James Dyson: 5127 Failures and $20 Billion
Hi Friends :)
I’m back with James Dyson. 5127 prototypes, 15 years, before he made any real money from his inventions. Persistence. Here’s a man who loves inventing, thinks from first principles, and shares his wisdom along the way.
A tiny announcement … You can win a physical copy of the book Invention: A Life by James Dyson. More at the end of the email …
Issue 7
There are no Eureka moments
In 1983, after four years of building and testing 5,127 hand-made prototypes of my cyclonic vacuum, I finally cracked it. Perhaps I should have punched the air, whooped loudly, and run down the road from my workshop shrieking ‘Eureka!’ at the top of my voice. Instead, far from feeling elated, which surely after 5,126 failures I should have been, I felt strangely deflated. How could this have been? Day after day, with the wolf at the door, I had been pursuing the development of an ever more efficient cyclone for collecting and separating dust from a flow of air. I built several cyclones each day, conducting tests on each one to evaluate its effectiveness in collecting dust as fine as 0.5 microns − the width of a human hair is between 50 and 100 microns − while using as little energy as possible. Folklore depicts invention as a flash of brilliance. That eureka moment! But it rarely is, I’m afraid. If would-be young inventors could see that pioneering a cure for Alzheimer’s, for example, is not about eureka flashes of Archimedean brilliance but more about an intelligent pursuit of diligent research, they might be less discouraged by the notion that brilliance is a prerequisite for their research. Research is about conducting experiments, accepting and even enjoying failures, but going on and on, following a theory garnered from observing the science. The invention is often more about endurance and patient observation than brainwaves.
In the footsteps of Soichiro Honda, André Citroën and Akio Morita
The Royal College of Art was, in so many ways, a real eye-opener. The RCA’s thinking was radical. At the time it went against the grain for an engineer to be a designer as well. You didn’t switch professions. Designers were mostly thought of as consultants or those, in my imagination, who didn’t get their hands dirty and who were concerned with looks rather than function. They were wholly remote from engineers in white lab coats who gave structure to things and made them work. Here, as I progressed, I realized that art and science, inventing and making, thinking and doing could be one and the same thing. I dared to dream that I could be an engineer, designer, and manufacturer at one and the same time. Art, design, fashion, and even architecture were seen as a continuum.
I had made up my mind that what I really wanted to be was a manufacturer. I wanted to make new things − things that might seem strange, and not things you make because you know they will sell. The ultimate challenge, I suppose, was to design, make and sell inventive and wholly new products. To do this you need to be more than a designer or engineer, no matter how well educated. You need control over the whole process just as my exemplars Soichiro Honda, André Citroën and Akio Morita, creator of the Sony Walkman, had done. Rather grandly, I had decided I wanted to be the one developing the technology, engineering, and design of a product and making and marketing it, too.
I had failed to protect the one thing that was most valuable to me
Things got worse when a former employee left to join a US company with whom we had discussed a license. That company produced a rival Ballbarrow, even using our Ballbarrow for the photos in their brochure. Against my wishes, Kirk-Dyson chose to launch expensive legal proceedings. This put further financial pressure on the company and so the need for yet more investment. I couldn’t have been more surprised, though, when in February 1979 my fellow shareholders booted me out. I lost five years of work by not valuing my creation. I had failed to protect the one thing that was most valuable to me. If I had kept control, I could have done what I wanted and avoided a big interest bill. I learned, very much the hard way, that I should have held on to the Ballbarrow patent and licensed the company. In the event, I lost the license, the patent, and the company. In this sense, the Ballbarrow − my first consumer product, my first solo effort − was a failure but one from which I learned valuable lessons. There was a lesson about assigning patents, another about not having shareholders. I learned the importance of having absolute control of my company and of not undervaluing it. I knew how to make and sell, but not how to look after myself.
I should have increased the price
By 1995 we began to think of altogether new products. One of these was the Dyson Contrarotator, a washing machine. It proved to be a really good washing machine but it never made money. The problem was that it was expensive to make and the price we sold it at when it was finally launched in 2000, although high at £1,099.99, was too low for it to make a profit. The marketing team, who I listened to, said to me, ‘If you make it £200 cheaper you will sell a lot more,’ and I believed them. We made it £200 cheaper and sold exactly the same number at £899.99 as we had at £1,099 and ended up losing even more money. I had made a classic mistake. I should have increased the price. The Contrarotator was not meant to be a low-cost washing machine. It was a different and well-engineered product made for those who would appreciate it and be willing to pay that bit extra for it. We serviced Contrarotators for the next fifteen years. Mine is still running.
