Dyson: James Dyson (2018)

So really quickly before we start the show, I want to let you know about another live show coming to Washington, DC on September 12th. I'll be talking with Tristan Walker of Walker Company brands, which makes beauty products like Bevel and Form. We're also going to announce two more live shows on the East Coast soon, so stay tuned for those. And don't forget We still have a few tickets available for the How I Built This Summit in San Francisco in October. The summit is supported by American Express, and you'll be able to hear and probably even meet some of the world's greatest founders. People who founded companies like Instagram, Slack, Away, JetBlue, Jenny's Ice Cream, Edible Arrangements, Bliss, and many, many more, the summit is an incredible opportunity to connect with other builders and hear from experts on how to grow your business. You can get tickets for both the DC Live Show and the summit at nprpresents.org. And I hope to see you there.

Okay, onto this week's show, and this one got a ton of amazing feedback when we first ran it back in February of last year. Here it is. Well, I'd had the idea for the vacuum cleaner. To replace the vacuum cleaner bag with a cyclone. And I I suggested the idea to the other directors. And they said of course Uh No they didn't. What they said was don't be so stupid.

And if there was a better vacuum cleaner Hoover Electrolux, or someone else would have made it. From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. Sky Roz, and on today's show, how James Dyson spent a lonely five years reinventing the vacuum cleaner in his backyard shed. And how that persistence turned him into one of Britain's most successful entrepreneurs.

Here's a question. Who invented the light bulb? Thomas Edison, right? That is the name that usually comes to mind. Because Edison is probably the most famous American inventor in history. And until recently, he held the record for the most patents by a single person. But Edison, he didn't actually invent the light bulb. He

took the existing design for a light bulb and at that time the best light bulb would only work for a few hours. And Edison improved it. He made a much, much better light bulb. And that's basically what James Dyson did with the vacuum cleaner. A product that had been around for almost 80 years, and a product so associated with one brand that in much of the English speaking world, They're still called Hoovers.

So as you'll hear, James Dyson, much like Thomas Edison, used a kind of trial and error design process for that vacuum. He made prototype after prototype in a shed in his backyard. Tinkering. Making small changes and then

Testing them. In fact, he made over five thousand prototypes before perfecting it. But James Dyson's journey as an inventor started a long time before he created his now famous vacuum. He grew up in England right after the Second World War with his brother and sister. His dad was a classics teacher at a boarding school, but when James was about nine years old, His dad?

Died of cancer. My mother saw it coming, knew it was happening. We we didn't. Um so i in a way It was more of a surprise to us than it was to her. Yeah.

Uh, she very bravely carried on, uh w went and trained as a teacher and Taught teaching. The school, which is a school you have to pay to go to. Wh where my dad taught, yes. It was a fee paying and boarding school. Yeah. And in those days nobody had insurance for being ill or dying. So the school said, Well you can come as boarders. Uh for free.

Uh so we had a free education and a great education. We were very, very lucky to have had no money and come from poor families yet had a good education. So you go off to uh to live at this boarding school, um, which was probably pretty hard for you as a as a kid. Having lost your dad. What do you remember about it? Um I I know I remember one thing that that was it was quite difficult for me'cause I was at school and my father had taught at the school.

There was a memorial service for him, which Which of course the whole school had to attend, and I don't think the boys particularly wanted to go to it. So it meant a lot to me, but not an awful lot to the boys around me. And and indeed I think going away to boarding school just after he had died, probably I should have stayed at home and been with my brother and sister and my mother. That was probably a a pretty harsh thing to do to a nine year old. Yeah.

But this idea in England that, you know, sending people away to boarding school toughens them up. Probably does, but uh don't think it toughens everybody up in the right way, but uh so I had to learn very early on to rely entirely on myself and not anybody else. And I think it makes you very determined. Very, very determined. To prove something.

Now James wasn't quite sure how he would eventually prove himself, and after he finished school, he managed to get a spot at the Royal College of Art in London. And he decided to study furniture design. And then architecture and structural engineering. And his first job out of college was for a fairly prominent British engineer and inventor named Jeremy Fry. Jeremy Fry, yes, he was he was chairman of an engineering company in Bath. Um I just got married.

