Dyson: James Dyson

In 1979, James Dyson had an idea for a new vacuum cleaner — one that didn't use bags. It took him five years to perfect the design, building more than 5,000 prototypes in his backyard shed. He then tried to convince the big vacuum brands to license his invention, but most wouldn't even take his calls. Eventually, he started his own company. Today, Dyson is one of the best-selling vacuum brands in the world, and James Dyson is a billionaire. PLUS for our postscript "How You Built That," how Theresa Stotesbury made a business out of fake blood — a synthetic material that helps create a realistic crime scene for police training. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Well, I'd had the idea for the vacuum cleaner, to replace the vacuum cleaner bag with a cyclone. And I suggested the idea to the other directors. Let's make this vacuum cleaner. Let's make this vacuum cleaner, then we can make some real money. And they said, "Of course." No, they didn't. What they said was, "Don't be so stupid. If there was a better vacuum cleaner, Hoover or Electrolux or someone else would have made it."

• 0:29Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 0:43Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, 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.

• 1:01Guy Raz?

  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

• 1:45Guy Raz?

  of the English-speaking world, they're still called Hoover's. 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 5,000 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.

• 2:30Speaker 00

  My mother saw it coming, knew it was happening. We didn't. So in a way, it was more of a surprise to us than it was to her.

• 2:39Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 2:40Speaker 00

  She very bravely carried on, went and trained as a teacher and taught teaching. The school, which is a school you have to pay to go to.

• 2:48Guy Raz?

  The one where your dad taught?

• 2:50Speaker 00

  Where my dad taught, yes. It was a fee-paying and boarding school.

• 2:53Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  And in those days, nobody had insurance for being ill or dying. So the school said, "Well, you can come as boarders for free." 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.

• 3:12Guy Raz?

  So you go off to live at this boarding school, which was probably pretty hard for you as a kid, having lost your dad. What do you remember about it?

• 3:21Speaker 00

  I know, I remember one thing that was, it was quite difficult for me because I was at school and my father had taught at the school. There was a memorial service for him, which, of course, the health 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 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 pretty harsh thing to do to a nine-year-old.

• 3:50Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 3:51Speaker 00

  But this idea in England that, you know, sending people away to boarding school toughens them up. Probably does, but I don't think it toughens everybody up in the right way. But 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.

• 4:13Guy Raz?

  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.

• 4:28Guy Raz?

  And his first job out of college was for a fairly prominent British engineer and inventor named Jeremy Fry.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  Jeremy Fry, yes, he was chairman of an engineering company in Bath. I'd just got married and he says, well, I'll give you a design job or two.

• 4:44Guy Raz?

  And what was it about you that interested him? I mean, why would he offer you a job?

• 4:49Speaker 00

  Well, actually, what I discovered was that he liked employing young people who were bright and had all the right attitudes and ideas. So he gave opportunity for young people. So I started designing one or two things. And the third thing I designed for him was this high-speed landing craft.

• 5:07Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  This was a moonlighting job that he was doing because his main business was making valve actuators for oil and gas pipelines. So this was his own invention.

• 5:19Guy Raz?

  He had a side gig that was inventing boats?

• 5:23Speaker 00

  Well, no, he had invented a boat. The theory was that a flat-bottomed boat is the most efficient planing hull. It's not very good in heavy seas, to be honest. But because it's flat and smashes into waves rather than cuts through the waves.

• 5:39Guy Raz?

  Is it similar to like those landing craft that you see in those World War II movies when they're storming the beach at Normandy?

• 5:44Speaker 00

  Yes, except that those are not flat-bottomed. 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.

• 5:58Guy Raz?

  So he had this idea to build this landing craft or transport craft and he said to you, hey, I got this idea, can you try to design something?

• 6:07Speaker 00

  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 well, he had never designed a boat either. But he had this wonderful attitude. You don't think about doing something, you just do it. And he hated experts, for a good reason, actually, and I rather hate experts as well.

