Dyson looks to technology to hit pay dirt
The British firm known for vacuum cleaners thrives by giving engineers free rein.
When Homer Simpson — America’s beloved cartoon idiot — got free rein to design the car of his dreams, he created an abomination, complete with a megaphone attached to the roof and dome-shaped windows. It tanked his brother’s fictional car company.
When Dyson — Britain’s beloved technology company best known for its high-end vacuum cleaners — gave its engineers free rein to design the vacuum cleaner of their dreams, they created a cordless marvel with the sucking power of a traditional vacuum cleaner and the mobility of a hand-held.
At first, it looked ridiculous. The body resembled a children’s Nerf gun. The power button was a trigger. Unlike the fictional “Simpsons” car, it quickly became a bestseller.
Today it accounts for 50% of Dyson’s sales. The company had nearly $2.1 billion in revenue last year, with about $500 million in profit.
Dyson’s engineers did with their freedom what Homer Simpson didn’t: They used technology to solve a problem.
“The first thing we do at Dyson is identify a problem to solve,” said the company’s head of new product innovation, Stephen Courtney. “The second stage is working out what technologies can solve that problem.
That’s what Dyson does, really. That’s why our products look so different. It’s because of the technology.”
In traditional cordless vacuum cleaners, the bulk of the machine is close to the ground. That makes it hard to maneuver because people are essentially pushing around a heavy vacuum cleaner on the end of a long stick. So why not balance the weight of the machine in the person’s hand instead?
Thanks to more than a decade of research and development, Dyson had developed a powerful motor small enough to fit in the palm of a hand. So instead of copying the broomstick design, why not build something easier and more comfortable, even if it requires an unconventional Nerf gun formfactor?
Dyson is a company of problem solvers, Chief Executive Max Conze said. It employs 2,500 people in its British headquarters and has more than 2,000 engineers around the world to solve everyday frustrations. The company spends more than $4.5 million a week on research and development as its engineers break problems down to their simplest forms.
“Take hand dryers,” said Dyson mechanical engineer Matt Kelly. “You’d start with a pure problem of getting water off hands. For a lot of people, they’d think, ‘OK, we need to evaporate the water. We need to heat it and get rid of it.’ But the tricky thing is to take a step further back and say, ‘No, we don’t actually need to evaporate the water. We need to remove it from the person’s hands.’ What are the ways we can do that?”
The engineers might start with pieces of rubber that act like windshield wipers on a person’s hands. The idea is terrifying, but maybe it would work. They might try motorized bristles that brush the water away. Or sheets of compressed air to scrape the water off — which is what they went with for the Dyson Airblade.
“Eighty percent of the things we work on won’t ever see the light of day,” Kelly said.
Is it a risk to throw hundreds of engineers on projects that might fail? Of course. Dyson has had no shortage of failures.
Before Oculus and Google Cardboard, Dyson developed a head-mounted wearable computer in 2001. Conze said it was too far ahead of its time, and the components available weren’t good enough to pull it off.
In the early 2000s Dyson tried a corded robot vacuum cleaner, smart enough to retrace its steps and wind up the cord on its own. Unfortunately, no one else was smart enough to avoid tripping over the cord.
Costly as the failures have been, it’s part of the process, Kelly said, and it’s a process that has led to vacuum cleaners, hand dryers, humidifiers and fans making Amazon’s and Wal-Mart’s bestseller lists, despite the devices being much more expensive than competitors’. The latest Dyson cordless vacuum cleaner starts at $599, whereas the average competitor cordless vacuum starts at $100.
“If you want to design something, and if you can see a way of doing it, the attitude is never, ‘Ah, that will never work,’ ” Kelly said. “It’s much more, ‘OK, then prove it. Make it. Demonstrate what you want to do.’ ”
It’s this openness to anything that has led to new products and complete reinventions of existing products. Take the Dyson Fluffy, a vacuum cleaner head that looks more like a roller someone might use to curl hair.
“Conventional cleaner heads on hard floors can snowplow lots of debris and, instead of picking up the dirt, they just push it around,” Courtney said. “So we completely reinvented the cleaner head. We’ve replaced the front edge with a fluffy roller and, because the bristles are fine and soft, it forms a complete seal with the f loor, which means we get really good suction.”
Dyson’s work is never done, Courtney said. The latest version of any of its products may be the lightest, fastest, quietest and most powerful of any on the market, but they can always be lighter, faster, quieter and even more powerful.
And those solutions will come from engineers getting carte blanche to Homer Simpson the heck out of everyday problems. Problems like hair getting tangled in vacuum cleaner brush bars.
“We’ve got a small attachment tool that solves it, but we don’t have a solution for the full cleaner head … yet,” Kelly said, smiling. “I’ll say no more than that.”