If a product costs you much to make, it's not a brilliant invention because it isn't gonna make money, and inventions have to make money.
This is the mind that started Dyson, an international appliance powerhouse. But before the company's rise, James Dyson faced a lot of rejection.
You famously had 5,127 iterations on your vacuum cleaner before the final product.
Approximately. Approximately.
Is that still your approach, as many as it takes?
Yes, I mean, that's what you have to do is trial and error, and something works, it's less challenging, it's less interesting. If something's gone wrong, you wanna know why it's gone wrong and it's a learning process.
The Wall Street Journal sat down with Dyson at the company's new headquarters in Singapore to discuss how James Dyson picks what to invent, when to give up, and what's in store for the company after 34 years. Going all the way back to your childhood, do you remember the first thing you ever created or invented?
Oh, I made model airplanes that I'd fly off the roof of the house. We lived in quite a large Victorian house. I can't say I invented them, but I think I started to add things to them and tried to make parachutes for them and things like that. But nothing particularly serious at that stage.
And so now you have vacuum cleaners, you have hair dryers, you have hand dryers, you have air purifiers. But one of the first things you created was an improved wheelbarrow. Can you take us back to that invention? Why the wheelbarrow?
I was using a wheelbarrow at home like everybody does, and the wheel was always sinking into soft ground. So therefore, I wanted to do a ball. Very fat wheel, if you like, rather than a narrow wheel. And the advantage of a spherical wheel is that it doesn't sink into soft ground.
And so how do you go from making improvements to a wheelbarrow to airflow technology?
When I was making the wheelbarrow, we used a giant vacuum cleaner with a bag to suck away excess powder, but the bag kept clogging. I saw cyclones on factory exteriors and realized that technology would be perfect for vacuum cleaners because it can't clog and maintains maximum airflow. So that's how I started. One thing leads to another.
It's a lot of connecting of the dots.
Yeah, one thing leads to another.
Is there a way to estimate, you think, how many prototypes or iterations across products Dyson has had over the years?
Oh, you mean if I added up all the failed prototypes?
Yeah. I always say mine is a life of failure. And it is true. For writers, and filmmakers, and all sorts of people, it's a life of failure because it takes a long time before you find the one that works, the one that hits the button on the head. And you just have to get used to that. That's what life is about. And I quite enjoy the failures. At school, you're taught to get the answer right first time. The clever person gets it right first time, but the clever person hasn't viscerally experienced failure and overcoming failure. And when you leave school or just leave university, life is about making things work.
Since its founding in 1991, Dyson has created more than 70 vacuum cleaner models and expanded into new product categories. Today, Dyson holds nearly 9,000 granted or pending patents. How do you decide what product categories you want to enter?
Always the impetus is have I got an idea that people are gonna want, that will be useful and better performing than what's on the market by a margin. It's not a business plan. We say, 'We've got a good idea, let's make a product with it.'
With a product, when you're going through that process, how do you decide, 'We need to keep pushing through,' or, 'We need to scrap this'?
When it's not technically working, you just go on until you decide it's not working. That's easy because it's not working. With a commercial product, we had to make a decision not to do it, entirely for commercial reasons.
The commercial product in question? Dyson's electric car, which went into development in 2014, but as more big-name automakers entered the category, Dyson was faced with increased competition.