• 6:33Guy Raz?

  Did he teach you how to make things? I mean, because you were a designer, how? How did that work?

• 6:39Speaker 00

  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 weld. And we had to make a prototype. And 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.

• 6:55Guy Raz?

  Like you described a welding.

• 6:57Speaker 00

  Autodidactic welding, one man welding course.

• 7:01Speaker 00

  And same with the lathe. And so I learnt to use engineering tools by myself.

• 7:08Guy Raz?

  So you have your prototype and does Fry say, let's try to sell these. Let's put this out on the market.

• 7:14Speaker 00

  Pretty much that. And I said, I know nothing about selling. He says, well, 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.

• 7:30Guy Raz?

  And who's buying it? Was it designed for the military initially?

• 7:34Speaker 00

  Well, military use, construction use, oil companies, as a diving platform, as a bridge building platform. So it had many, many uses.

• 7:44Speaker 00

  And I mean, within a couple of years, we were selling 100 or more a year.

• 7:47Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 7:48Speaker 00

  It's a very successful business.

• 7:50Guy Raz?

  So it sounds like Fry was a very fortuitous meeting early in your life that he was older than you, right?

• 7:57Speaker 00

  Oh, yes, yeah, yeah, some 20 years older.

• 8:00Guy Raz?

  Almost like a father, probably.

• 8:01Speaker 00

  Yes, he was, in a way, yes. He was a good mentor and taught me everything I know, really.

• 8:07Guy Raz?

  So I guess you worked with Jeremy Fry for a couple of years. And then at a certain point, you decide, you know, I want to kind of see if I can start my own business?

• 8:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I worked for five, well, seven years in all. And he offered to fund me. And I said, no, no, 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.

• 8:28Guy Raz?

  How did you even come up with an idea to design a new kind of wheelbarrow?

• 8:33Speaker 00

  Well, because I was fixing up a house and doing a garden. And I noticed the deficiencies of metal wheelbarrows with narrow wheels. First of all, they're very unstable with 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.

• 8:59Guy Raz?

  What was it? What was different about it?

• 9:01Speaker 00

  Well, it had this big balloon. It was actually literally a ball. It was actually a plastic football. If you think of it like that, then that's how I made it, in fact. I made it out of quite interesting plastic.

• 9:12Guy Raz?

  I should say soccer ball for Americans.

• 9:14Speaker 00

  Well, it's soccer ball, exactly. Like a soccer, plastic soccer ball.

• 9:17Guy Raz?

  So 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?

• 9:25Speaker 00

  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 the building site.

• 9:31Guy Raz?

  Why aren't wheelbarrows like that today?

• 9:34Speaker 00

  Well, I don't know. I don't know. But the difficult thing was then selling it because the traditional hardware stores, as they were then, and a few garden centers, they didn't want to sell it because they thought it looked very strange. So I used to sell it through little advertisements in the newspaper. It was always next to the incontinence pants or the baldness cures. And there would be this advert for, for wheelbarrows, strange, modern-looking, actually nicely designed, I think, wheelbarrow. And I started to get quite a lot of business. People sent checks.

• 10:06Guy Raz?

  So you had this company, The Ballbarrow, and it seems like it's going pretty well, so?

• 10:10Speaker 00

  Well, it never made money.

• 10:11Guy Raz?

  Why? What happened?

• 10:13Speaker 00

  There's no money in wheelbarrows. It was a very good lesson to learn. Not many people buy wheelbarrows, so it's a very small market. Wheelbarrows 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. And we had to explain why it was different and better. And that was all fine, and we got 50% of the market, but never made any money. I should have charged a lot more.

• 10:39Guy Raz?

  My understanding is that you actually, when you took in investors, you kind of gave the patent over to the company. Is that right?

• 10:46Speaker 00

  I signed the patent over to the company, which was possibly a mistake.

• 10:50Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Why'd you do that?