No experience, no problem
From the beginning, we decided that we would create our own publicity materials and advertising. We would not use outside agencies. Since we have developed the technology, we should know how to explain it to others! In the late ’90s, a Belgian court banned us from talking about vacuum cleaner bags. We produced an advert, shot by the photographer Don McCullin, with the word ‘bagless’ blanked out repeatedly and a strapline that read ‘Sorry, but the Belgian court won’t let you know what everyone has a right to know’. This got the media interested. We were able to tell them the story of how European manufacturers, as a group, were trying to silence competition.
Who you know …
It took nearly two years to get our vacuum cleaners into mass-market Comet, Argos, and Curry’s warehouses. For a long while their buyers wouldn’t speak to us, wouldn’t answer the phone. We needed a break, and we got it when our wonderful local Wiltshire MP, Richard Needham, turned up out of the blue at the Chippenham factory. I started to tell the minister all the things that were wrong about politics when he suddenly said. ‘Shut the fuck up, Dyson. What’s your turnover?’ ‘About £3.5 million,’ I said. ‘I want it up to £50 million within twelve months. What help do you need?’ I explained the problems we were having with the mass-market retail trade. The next morning, I got a call from Comet. They would like to sell our vacuum cleaners. Currys and Argos followed.
On why Dyson prefers hiring fresh graduates
The time had come to employ a dedicated marketing person back in the UK. I put a notice up at the University of Bath. It read: ‘Does any Modern Languages graduate want to do some marketing at Dyson?’ Oddly, an Oxford graduate turned up at the office. The daughter of a schoolteacher, Rebecca Briggs knew nothing about business and even less about marketing. But she was bright and sparky. I took her on immediately and she joined our growing team of young graduates. Rebecca’s German-language skills proved to be a very handy asset indeed since we’d been getting sales inquiries from British Army on the Rhine. I sent Rebecca off to Germany, with one of our English salesmen. Then, once I decided she’d had enough direct experience of selling, Rebecca came back to the office and got stuck deep into marketing, having never done anything of the kind before. She had a wonderful instinct for it and the nous and confidence to believe in her intuition. Because of our exciting and different technology, we didn’t have to market our product in a traditional sense. I didn’t want anyone to buy our vacuum cleaner through slick advertising. I wanted them to buy it because it performed. We could be straightforward in what we said, explaining things simply and clearly.
Rebecca ran our marketing very successfully for many years. She would go out, make store visits and do a bit of selling herself in stores, which is very important but for some reason, it’s very difficult to get conventional marketing people to do this.
Premium Product. Premium Positioning.
I spoke to Andy Garnett, who had been with me at Rotork, and had also left to start a successful company of his own. I asked him if he could find us an office in Paris. Together we moved Dyson to rue La Boétie. It’s not a shopping district, rather a place where smart people have offices. We had a glass frontage to the showroom stretching up from pavement level to the top of the first floor. We installed two mezzanines connected by a stainless steel and glass bridge. The ground floor had nothing except a French limestone floor, white walls and plinths supporting a cylinder vacuum cleaner and an upright vacuum cleaner. Nothing was said about the products. There were no price tags. All we had on display were products on plinths. It resembled a minimalist sculpture gallery. We had a limestone desk, behind which sat a sales assistant. And, rather like an art gallery, we had just a few select customers.
We wanted to display our product how we thought it ought to be displayed. It was a relief in our Paris gallery to be able to have a sense of calmness with no signs and just one of each product on a pedestal. The first Apple Store, some years later, in SoHo, New York was exactly the same format, with a French limestone floor, mezzanines, stainless steel and glass bridges, and products on white plinths, with no writing.
Learning by doing > Learning in classrooms
Having studied and practiced engineering, there is nothing quite as instructive as seeing a test fail before your eyes. This is why at Dyson we don’t have technicians. Our engineers build their own prototypes and then test them rigorously so we properly understand how and why they might fail. Learning by doing. Learning by trial and error. Learning by failing. These are all effective forms of education.
One of the really important principles I learned to apply was changing only one thing at a time and to see what difference that one change made. People think that a breakthrough is arrived at by a spark of brilliance or even a eureka thought in the bath. I wish it were for me. Eureka moments are very rare. More usually, you start off by testing a particular set-up, and by making one change at a time you start to understand what works and what fails. By that empirical means, you begin the journey towards making the breakthrough, which usually happens in an unexpected way. You do need to have bright ideas or be willing to try the unthinkable along the journey, but trying to rush by testing a brainwave rarely works.