And he says, Well I'll give you a design job or two. And what was it about about you that interested him? I mean Why would he offer Well actually what what I discovered was that he liked employing young people who were bright and had all the right Attitudes and ideas

opportunity for young people. So I started designing one or two things. Um The third thing I designed for him was this high speed landing craft. Okay. This was a a moonlighting job that he was doing because his main business was making valve actuators for oil and gas pipelines. So th this was his own invention. He had a side gig that was inventing Boats?

Well no, this th he had invented a boat. The theory was that a flat bottom boat is the most efficient planing hull. It's not very good in heavy seas, to be honest. Yeah. But because it's um flat and smashes into waves rather than cuts through the waves. Is it similar to like those landing craft that you see in the in those World War Two movies when they're storming the beach in Normandy? Yes, except that those are not flat bottomed. Oh. They're V shaped hulls, which is why you see the troops having to wade through chest high water in order to get to the beach. Whereas we could land straight on the beach. In fact we could ram the boat up the beach.

So he had this idea to build this landing craft or transport craft that and he said to you, Hey, I got this idea, can you Try to design something? That's exactly what he said. It was as simple as that. And it was as mad as that because

I'd never designed a boat and I'd never designed anything in fiberglass. And he what he had never designed a boat, either. Um but he had this wonderful attitude. Um, you don't think about doing something, you just do it. And he hated experts. For a good reason, actually, and I I rather hate experts as well.

Did he teach you how to make things? I mean, because you were a designer. How? How did that work? Well, yes, he did. I mean we were taught how to make things at college. But one thing we weren't taught was how to world, and we had to make a prototype. And he he said, Well just go and weld it up. I said I can't weld. He said, Well go and try. So I just went off and did it.

Like you described a a a welding. Autodidactic welding one man welding course, that's right. And the same with the lathe. And so I learnt to to use engineering tools. By myself. So you have your prototype and and does Fry say Let's try to sell these. Let's put this out uh on the market.

Uh pretty much that. And I said I don't I know nothing about selling. Uhhuh. He says, Well, th don't be ridiculous, you designed every square millimeter of it, every nut and bolt. You know everything about it, so go out and sell it. Which is what I did. And and who's buying it? Was it Was this designed for for the military initially? Well, military use, construction use, oil companies

As a diving platform, as a bridge building platform. So it had many, many uses. Uh and I mean, within a couple of years we were selling a hundred or more a year. Wow. So s it sounds like Fry was a it was a very fortuitous meeting early in your life that

He was uh older than you, right? Oh yes, yeah, yeah, some twenty years older. Almost like a father, probably. Yes, he was in a way. Yes, he was a good mentor. And taught me everything I know, really. So I guess you worked with with Jeremy Fry for a couple years and then at a certain point you decide, you know, I wanna kinda see if I can start my own business.

Yeah, I worked for five. Well seven years in all. Mm-hmm. And he offered to fund me and I said no no, I w I want to do it on my own. So I went off and designed and made the ball barrow, which is a wheelbarrow with a ball instead of a wheel. How did you even come up with an idea to design a New kind of wheelbarrow. Well, because I was fixing up a house and doing a garden.

And I noticed the deficiencies of metal wheelbarriers with narrow wheels. First of all, they're very unstable with these very narrow legs. The legs sink into soft ground. The wheels sink into soft ground. So as I used one. I started to redesign one.

And it was quite a good project. To do as my first business because it was relatively simple. At least I thought it was simple. What was it? What was different about it? Well, it had this big balloon. Well it was actually literally a ball.

It was actually a plastic football. I th if you think of it like that, then that's how I made it, in fact. I made that as quite interesting plastic soccer. I should say soccer ball for Americans. Like a soccer plastic soccer ball. So you you instead of having the one wheel on the front, it would be this this 360 degree rotating ball and it would it was more stable. And it was more stable, it didn't sink into broken ground in your garden, it didn't damage your lawn, and of course it didn't sink on a building site. Why aren't wheelbarrows uh like that today? Well, I don't know. I don't know. But uh the the difficult thing was then selling it.