• 10:52Speaker 00

  Well, it's quite normal to assign the patent to the company that you work for, as I do now with with all my patents.

• 11:00Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 11:01Speaker 00

  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. And I now only own about thirty percent of the business.

• 11:13Guy Raz?

  That must have been pretty frustrating. I mean, here's your your idea comes out of your brain and you don't even own your own idea.

• 11:20Speaker 00

  No, but sometimes one needs to go through these rites of passage to understand the importance of ownership of intellectual property, the 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, running a business that doesn't make money. All these lessons, very important lessons to learn and feel viscerally.

• 11:46Guy Raz?

  And I guess it was around this time when you were wanting to make new products, right? So what what were you thinking of?

• 11:53Speaker 00

  Well, I'd had the idea for the vacuum cleaner. It's quite a long story, but I'll try and keep it very short. The the frames for the wheelbarrow, instead of painting them with wet paint, we had elected to use a thing called epoxy coating. But the way you get the epoxy onto the frames is to spray the powder electrostatically. A wheelbarrow 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. And I thought this was very inefficient.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  So I asked these kind of people who made this equipment, you know, what smart people used. And I learned that they use giant cyclones. Now, I'd seen giant cyclones on sawmills for collecting fine sawdust.

• 12:48Speaker 00

  So I went and copied 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.

• 13:00Guy Raz?

  So how does a cyclone actually work?

• 13:03Speaker 00

  A cyclone is literally an upside down wine bottle. You have to blow into the system or suck out of the system.

• 13:10Guy Raz?

  Ah, I see.

• 13:11Speaker 00

  But it is exactly a wine bottle and the dirt spins around the wall of the bottle. And the air goes out of the center of the bottle. And the idea is the dust can't get into the center because it's too busy spinning around the walls of the bottle by centrifugal force. That's the basic principle of it.

• 13:28Guy Raz?

  And cyclones were widely used in these industrial vacuum machines that were cleaning factories?

• 13:34Speaker 00

  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 vacuum system. A sawmill 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 up onto the roof where you see a cyclone, a huge metal cyclone.

• 13:55Guy Raz?

  Wow. And how do you connect that to a vacuum cleaner?

• 13:59Speaker 00

  Well, over the two weekends while I'm welding up this thirty foot high one, I realized the point of this cyclone, which is that it collects dust all the time without ever blocking or clogging.

• 14:11Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 14:12Speaker 00

  So when I saw how cyclone 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 and made a miniature one out of cardboard and Scotch tape and connected it with a piece of hose to my Hoover and pushed it around the house, feeling rather happy, and it appeared to work.

• 14:38Guy Raz?

  This is around nineteen seventy-eight, seventy-nine.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 14:42Guy Raz?

  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?

• 14:56Speaker 00

  Well, I I just bought my our own home and and 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 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.

• 15:24Guy Raz?

  Yes.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  So I took the bag out and undid the end and tipped the contents out into the garbage can and put it back in the vacuum cleaner. And I thought, this is great. I don't have to buy bags again.

• 15:37Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 15:38Speaker 00

  And I was astonished that I got no better suction. It was exactly as before. I'd emptied 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 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'd just bought?

• 16:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  And I had a look at the one I'd emptied. And you could see, even with my own eyes, that the pores in the bag were blocked with fine dust.

• 16:11Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 16:11Speaker 00

  So I suddenly realized what was going on here. You don't replace the bags because they're full. You replace the bags because they're blocked.

• 16:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 16:20Speaker 00

  And I thought there must be a better solution to this. So that's how it all started.

• 16:25Guy Raz?

  So just pause for a sec because you're still involved in the in the Ballbearer Company, which had investors. Did you go to them and say, hey, I've got this this vacuum cleaner idea?

• 16:34Speaker 00

  Yes, indeed. And I suggested the idea to the other directors.

• 16:38Guy Raz?

  Let's make this vacuum cleaner.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  Let's make this vacuum cleaner. Then we can make some real money.

