Name: Dyson Founder James Dyson on Inventing the Bagless Vacuum and More
Uploaded: 2025-04-23T04:01:00Z
Duration: 9 min 16 s
Description: James Dyson’s bagless vacuum built a global empire. WSJ met the founder at Dyson’s headquarters in Singapore to discuss failure and the tension between innovation and profitability.

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James Dyson’s bagless vacuum built a global empire. WSJ met the founder at Dyson’s headquarters in Singapore to discuss failure and the tension between innovation and profitability. Photo Illustration: MacKenzie Coffman

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James Dyson’s bagless vacuum built a global empire. WSJ met the founder at Dyson’s headquarters in Singapore to discuss failure and the tension between innovation and profitability.

Dyson Founder James Dyson on Inventing the Bagless Vacuum and More

If a product costs you much to make, it's not a... Well, it is an invention, but 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 wheel is that 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 were spraying epoxy powder on some steel frames. And the idea was that the powder stuck there by static to the frame, but of course a lot of it missed the frame and had to be sucked away. And we were using what was essentially a giant vacuum cleaner with a giant bag as it were. But the bag kept clogging, so I looked around at what sophisticated people did to collect dust, and they used things called cyclones, which of course I'd seen on the outside of factories. So I suddenly realized, "Here's the technology, which would be wonderful for vacuum cleaners because it can't clog you get maximum airflow all the time." So, that's how I started. So it is one thing needs to another.

It's a lot of connecting of the dots.

Yeah, one thing needs 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?

Yes.

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 it's a 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 patterns. 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, and that will be useful and be better performing than what's on the market at the moment. By a margin, not sort of minute in that. So it's not a business plan. "Oh, this would be a good category to go into and there's lots of money in this category." I don't think we think of it like that. Perhaps we should, but it was just saying, "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"?

So when it's not technically working, you just go on, and on, and on, often for many years, until you decide that it's not working. And that's easy 'cause it's not working. So, you don't even have to make a decision. You just have to say, "Enough is enough. Let's try something else." With a commercial product, we happened to be sitting next to something where we had to make a decision not to do it. And that was 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.

Suddenly, everybody was gonna make electric cars and nobody was making any money out of them, they're making huge losses out of them because it's an expensive thing to develop. And I could see that it was just too risky. And we're a private company, a relatively small private company, and I haven't got 30 billion to keep pumping into that until it makes a profit, which is a shame 'cause I'd love doing it.

Is there a tension between innovation and profitability?

Oh yes, there is. You've got to be able to make it economically, but sometimes it's quite hard to sell things for various reasons. The distribution system and the share resource you have to put behind, getting it in front of people, you've gotta make it in large numbers and you've got to be able to sell it.

Have you ever scrapped a product and regretted it?

Oh, yes, yes. We used to make a washing machine with two drums, counter-rotating washing machine, which had very large capacity, and wash well, and quickly and gently, but we were losing money on it. This is quite a long time ago. And the board just didn't want to go on losing money on it and we stopped it. And I do regret that, very much regret that.

Do you wanna bring it back?

Well, times change, and you move on and you're doing other things. It's sort of difficult to go backwards and revive something.

How do you think of making changes to the business versus changes to a product? Is it a similar type of iterative approach?

It's a very interesting question, which no one's ever answered me, but yes, I suppose I'm a bit like an engineer. I see what's not working or wonder if we could do something better, and then look at the opportunities, try to work out opportunities. I mean, I'm sure lots of other people do that, but my approach to it is as an engineer, and then to try something out or try several things out to see what might work, and then do it in a very organized manner.

What's the one invention that you've looked at and said, "I wish I had made that?"

Oh, that's very easy, that's the jet engine. So I'm a great fan of Frank Whittle who invented the jet engine. He had no education and he went... He was a very good model airplane builder. And while he was at RF Cranwell, he wrote down the theory of a jet engine. He seemed to get things right the first time. His engineering judgment was brilliant.

Because you didn't actually study engineering.

No, no, no. I started off as an architect.

You've said in the past that inexperience can be an advantage. How do you incorporate inexperience into a company? 'Cause most people, when they're hiring, look for experience.

I look for the opposite because experience means that you've seen how something's worked in the past or you've seen solutions to problems. But the world is changing so rapidly, and we are trying to innovate and pioneer anyway. So actually, experience doesn't help us very much. And in fact, it can get in the way. So I've always recruited undergraduates, and now I recruit people who are leaving school and we have our own university. So we train our own undergraduates.

How do you harness inexperience so that it's not a train wreck?

The temptation is always to choose someone who's got experience so you don't have to train them. But actually, you do have to train everybody because anyone coming in here is doing something they've never done before. And the experience with our undergraduates is wonderful. they don't do the obvious thing. They don't do what should be done. They start doing something else, which is much more interesting.

James Dyson stepped down as CEO in 2017, but he still acts as the company's chairman. Do you think about retiring?

No. No, I don't. And I'll go on doing it as long as I enjoy doing it and I don't feel that old. I mean, but my body quite often tells me I'm old, but in my mind, I still want to go on doing what I'm doing and still enjoy it.

Is there a problem you still dream of solving, but just haven't gotten around to doing it yet?

Yes.

Niharika: Which is it?

I'm not telling you that.

How Dyson’s Founder Picks What to Invent Next

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How Dyson’s Founder Picks What to Invent Next

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