Because um The traditional hardware stores as they were then, and a few garden centres. They didn't want to sell it'cause they thought it looked very strange. Hm. So I used to sell it through little advertisements in the newspaper. was always next to the incontinence pants or the baldness curs. And they would be this advert for

For wheelbarrow, strange, modern looking, actually nicely designed, I think, wheelbarrow. And I started to get quite a lot of business. People sent checks. So you had this company, the Ball Barrow, and seems like it's going pretty well, so Well, it never made money. Uh why? What happened? There's no money in wheelbarrows. Okay. It was a very good lesson to learn. Not many people buy wheelbarrows. So it's a very small market. Uh, wheelbarrow are very cheap. No wheelbarrow manufacturer has a salesman or a designer or an engineer. They just make the same thing they've made. Year after year. Yeah. And we had to explain why it was different and better. Yeah. And that was all fine and we got fifty percent of the market.

But never made me money. So I should have charged a lot more. My understanding is that you actually when when you took in investors You kind of gave the patent over to the company, is that right? I signed the patent over to the company. Which was possibly a mistake. Yeah, w why why'd you do that? Uh well it's quite normal to assign the patent to the company

that you work for. As I do now with with all my patterns. The only problem was that further investors came in And The thing was that I didn't really own anything in the company apart from my shares.

Uh and I now only owned about thirty percent of the business. That must have been uh frustrating. I mean, here's your your idea comes out of your brain and you don't even own your own idea. No, But um Sometimes one needs to go through these rites of passage to understand the importance of ownership of intellectual property.

Importance of owning. Having a majority share in your own company, or even all the shares in your own company. And not charging enough for the product. Uh running a business doesn't make money. All these lessons of very important lessons to learn and feel viscerally.

And I guess it was around this time when you were wanting to make new products, right? So what What were you thinking of? Well, I'd have the idea for the vacuum cleaner. Hm.

It's quite a long story, but I'll try and Keep it very short. Um the the frames for the wheel. Instead of Painting them with wet paint. Uh we had elected to use that thing called epoxy coating, but the way you get the epoxy onto the frames is to spray the powder electrostatically.

A wheelbar frame is a very open thing. So a lot of the spray is going to miss the frame and have to be sucked away rather than have it go all over the factory. So you you have a giant vacuum cleaner. At the back of the spray booth sucking away. the powder that's missed the frame. Hm. I thought this was very inefficient, so I asked these

kind of people who made this equipment. smart people used. And I learned that they used giant cyclones. Now I'd seen giant cyclones on sawmills. for collecting fine sawdust. So I went and copy one of those. that I saw on a local sawmill. I climbed over the wall at night and took some sort of measurements and examined it.

And we came back and over two weekends we made one that was about thirty foot high. How How does a cyclone actually work? Uh a cyclone is literally an upside down mind bottle. You have to But it is exactly a wine bottle.

Spins around the wall of the bottle. And the air goes out of the centre of the bottle. And the idea is the dust can't get into the centre'cause it's too busy spinning round the walls of the bottle. By centrifugal force. That's the basic principle of it. And cyclones were widely used in these industrial vacuum machines that were cleaning factories? It was widely used at cement factories.

paint factories, all sorts of places that had nasty dust that had to be sucked away by the central s vacuum system. A saw mill is a is a sort of very good example. But you see all the ducting sucking away from all the saws and everything and it sucks it to up onto the roof where that you you see a cyclone, a huge metal cyclone. Wow. And how do you connect that to a vacuum cleaner? Mm. Well,

Over the two weekends while I'm welding up this thirty foot high one. I realise the point of this cyclone. Which is that it collects dust all the time without ever blocking or clogging. Yeah. So when I saw how cycling worked, I wondered if you could make a small one and put it in a vacuum cleaner. So when I'd finished the welding, I rushed home.

I made a miniature one out of cardboard and uh Scotch tape. And connected it with a piece of hose. To my Hoover. And uh push it around the house.