• 16:41Guy Raz?

  And they said, of course.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  Uh, no, they didn't. What they said was, don't be so stupid. If there was a better vacuum cleaner, Hoover Electrolux or someone else would have made it. These are huge companies.

• 16:50Guy Raz?

  But I mean, you can you can understand their thinking at that time because how could anybody possibly compete with these giant vacuum companies?

• 16:57Speaker 00

  Well, actually, the the I saw immediately that these big companies like Hoover Electrolux weren't bothering to improve the technology.

• 17:05Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 17:05Speaker 00

  They were quite happy selling bags.

• 17:07Guy Raz?

  Sure.

• 17:08Speaker 00

  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 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.

• 17:24Guy Raz?

  Wait, wait, they kicked you out of your own company?

• 17:27Speaker 00

  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've 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.

• 17:44Guy Raz?

  How much did you have to borrow?

• 17:46Speaker 00

  Well, I, um, it was about forty or fifty thousand pounds in those days to, to get it started.

• 17:51Guy Raz?

  And you did not have any of your own?

• 17:53Speaker 00

  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 a cyclone to make.

• 18:03Guy Raz?

  Like, where, where did you do this?

• 18:05Speaker 00

  In the shed behind my house.

• 18:07Guy Raz?

  So you did this in your backyard?

• 18:10Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 18:10Guy Raz?

  And you borrowed the money?

• 18:11Speaker 00

  Borrowed the money.

• 18:12Guy Raz?

  And the idea was it'll, it'll take me a year or so and then I'll like start selling these things?

• 18:16Speaker 00

  Yes. Well, no, what, what I thought, we thought rather was that we'd get it to work and then we'd license it to someone like Hoover.

• 18:24Guy Raz?

  So you are, uh, trying to build this, uh, and you're doing this day and night, day and night, day and night?

• 18:31Speaker 00

  Yes, I wouldn't say night, but during the day. I mean, quite a long day.

• 18:35Guy Raz?

  And what were you doing in the shed? Like, was it like trial and error, trial and error? Was it?

• 18:40Speaker 00

  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 would go straight through the cyclone and not be collected.

• 19:24Speaker 00

  And I built five thousand one hundred and twenty seven prototypes before I got it right.

• 19:30Guy Raz?

  Here's what I'm trying to understand, James. Why you are iterating and doing this in your backyard. How are you earning a living? How are you paying your bills? How are you providing for your family?

• 19:42Speaker 00

  Well, the money that I borrowed from the bank and the money that Jeremy Fry put in was essentially paying my salary, plus a few costs. But I kept the cost to a minimum.

• 19:53Guy Raz?

  And once you got a prototype up and running, did you go around and try to pitch the vacuum companies?

• 20:01Speaker 00

  Exactly that. I targeted all vacuum cleaner companies and one or two other domestic appliance companies.

• 20:06Guy Raz?

  And what did they say when they saw it?

• 20:08Speaker 00

  Well, they all had a good look at it, but they didn't really want to do anything. They didn't want to change. And one or two of them said they actually rather liked selling paper bags. It's like Gillette selling her razor blades. They can make a lot of money out of bags. So essentially, they were curious but didn't want to license it.

• 20:27Guy Raz?

  How bad did your financial situation get?

• 20:29Speaker 00

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

• 21:00Guy Raz?

  But with all of those companies, those big companies telling you, "Not really interested", did you ever get nervous? Did you ever think about just packing it all in and going, getting a safe job as a designer for a big company?

• 21:13Speaker 00

  Well, no. You see, I don't quite react like that. It has the opposite effect on me. You know, I could see that they were turning down what is a good idea without good reason. Now, if they'd given me a really good reason, then I would have got nervous.

• 21:28Guy Raz?

  What about your friends and family? Do you think people were sort of...

• 21:30Speaker 00

  They all thought I was mad.

• 21:31Guy Raz?

  Right. They must have. There's James over there. He's working on this weird thing that he thinks is going to be a big deal.

