly $ 12 million a week on research and development, triple what it spent four years ago, the company said. By 2020, it aims to hire another 3,000 engineers globally as part of an aggressive 2.5-billion- pound ($ 4.25- billion) expansion plan.
Last year, the company opened a new technology lab in Shanghai and a technology centre in Singapore to work on hardware and software projects, and announced it will construct a second campus near its global headquarters in the U.K. that will increase its footprint in the country tenfold.
In 2016, Dyson opened a 56- acre, 250- million- pound ($ 424.7- million) campus in England with 129 labs for future product development.
“Because we now have that geography globally, we can write software 24/ 7 … and it shortens the delivery time to the end product,” Rowan said.
“There are a lot of benefits from an organizational and efficiency view, but you also get that broadness of thinking across the entire globe. It’s been tremendously suc- cessful for us and one of the reasons we’ve been growing the company 20 to 25 per cent a year for the last four or five years.”
Dyson’s development process is to first figure out the science behind a potential product — such as testing poor air quality for a purifier or understanding how hair works to make a better hair dryer — and then layering on industrial design, environmental testing and, more recently, software. The company has also been investing into robotics, AI and new battery technology to improve its products.
“Technology is at the core of what we do. We’ve advanced and grown rapidly i nto a global technology company because of great ideas and great engineering,” said Jake Dyson, the company’s research and development director and son of company founder Sir James Dyson. “We need technology to do that and our own technology to support those ambitious ideas.”
One support area is software, which Dyson engineers write for the company’s Connectivity mobile applications. Using these relatively new companion apps — 90 per cent of Dyson’s efforts were devoted to hardware just four years ago — lets consumers remotely program appliances, look at historical data, monitor house conditions and see where their robotic vacuum went while they were out.
Developing software alongside t he hardware comes with benefits that the technology community at large is finding too hard to resist, with giants such as Apple, Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. already bringing everything in-house. One chief benefit is that controlling the entire process allows for tighter integration between software and hardware.
“I’ve been incredibly impressed with how quickly our engineers learn things,” Dyson said. “We have over 120 people working in Connectivity producing very good apps and understanding what is required with connected products. We’re not doing it as a gimmick, but we are doing it when there is a tangible benefit to consumers.”
“( Dyson is) another example … of a firm that is focused on innovation, differentiating themselves from the competition and developing platforms or apps to support their customers and build customer loyalty,” said Mark Schrutt, strategic adviser, Innovation & Public Sector Research, at IDC Canada
It will take time for Dyson to become better known as a technology company, if at all, according to some analysts, but it may also depend on the product categories it enters.
Warren Shiau, director of IDC Canada’s buyer behaviour practice, said Dyson has very strong consumer recognition for high- end products, but becoming known as a broader technology company might not be the best decision.“If ( Dyson) is branching into home automation or smart-home technology, this may be a reason for them to drive for recognition as a tech company and within this context, yes, it is possible,” Shiau said.
“Consumer association of Dyson as a leading design company is more important for their sales, and pricing levels, than developing their perception amongst consumers as a technology company.”
Shiau added that he sees similarities between Dyson and Apple in terms of the importance of design. Last year, Apple’s chief designer Jony Ive even succeeded Sir Dyson as chancellor at the Royal College of Art, London’s famous design school.
“Identification with design would be the same model that Apple has pursued so successfully and still pursues,” he said.
Of course, the company isn’t abandoning its physical product offerings. For example, LED lights were added in 2015 to the product lineup following the acquisition of Jake Dyson’s company after he spent more than a decade away from his father’s company. Dyson has also added humidifiers, hair dryers and air purifiers, to name but a few.
Those new products have allowed Dyson to start opening its own bricks- and- mortar stores, even as some traditional retailers close theirs.
Dyson opened its first Canadian retail l ocation (fourth in North America) in Toronto’s Yorkdale Shopping Centre in December 2017.
Employees at Dyson Demo are trained by engineers on the intricacies and technologies behind the products, which consumers can check out through interactive displays. For example, various things such as cereal are in jars and available to toss on to carpets for vacuum testing; transparent boxes fill up with pollutants like smoke for purifiers to clean; and mobile devices display companion apps.
“It’s all about having a feel of the Dyson culture — the innovation, the development and the engineering that have gone into the product,” Dyson said.
“It’s about controlling that experience ourselves rather than it being lost amongst the discount stickers that are stuck all over products and distancing ourselves from competitors with less performing products that are constantly trying to copy us.”
There is always the danger of growing too spread out, especially since competitors are getting ever quicker to borrow ideas and some of Dyson’s patents will soon expire.
“But that,” Dyson said, “is what keeps us on our toes.”
WE’VE ADVANCED AND GROWN RAPIDLY INTO A GLOBAL TECHNOLOGY COMPANY.