Feeling rather happy. And it appeared to work. This is this is around nineteen seventy eight, seventy nine. Yes. Um What just explain to me, what was the problem with a regular vacuum cleaner in a bag? I mean did you were you frustrated by them? Did you hate vacuuming? Like when how did it occur to you that there was a problem with vacuum cleaners that needed to be solved? Well I I

Just bought my RN home and and um We had a vacuum cleaner. Now, I'd bought what was Billed as the most powerful vacuum cleaner in the world. It was sort of spaceship shaped, about two foot in diameter. With a huge motor, very powerful. And um

I was using it one weekend and the suction was Rather pathetic. So I decided to put a new bag in it. I couldn't find a new bag. Yes. So I took the bag out and undid the end. and tip the contents out into the garbage can.

And put it back in the vacuum cleaner. And I thought. This is great. I was astonished that I got no better suction.

Hm. It was exactly as before, I had to empty the bag. It wasn't a full bag, it was completely empty. But I still had no suction. So I got in the car and went down to Buy some new bags. And came back and put the a new bag in.

And I got good suction. So I thought to myself, what's the difference between the one I've emptied And the one I just bought. Yeah. And I had a look at the one I'd empty. And you could see

Even with my own eyes, that the pores in the bag were blocked with fine dust. So I suddenly realised what was going on here. You don't replace the bags'cause they're full. You replace the bags because they're blocked. Yeah. And I thought there must be a better solution to this.

So that that's how it all started. Pause for a second, because you're still involved in the in the ball barrow company which had investors did you go to them and say, Hey, I've got this this vacuum cleaner idea. It looks like I suggested He said let's make this vacuum cleaner. Let's make this vacuum. Then we can make some real money. And they said of course. Uh no, they didn't. What they said was Don't be so stupid, if there was a better vacuum cleaner, who or Electrolux or someone else would have made it. These are huge companies. But I mean you can you can understand their thinking at that time because Well how could anybody possibly compete with these giant vacuum companies? Well actually the the um I saw immediately that these big companies like Hooven Electric weren't bothering to improve the technology. Yeah. They were quite happy selling bags. Sure. And no one was taking them on because they're so big.

So I thought, well, therein lies the opportunity. I may be tiny and have no money and be in debt, but uh I've got an idea. So I I think the my suggesting that we make a vacuum cleaner was the final straw and they kicked me out. Wait wait they kicked you out of your own company? Oh yes, yeah, yeah. So that which was a great thing actually because I was then able to start developing the vacuum cleaner. So I went back to my friend Jeremy Fry and said I got this idea for a vacuum cleaner. He thought it was excellent. So he put up forty nine percent of the capital I borrowed, fifty one percent from the bank. How much did you have to borrow?

Well, I um it was about forty or fifty thousand pounds in those days to to get it started. And you did not have any of your own. I didn't have a bean, I was in debt. I had a big mortgage, uh you know, and I had three kids. So uh I started making prototypes for In the shed behind my house. So you did this in your backyard. Yes. And you borrowed the money.

It'll take me a year or so and then I'll like start selling these things. Yes. W we thought rather was that we'd get it to work and then we'd license it. to someone like Hoover. So you are uh trying to build this uh and you're doing this day and night, day and night, day and night.

Yes, what would it say? Night, but during the day. I mean quite a long day. And what were you doing in the shed? Like was it like trial error? Trial error was it. Exactly that. It was empirical, entirely empirical, because this is before the days of of computer simulation. I was building one prototype at a time, making one change at a time. So I knew what difference that one change made. And so I progressed.

There were quite a number of problems to solve. Firstly. At that time the state of the art was that cyclones were only good at separating dust Down to about twenty microns. Whereas I had to get it down to half a micron, cigarette smoke type particles. So that was the first problem. And the second thing was that I found that hairs

And fluff. But go straight through the cyclone and not be collected. And I built five thousand one hundred and twenty seven prototypes before I got it right. Here's what I'm trying to understand, James. Why you are Iterating and doing this in your backyard.

Uh, how are you earning a living? How are you paying your bills? How are you r providing for your family? Well the money that I borrow from the bank and the money that Jerry Fry put in was essentially paying my salary. Plus a few costs. But I kept the cost to a minimum.

And once you got a prototype. Up and running. Did you go around and try to pitch um the vacuum companies? Exactly that. I targeted all the vacuum cleaner companies and one or two other domestic appliance companies. And what did they say when they saw it? Well, they all had a good look at it. But uh they didn't really want to do anything, they didn't want to change.