• 21:37Speaker 00

  Obsessed and mad. But the thing is, never to take advice.

• 21:41Guy Raz?

  I mean, it is amazing, because even some of the most successful entrepreneurs that have been on the show had sleepless nights. They had anxiety about what they were doing.

• 21:52Speaker 00

  Well, I did. 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 bearing and from the high-speed landing craft, which a lot of people wouldn't buy it because it didn't look like a boat.

• 22:08Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  So having introduced to very strange-looking, very different new technology, you can make a success of it if it genuinely works better.

• 22:19Guy Raz?

  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.

• 22:48Guy Raz?

  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.

• 23:13Speaker 00

  Yes, a very small Japanese company that had 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.

• 23:23Guy Raz?

  What did it look like compared to what we think of a Dyson vacuum cleaner today?

• 23:28Speaker 00

  It looks much like our upright machines, except it's pink.

• 23:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 23:33Speaker 00

  And it has a lot of exposed hoses, a bit like the Pompidou Building in Paris. So you can see exactly what the air does.

• 23:40Guy Raz?

  Oh, cool.

• 23:41Speaker 00

  But in most other respects, it's quite similar to the early upright machines we sold here.

• 23:46Guy Raz?

  And how did it do? How did it sell?

• 23:49Speaker 00

  Well, I think considering it was $2,500, it did quite well.

• 23:53Guy Raz?

  Right, because in like today's dollars, it's like $6,000.

• 23:56Speaker 00

  It's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. Unfortunately, there were some quite rich Japanese people there.

• 24:00Guy Raz?

  They must have been $6,000 vacuum cleaners.

• 24:03Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 24:03Guy Raz?

  Was the licensing agreement with the Japanese company enough money to pay off your debts?

• 24:08Speaker 00

  Well, yes, it saved me from bankruptcy, put it that way.

• 24:13Guy Raz?

  So you licensed it to this company and they were kind of selling OK. What made you at a certain point say, you know what, maybe I should I should try and sell these myself?

• 24:23Speaker 00

  Well, 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 I want to make the 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

• 25:08Speaker 00

  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.

• 25:22Guy Raz?

  You actually went to outside investors asking them?

• 25:24Speaker 00

  Oh, yes, yes, for which I'm actually eternally grateful because I'd have to give them equity.

• 25:29Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 25:30Speaker 00

  Whereas I went to a clearing bank, Lloyds Bank, and by some miracle, they agreed to lend me 600,000 pounds.

• 25:37Guy Raz?

  Why did they agree to do that?

• 25:38Speaker 00

  Well, I asked the the bank manager afterwards and he said, well, I saw that you had won a big lawsuit. So I saw that you had determination.

• 25:46Guy Raz?

  What was the lawsuit?

• 25:47Speaker 00

  There's a lawsuit in America with someone who copied the vacuum cleaner.

• 25:50Guy Raz?

  Oh, so by this point, somebody had already copied your idea?

• 25:53Speaker 00

  Yes, and I'd fought a five-year lawsuit and we managed to settle it very successfully. And the interesting thing is this bank manager, he went home and asked his wife what she 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 his wife didn't like bags in vacuum cleaners.

• 26:18Guy Raz?

  And presumably you had to put some collateral down, like your house.

• 26:20Speaker 00

  The house, exactly. So my wife and I had to sign the house over to the bank.

• 26:25Guy Raz?

  I'm getting nervous for you thinking about this.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, so am I. So am I even thinking about it now.

• 26:29Guy Raz?

  I'm getting nervous.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  And so off I went and I had 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. The tooling is 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, we're not to make any changes at all. This is it. I haven't got any more money, so this is it. So 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 factory.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  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 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, well, I went everywhere and nobody would take it. But in those days, there were mail order catalogs. Do you remember the Sears mail order catalog? 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,

• 28:01Speaker 00

  who was sort of curious about this funny man who had done this yellow vacuum cleaner with a cyclone instead of bags. Yellow and silver, right? Yellow and silver. I spent a day with him and at the end of the day, he said, why should I put your vacuum cleaner in my catalog and take out a Hoover on an electrolyte? Yeah. And I said, well, because your catalog'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 mail order catalog in England.