Education and obvious observations
I love the story of Concorde engineers, at the early design stage of the supersonic airliner, making paper planes and throwing them around in their drawing offices to test ideas for an ideal wing. Some of these models are in the safekeeping of the Science Museum in South Kensington, a happy reminder of how things teachers and examiners might well disapprove of − throwing paper planes in class − might just lead some young people towards some of the greatest designs of all time.
60 percent of engineering postgraduates and 60 percent of those engaged in engineering research in British universities are from outside the EU. After their studies, what does Britain do for or with them? We chuck them out, that’s what. Why on earth would you send engineering graduates, researchers, and doctorates packing when they have valuable technology at their fingertips that they take back to countries like China and use to compete against us?
The Next Dysons …
We gave £5 million for the new James Dyson Building, close to Battersea Bridge, part of which would house ‘incubator units’ where graduating designer–engineers could continue development of their degree projects, put them into production, and then on sale. Here, they would have workshops as well as advice about patents and the commercial world. The RCA would link them with investors to provide early capital.
It has been hugely successful. Silicon Valley investors are lucky if 10 percent of the start-ups they back succeed, whereas the RCA incubator unit has a 90 percent success rate. In fact, the college as a whole has twenty times more start-ups emanating from their courses than the second-highest university in the field, Cambridge. I believe this is because the product ideas come from imaginative engineers and designers with a burning passion for their products, rather than from people just trying their luck at being entrepreneurs.
Better drowned than duffers
I believe that a business loses something when it goes public but also because so many of these businesses end up in foreign hands, losing their way and ending up as vassal companies. Entrepreneurial family businesses, on the other hand, may be handed down through generations. Britain has remarkably few compared with other countries.
In Germany, for example, there are the famous Mittlestand, medium-size private businesses, often multi-generational, as well as giants like BMW and our competitor Bosch. France has big family-owned fashion houses; Italy and Spain the same. The US has the largest number of family businesses in the world, including Mars and Cargill, the agri-chemicals business. I believe Britain is weaker through not having a large number of successful family businesses. The advantages of family businesses are that they can think in the very long term, and invest in the long term, in ways public companies are unable to do. I also believe that family-owned enterprises have a spirit, conscience, and philosophy often lacking in public companies. If we fail, ‘better drowned than duffers’.
How to become the 1%
At the same time as visiting R. G. Dorman at Porton Down, I read Jim Slater’s book The Zulu Principle (1978). Slater was a British accountant and investor who rode the waves of investment finance with a number of great successes, although he had his downs as well as ups. His approach to winning investment, he wrote, was to become a leading authority on a ‘clearly defined and narrow area of knowledge’. Slater had been intrigued when, after reading a single article on the Zulu people in a copy of Reader’s Digest, his wife’s knowledge of Zulus far exceeded his own. If, he reckoned, she read all the books she could find on the subject and made a quick trip to South Africa to meet Zulu people, she would soon be considered a leading authority. I suppose I did this in a way with cyclonic technology. Over a period of four years, I had probably built and tested more cyclone dust separators than most cyclone experts.
Great Men learn from History
What is equally interesting is that these radical machines made use of pre-existing ideas and components. With the Mini, for example, the features that made it so revolutionary had been tried at various times beforehand. Before the Mini, which made its debut in 1959, there had been cars with transverse engines, notably the Saab 92 in 1947, a wind-cheating, rally-winning saloon engineered by a small team led by Gunnar Ljungström, an aero-engineer and keen sailor, and stylist Sixten Sason, a former Swedish Air Force pilot and designer of Saab military aircraft. In fact, the transverse car engine dates back to 1899 and the Critchley Light car made by Daimler in Coventry. There had been cars in the mid-’30s with front-wheel drive like the Citroën Traction Avant, engineered and styled by André Lefèbvre and Flaminio Bertoni, to whom we owe the 2CV. There had been boxy cars making as much room as possible for driver and passengers and there had been forms of rubber suspension, too. Issigonis brought these ideas together in a tiny car that, despite its very modest dimensions − just 10ft long and 4 ½ft wide − could seat four adults and their bags and drive like a go-kart.
Newsletter Recommendation
My friend Matthew writes The Education of an Angel Investor and is the founder of 9others. I went to a 9others dinner in London last month and loved it. If you’re in the UK I highly recommend you go to one of the dinners. Don’t forget to let me know, I’ll tag along ;)
If you’re outside the UK, you can learn valuable lessons from Matt; lessons learned over decades and meeting thousands of founders, and investing in many, many startups. Here’s an article I think you’ll love
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- Abhishek