And one or two of them said they actually rather like selling paper bags. It's like a you know, Gillette selling a razor blade. Sure. They can make a lot of money out of bags. So Essentially they were curious. But Didn't want to license it. How bad did your financial situation get?

It got pretty bad. It's not nice going for many years with a huge overdraft. And not earning any money either. But uh the one thing that my wife and I always said was that we both had skills. I mean she's an artist. Yeah. And she could always teach art, w and she did do some evening class lessons. And I could always earn money in making furniture or doing something like that. So we we had um practical That we could do. It wasn't what we wanted to do, but we had that back up.

But with all of those companies, those big companies telling you Did you ever get nervous? Did you ever think about just packing it all in and then and and going getting a safe job as a designer for a big company? Well, no, you see, I uh I don't quite react like that. It it's uh it has the opposite effect on me. You know, I could see that they were turning down a

Without good reason. If they'd given me a really good reason, then I would have got nervous. What about your friends and family? Obsessed and mad. But the thing is never to take advice.

Some of the most successful entrepreneurs that have been on the show. had sleepless nights. They were they had anxiety about About what they were doing. Well, I did just I'm not pretending I didn't, I did. But I have a sort of basic belief.

I think partly from The success of the ball bearer. And from the high speed landing craft, which a lot of people wouldn't buy it because it didn't look like a boat. Yeah. So having having introduced two very strange looking, very different new technology, you can make a success of it.

If it genuinely works better. Coming up. The story of how James Dyson's design for a new vacuum that no one wanted to manufacture? eventually became one of the best selling vacuums in the world. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

From NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 1985, and James Dyson approaches a bunch of companies to try and license his new vacuum. But none of them are interested, and most don't even return his phone calls. But finally that year, a small company called Apex decides to try making and selling Dyson's design. In Japan.

Yes. Very small Japanese company that never made anything before in its life. Got very excited about it and found someone to make it for them. And they would sell it. What did it look like compared to what we think of a Dyson vacuum cleaner today?

Um, it looks much like our Upright machines, except it's pink. Yeah. And it has a lot of exposed hoses, a bit like the Pompidou building in Paris. So you you can see exactly what the air does. Oh cool. But in most other respects it's quite similar to the early upright machines we sold here. And how how did it do? How did it how did it sell? Well, I think considering it was two and a half thousand dollars, it did quite well.

It's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. I mean fortunately there were some quite rich Japanese people there. Yeah, but they must have been six thousand dollars backing cleaners. Yes. Was the licensing agreement with the Japanese company enough money to pay off your debts? Uh well, yes, it saved me from bankruptcy, put it that way. So you you licensed it to this company and they were kinda selling okay. What made you at at a certain point say, you know what, maybe I should I should try and sell these myself? Well, I I although we were selling some in Japan at a ridiculously high price. It didn't really satisfy me because I wanted to sell a lot at a reasonable price. So I said, well I can't really go on like this licensing people. It's uh I want to make a vacuum cleaner and I want to design the vacuum cleaner I want to design and I want to sell it in the way that I want to sell it. So

I decided to Borrow some money. I was now completely on my own. I'd bought out. Jeremy Fry, my partner, and I went to all sorts of people to try and borrow money to start my own vacuum cleaner business. And I thought I had quite a good track record because I designed the new technology, I got a successful licensee in Japan, and I thought that I ought to be able to raise money. The problem with the venture capitalists and the private equity people is that they all thought that because I was an engineer and designer, I knew nothing about making and selling things and I couldn't possibly make a commercial success of it. So they all turned me down. You actually went to outside investors asking. Oh yes, yes.

For which I'm actually eternally grateful because I'd have to give them equity. Whereas I went to a clearing bank, Lloyd's Bank. And by some miracle they agreed to lend me six hundred thousand pounds. Why did they agree to do that? Well I asked the the bank manager after us and he said, Well I saw that you had won a big lawsuit. I saw that you had determination. Oh, so uh by this point somebody had already copied your idea? And we managed to settle it very successfully. And uh the interesting thing is this bank manager, he went home and asked his wife what he thought of a vacuum cleaner that didn't have bags, and she said wonderful. Exactly what I want. So it was partly that he'd seen my determination to win a lawsuit, and partly That uh his wife didn't like bags and vacuum cleaners. And presumably you had to put some collaral down, like your house. So my wife and I had to sign the house over to the bank. I'm getting nervous for you thinking about this. So am I even thinking about it now. I'm getting nervous.