• 28:32Guy Raz?

  How much were you selling them for?

• 28:34Speaker 00

  £199. So that's three times what other vacuum cleaners were sold for.

• 28:41Guy Raz?

  Didn't any of these catalog companies say, "This is just too expensive. You're asking for too much money."

• 28:47Speaker 00

  Oh, well, no. The price was concealed because you paid on the drip. You paid so much per week.

• 28:52Guy Raz?

  I see.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  So they didn't actually show the full price, or you could have it in very small print.

• 28:57Guy Raz?

  But why would somebody take a risk on something that was untested, that they'd not ever seen before through a catalog?

• 29:04Speaker 00

  Because it looked different. Its promise was no loss of suction. You don't have to buy bags.

• 29:10Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 29:10Speaker 00

  And we then got into another catalog. And so my first three or four or five month sales were to those catalog people. And then I got into quite a famous shop called John Lewis, so sort of department stores.

• 29:25Guy Raz?

  How did you do that?

• 29:26Speaker 00

  They were looking to compete with the big electrical multiples. And so they wanted something different for which they could charge more money. But very quickly, it became their best-selling vacuum cleaner.

• 29:38Guy Raz?

  And this was 1990?

• 29:40Speaker 00

  Three. 1993.

• 29:42Guy Raz?

  So how long was it before you were actually profitable?

• 29:46Speaker 00

  I was in the black from the first month on.

• 29:48Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  I was able to pay my employees and I was making a profit as my distribution started to rise. And I could only get into the shops if I promised to advertise on television.

• 30:00Guy Raz?

  How did you do that? How did you have the money to do that?

• 30:02Speaker 00

  Well, I didn't. So I said to the first retailer who demanded I do that, I said, "Well, look, if you order 10,000 vacuum cleaners off me, I'll put all the profit on those vacuum cleaners into television advertising," which I did. And so my strapline in the beginning was, "Say goodbye to the bag."

• 30:20Guy Raz?

  Say goodbye to the bag.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  So I had this woman explaining how the Dyson doesn't lose suction 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 there.

• 30:33Guy Raz?

  So I guess within two years, this vacuum cleaner, by 1995, this becomes the number one selling vacuum cleaner in the UK.

• 30:42Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 30:43Guy Raz?

  Were you just blown away or were you just thinking to yourself?

• 30:48Speaker 00

  I was too busy, actually. It's like going down a fast ski run. You can't stop, you just have to carry on. And we were then bringing out a new version, a canister version, and we were starting to export.

• 31:02Guy Raz?

  How much revenue were you making by the time you were the number one best-selling vacuum in the UK? What was the annual revenue for Dyson, do you remember?

• 31:10Speaker 00

  I don't know, it was probably $100 million.

• 31:12Guy Raz?

  In two years? That's incredible.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  Yes, I mean, it's a very steep graph.

• 31:19Guy Raz?

  I mean, that doesn't happen. It's happened, of course, in the tech world. I mean, this was a real product. This was a real thing that people could buy and take home.

• 31:28Speaker 00

  Oh, yes. And we're making real money. And to see people buying the vacuum cleaner and liking it and commenting on it was tremendous. That was actually much more exciting than the whole money thing.

• 31:41Guy Raz?

  And how did you get into the US market, which is, I guess, became your biggest market in the world?

• 31:47Speaker 00

  Yes. 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 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 for the first year, we didn't do any advertising, but it sold pretty well in Best Buy.

• 32:22Guy Raz?

  This is like 2002, 2003, something like that?

• 32:24Speaker 00

  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?

• 32:40Guy Raz?

  Just like you on TV.