So off I went and I had Uh a that's a very small amount of money. To build the tooling. And it costs the whole of the six hundred thousand pounds. And the tooling is the is the the tooling is the the injection molds that you inject the plastic into to make all the components. Okay. Now one of the things about tooling is that you

If you make any changes. That's where the toolmaker makes all his money. It's like a builder. If you make changes, the builder starts piling on the costs. So I said to my fellow engineers, but not to make any changes at all. This is it. I haven't got any more money, so this is it. So we we didn't make any changes. We got our tooling. And I put the tooling in a plastics factory to make the plastic.

Yeah. And they only were using half their factories. So I said, Can I use the other half to assemble the vacuum cleaners in? And they said yes. So I had, you know, a few people there doing that assembly. And there were four engineers and myself And we had one salesperson and one money person. So the plastics company

made the parts and I paid them At the end of sixty days. Yeah. And uh so I had to go and get some orders. So I got some orders. How how did you sell who did you sell them to? How did you know where to go? Well I uh well, I went everywhere and nobody would take it, but in those days there were Mayor Order catalogues. Do you remember the Sears Mayor catalogue? Well, I wasn't supplying Sears, but in England there were one or two people who had catalogs like that. And I got into one of those because I spent a day with the buyer. who was sort of curious about this funny man who'd done this yellow vacuum cleaner with a cycling instead of bags. Yellow and silver, right? Yellow and silver. I spent a day with him and um at the end of the day he said

Why should I put your vacuum cleaner in my catalogue and take out a Hoover or an Etruds? Yeah. And I say well because your catalogue's boring. And he sort of looked at me for quite a long time and then he said, Okay, I'll give it a go. And he happened to be the biggest Mayor Order catalogue in England. How much were you selling them for?

Uh a hundred and ninety nine pounds. So that's three times what other Vatican cleans are so for. Didn't any of these these catalog companies say this is just too expensive, this too you're you're you're asking for too much money? Oh well no, the price is concealed because you paid on the drip. You paid so much per week. So they didn't actually show the f the full price, or you could it was in very small print. But why would somebody take a risk on something that was untested that they'd not n ever seen before through a

Catalogue. Because it it looked different. It its promise was no loss of suction. You don't have to buy bags. Right. Catalog.

Uh my first three or four or five month sales were to those catalogue people. And then I got into quite a famous shop called John Lewis. So sort of depart department stores. How did you do that? Um they were looking to compete with the big electrical multiples. And so they wanted something different. For which they could charge more money. But it very quickly became their best selling vacuum cleaner. And this was uh nineteen ninety

Three. Nineteen ninety three. So so how long was it before you were actually proferable? I was in the black from the first month on. Wow. I was able to pay my employees and I was making a profit. as my distribution started to rise.

Um And I I could only get into the shops if I promised to advertise on television. How did you do that? How did you have the money to do that? Well, I didn't. So I I said to the first retailer who demanded I do that, I said, Well look, if you order ten thousand vacuum cleaners off me I'll put all the profit on those vacuum cleaners into television advertising. Which I did. And so my strap line in the beginning was say goodbye to the bag. Say goodbye to the bag. So I had this woman explaining how the Dyson doesn't lose such and and others do. And then she said, Don't need these and tore up a bag and threw it away.

And it all worked, and it snowballed from that. So I guess within two years. This vacuum cleaner by nineteen ninety five this becomes the number one selling vacuum cleaner in the UK. Yes. Were you were you just blown away or were you were you just thinking to yourself too busy actually. It it was li it's like going down a fast ski run, you know, you you can't stop, you just have to carry on. And we were then bringing out a a new version, a s uh a canister version, and we were starting to export.

How much uh revenue were you making by the time you were the number one best selling back in the UK. What was the annual for Dyson? Do you remember? Turn it's probably hundred million dollars. In two years! That's incredible! Yes, I mean it it's uh

Uh it's a very steep draw. I mean that doesn't happen. It's happened of course in the tech world, but I mean this was a real product. This is a real thing that people could buy and take home. Oh yes. No and it's real we're making real money. And

see people buying the vacuum cleaner and liking it and commenting on it was tremendous. That that was actually much more exciting than the whole money thing. And how did you get into the US market, which is your I guess became your biggest market in the world? Yes. Uh The first year we didn't do any advertising. But even getting in was difficult because

Everybody said, Oh well you might have been successful in England, but America's very different. And then um A a junior buyer at Best Buy. took one of our vacuum cleaners home for a couple of weeks and said to her boss. Look.

It actually Is what he says it is. It works really well and it doesn't lose suction. So Best Buy Took it.

And um For the first year we didn't do any advertising, but it sold Pretty well in Best Buy. This is like two thousand two, two thousand three, something like that. Exactly. Exactly. And then we started to get into one or two other outlets. So we decided to put all our money, a lot of investment, into a television campaign. And so it wasn't my suggestion, but someone said, Look, why don't you just explain what you did and why you did it?

Just like you on TV. Taking a vacuum cleaner apart, showing a clogged bag. And then showing how my cyclone worked. And you know that Americans are suckers for a British accent.

Well, I didn't know that. But I so I I was just being very honest. I was explaining how a vacuum cleaner works, why it loses suction. Why mine doesn't. It was it was very, very simple approach. And we shot it in my house. And it was a very successful advertisement. And uh We started selling very fast. It's good.

Um As you grew and grew and grew and grew, I mean eventually you began to sort of expand out to A whole range of products. I mean Air filters. Um

bladeless uh fans. Tryers. Anybody who's gone to a sports arena. Or a movie theater in the US or certainly in the US and probably elsewhere has used a Dyson hand dryer that you just put your hands in and out of. Well, first we did the fan, the bladeless fan. How does that work? Can you explain that to me?

Yes. Yes. Um You accelerate the air out of an air slot. That draws in other air. You then Expand.

The volume. the of air that you're creating. And you create A negative pressure suction behind. So you pull in more air. So you end up um

Multiplying the original airflow fifteen to twenty times. I've simplified it and there's a lot going on there that I haven't talked about. But that's the basic principle. I I'm not sure I entirely understand it, but it is amazing to see that thing work. Blue. Really powerful air.

Yeah, no it it no, it is interesting. And of course you have no blades to clean. James, I'm curious about your the way you run a business because you really are an inventor and uh designer. And you don't strike me as somebody who's interested in administering a company or doing the books or going to a bunch of meetings. Or maybe you are. Are you uh how do you do those all those things. Well I had to do all those things at the beginning. But uh as the company grew, I did more and more of the engineering.

And now I spend, you know, ninety five percent of my time doing that. But I was the CEO for the first ten years. I mean I'm not totally happy. doing anything other than engineering. Yeah. I will do those other things if they need to be done. But I sort of resent the time I'm doing that.

I would much rather be with my engineers uh doing what I really love doing and doing what I think is the most important thing. Did you feel a sense of secretly a sense of I don't know, Schadenfreuder that you were right and the people at the ball barrel company were wrong and those other vacuum companies were wrong when they turned you down, do you secretly think ah I got him, I was right? No, no I'm on to the next thing. I'm you know, everybody makes mistakes all the time. Fifty percent of what I do is wrong.

Actually they're great. Mistakes great. Yeah. Ch not charging enough for the ball bearing was a mistake. And I learned from it. I've never made that mistake again. I've never made the mistake of giving away equity in the company. You own a hundred percent of it. You don't have to answer to shareholders. You don't have to answer to venture capitalists. No, and it that's wonderful. And actually it makes my life pretty simple. Um You are just so people understand this, because you went from being deeply in debt

in your early forties, really having nothing, no money, and uh Three kids. Minus to today you own a jet, a private yacht. I mean that's crazy to think that not that long ago In middle age.

You had nothing. Yes. Yes, it is. Um In in a way that it's I find it quite nice that Sony came much later in life. I think it would be very different.