• 32:41Speaker 00

  Me on TV, taking a vacuum cleaner apart, showing a clogged bag, and then showing how my cyclone worked.

• 32:48Guy Raz?

  And you know that Americans are suckers for a British accent.

• 32:52Speaker 00

  Well, I didn't know that.

• 32:56Speaker 00

  But I was just being very honest. I was explaining how a vacuum cleaner works, why it loses suction, and why mine doesn't. It was a very, very simple approach. And we shot it in my house, and it was a very successful advertisement. And we started selling very fast. It was good.

• 33:14Guy Raz?

  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, bladeless fans, dryers. 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.

• 33:37Speaker 00

  Oh, good, good.

• 33:38Guy Raz?

  So how did those, when did you begin to expand to other products?

• 33:41Speaker 00

  Well, first we did the fan, the bladeless fan.

• 33:44Guy Raz?

  By the way, how does that work? Can you explain that to me?

• 33:46Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. You accelerate the air out of an air slot. That draws in other air. You then expand the volume of air that you're creating. And you create a negative pressure suction behind. So you pull in more air. So you end up multiplying the original airflow 15 to 20 times. Now, I've simplified it, and there's a lot going on there that I haven't talked about. But that's the basic principle.

• 34:14Guy Raz?

  I'm not sure I entirely understand it, but it is amazing to see that thing work, to see this hoop blow really powerful air.

• 34:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, it is interesting. And of course, you have no blades to clean.

• 34:29Guy Raz?

  James, I'm curious about your, the way you run a business, because you really are an inventor and a 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? How do you do those, all those things?

• 34:47Speaker 00

  Well, I had to do all those things at the beginning. But as the company grew, I did more and more of the engineering. And now I spend, you know, 95% of my time doing that. But I was the CEO for the first 10 years. I mean, I'm not totally happy doing anything other than engineering.

• 35:06Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  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, doing what I really love doing and doing what I think is the most important thing.

• 35:20Guy Raz?

  Did you feel a sense of, secretly a sense of, I don't know, schadenfreude 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 them, I was right?

• 35:36Speaker 00

  No, no, I'm on to the next thing. I mean, you know, everybody makes mistakes all the time. Fifty percent of what I do is wrong. Actually, they're great. Mistakes are great.

• 35:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 35:46Speaker 00

  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.

• 35:54Guy Raz?

  You own 100% of it. You don't have to answer to shareholders. You don't have to answer to venture capitalists.

• 35:58Speaker 00

  No, and that's wonderful. And actually, it makes my life pretty simple.

• 36:02Guy Raz?

  You are, just so people understand this, because you went from being deeply in debt in your early 40s, really having nothing, no money, and three kids, to today-

• 36:14Speaker 00

  Minus, being minus.

• 36:16Guy Raz?

  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.

• 36:26Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, it is. In a way, that it's, I find it quite nice that it only 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 developing an electric car and, you know, that's a huge financial risk.

• 36:46Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 36:47Speaker 00

  But I am able to do it, and that's the big difference. 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.

• 36:58Guy Raz?

  James, how much of your success do you attribute to your skill, your intelligence, your hard work, and how much of it to luck?

• 37:08Speaker 00

  Absolutely none to my intelligence. Hard work, yes. Perseverance, yes. And luck, yes. And I do believe, though, that you create your own luck.

• 37:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 37:20Speaker 00

  Because luck is around. You know, I'm, 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.

• 37:39Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 37:40Speaker 00

  So, and I've learned that with developing new technology, that when you feel like giving up- It's 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 around the corner.

• 38:00Guy Raz?

  That's James Dyson. Actually, Sir James Dyson. He was knighted in 2006. Sir James and his wife Deirdre will celebrate 50 years of marriage this year. And the latest Forbes estimates put his net worth at $5.8 billion. By the way, do you still vacuum your own house?

• 38:21Speaker 00

  Well, of course.

• 38:21Guy Raz?

  Oh, really? Yourself? You don't hire people to do it?

• 38:24Speaker 00

  No, no. No, we, you know, we cook our own supper, wash it up. I do some vacuuming on my clothes. And I like doing all those chores because I learn, you know, what works and what doesn't work.

• 38:48Guy Raz?

  And stick around because in just a moment, we're going to hear from you about the things you're building.

• 38:56Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And we've got a really niche product to talk about this week. So you know how in crime shows, the detective walks into a murder scene and starts looking for clues in the blood that's lying around? Well, real police have to be trained to do that. And this kind of training has been going on for a long, long time. And forensic teams at police departments have used everything to make it realistic.

• 39:24Speaker 03

  Everything from their own blood to animal blood sources to even corn syrup and water, that classic fake blood maybe you'd use to make your Halloween costume.

• 39:34Guy Raz?

  This is Teresa Stotzberry. She's a chemist. And she says that if you're training a bunch of cops for like a day, you need blood that won't clot too fast, that won't spread disease, but that still kind of acts like the real thing. And she learned all this when she worked at a crime lab in Ontario, Canada.

• 39:52Speaker 03

  People were kind of grumbling in the forensic community that there just wasn't a good enough fake blood product on the market.

• 39:58Guy Raz?

  So Teresa kind of filed away that idea. And around the same time, this is about 2010, 2011, she was working in another lab on something totally unrelated: a better coating for steel to keep it from corroding.

• 40:12Speaker 03

  So I was working with this clear, colorless liquid that made a nice coating. It could make little spots if you wanted to kind of spray it on things. And I thought to myself, hey.

• 40:25Guy Raz?

  This, of course, was her lightbulb moment.

• 40:28Speaker 03

  I thought if you just put a little bit of coloring in this and you just tinker a little bit with its properties, I bet you I could make a pretty good fake blood out of this.

• 40:36Guy Raz?

  And so that's what Teresa did. In fact, at the time, she was in grad school and kind of did her thesis on fake blood.

• 40:44Speaker 03

  I spent four years perfecting the material, got my PhD, and then we decided to form a company where we would sell it.

• 40:53Guy Raz?

  And she's now working with colleagues at Trent University in Ontario to sell it to police trainers around the world. The ingredients, by the way, are top secret. There's some water, some polymers, and coloring. But the mixture has features that you'd find in real blood.

• 41:08Speaker 03

  We call those little features tails, or spines, or scallops. And they can tell you a lot about how the blood got there. So was it flying through the air? Was it just formed on a surface?

• 41:20Guy Raz?

  Which admittedly is a little creepy, but that's the point, right? If you're learning to investigate a crime scene. Anyway, Teresa's company, Impact Scientific, has made about $10,000 since it launched last year. And one of the coolest perks of the job?

• 41:35Speaker 03

  I do make a pretty mean Halloween costume.

• 41:37Guy Raz?

  I bet.

• 41:38Speaker 03

  One year was I dressed up like a zombie, which was pretty intense.

• 41:45Guy Raz?

  You can find out more about Impact Scientific at our Facebook page. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org. We love hearing what you're up to. And thanks for listening to the show this week. If you want to find out more or hear previous episodes, you can go to howibuiltthis.npr.org. Please also download our podcast at Apple Podcasts or however you get your podcasts. You can also write us your feedback or any pitches at [email protected]. And if you want to send us a tweet, it's @howibuiltthis. Our show was produced this week by Casey Herman with original music by Ramtin Arablouei. Thanks also to Neva Grant, Sanaz Meshkhanpour, Jeff Rogers, and Thomas Lu. Our intern is Noor Kutsi.

• 42:29Speaker 04

  I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 42:38Speaker 04

  There are millions of books out there just waiting for you. But how to keep up? Introducing NPR's Book of the Day. Every weekday, we feature some of our favorite conversations with authors and writers about their latest books. You can check it out in about the time it takes to walk the dog. Happy reading.