Had it happened earlier. And you know, there are still big risks to be taken. I'm I'm uh developing an electric car and you know, that's a huge financial risk. Yeah. But I am able to do it, and that's the big difference. I I am able to take a long term view. And invest large sums of money and take big risks. And it's a huge privilege to be in that position. James, how much of your success

do you attribute to your skill, your intelligence, your hard work, and how much of it to luck? Absolutely none to my intelligence. Hard work, yes. Perseverance. Yes, and luck. Yes, yeah.

I I do believe though that you create your own luck. Yeah. Because Luck is around. Uh you know, I'm I'm a I did long distance running at school. And you only succeed by doing a huge amount of training.

And then having great stamina, understanding that Other people are also feeling tired, so When you feel tired you should accelerate. That's when you start winning. Yeah.

So and I I I've learned that. With When you feel like giving up. is precisely the point everybody else gives up.

So it's at that point that you must put in extra effort. You do that and then success is literally just round the corner. That's James Dyson. Actually Sir James Dyson. He was knighted in 2006. The latest Forbes estimate puts his net worth at$5.4 billion. And last year, Sir James and his wife Deirdre celebrated 50 years.

A marriage. Thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And today we're going to update a story that begins with a TV producer named Mike Sorentino. And as part of his job, Mike would be out in the field using his smartphone to take pictures for his company's website. And uh what I found was when I would be in a place like Louisiana after the BP oil spill, I was constantly having to wipe smudges from my camera lens. And by doing that, Mike was missing a lot of really good shots. Meanwhile, people were starting to worry about whether cameras on your phone could get hacked, and Mike kept wondering why nobody had solved these two things. Yeah, well think about it, I mean f you you have a camera that you carry around all day, every day, but it doesn't even have a lens cap. So Mike figured he would design an iPhone case where you just slide a switch at the top to cover up the camera lens.

And on the inside of that lens cover is a fabric lining, and it also wipes the lens clean of any smudges. So a pretty great and simple idea. And around four years ago, when Mike first thought it up, he said, First thing. I gotta patent this. Good patent attorney is really expensive. So my wife gave me the great advice of

Do some side work and find a way to finance your invention. So Mike started doing some video production on the side to pay for a lawyer. Meanwhile, he worked with an engineer who helped take his paper sketches and make a prototype with a 3D printer. But at the same time. He was getting some pushback. Even close friends were like, This this is a dumb idea. Why are you doing this? Right, people kept saying, hey Mike, you're a TV producer, why are you trying to break into the iPhone accessory business? And Mike says they kind of had a point.

Yeah, I'm not one of these Otterbox or Spec or one of these major brand phone case companies who gets the specs and the designs of these phones before they come out. So I've got to wait for the phone to come out into the market. Then I've got to go to the Apple store and measure it and then send it to the engineer. And then it's a lot of back and forth. But by the end of 2014, with the help of$20,000 that he raised on Kickstarter, Mike found a factory in China to make his first run of iPh and 5S cases with lens caps. And then?

Somebody gave him a tip. Somebody said to me If your product's ready. In January, you have to go to the Consumer Electronics Show. You have to be at CES. So that's what Mike did. He found a way to camp out in someone else's booth at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And there were a lot of people that came up to me and said, Well jeez, I I feel like this should be on the market already. But no, Mike says he was actually the first guy to come out with an iPhone case that has a lens cover and cleaner. Right. And our logo is something I made up in Microsoft Paint. It's a little

phone case that looks like a little pirate. Got an eye patch. That's why I came up with the name eye patch case because it covers up the camera's eye. Since he launched the iPatch case four years ago, Mike's been doing a pretty modest business. He sold about 7,000 so far. but he's turning a profit and he's about to release four new models. And he says, it's great doing this business as a side hustle to video production. I worked in an industry that was all about ideas and content and things that you could not touch. So to have a physical tangible product in my hand was so incredibly rewarding.

If you want to find out more about the company or hear previous episodes, head to our podcast page, how IbuiltThis.npr.org. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, and while you're there, please do give us a review. You can also write to us at hibtnpr.org, and if you want to send us a tweet, it's at how I built this. Our show is produced this week by Casey Herman with original music composed by Ramteen Arablui. Thanks also to Sanas Meshkin poor Neva Grant and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is David Ja. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to how I built this?

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