Dyson: James Dyson (2018)

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," we check back with television producer Mike Sorrentino, who created an iPhone case called EyePatch that cleans and protects the phone's camera. 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.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  So really quickly, before we start the show, I want to let you know about another live show coming to Washington DC on September 12. 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

• 0:43Guy Raz?

  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. OK, on to 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.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:15Guy Raz?

  He said, "Let's make this vacuum cleaner."

• 1:16Speaker 01

  "Let's make this vacuum cleaner, then we can make some real money."

• 1:19Guy Raz?

  And they said, "Of course."

• 1:20Speaker 01

  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."

• 1:32Guy Raz?

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

• 1:46Guy 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.

• 2:04Guy 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

• 2:46Guy Raz?

  one brand that in much 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

• 3:26Guy Raz?

  a boarding school, but when James was about nine years old, his dad died of cancer.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 3:51Guy Raz?

  The one where your dad taught?

• 3:53Speaker 01

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

• 4:14Guy 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?

• 4:24Speaker 01

  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, 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 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.

• 4:53Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 5:16Guy 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. And his first job out of college was for a fairly prominent British engineer and inventor named Jeremy Fry.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:47Guy Raz?

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

• 5:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:10Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:22Guy Raz?

  He had a side gig that was inventing boats?

• 6:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:37Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  But because it's flat and smashes into waves rather than cuts through the waves.

• 6:42Guy Raz?

  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 at Normandy?

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Yes, except that those are not flat bottomed.

• 6:51Guy Raz?

  Oh.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:57Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Whereas we could land straight on the beach. In fact, we could ram the boat up the beach.

• 7:02Guy Raz?

  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?

• 7:11Speaker 01

  That's exactly what he said.

• 7:12Guy Raz?

  Huh.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:20Guy Raz?

  Huh.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  And what 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.

• 7:32Guy Raz?

  [laughing]

• 7:33Speaker 01

  For a good reason, actually, and I rather hate experts as well.

• 7:36Guy Raz?

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

• 7:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:58Guy Raz?

  Like you described a welding.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  Autodidactic welding, one man welding course.

• 8:03Guy Raz?

  [laughing]

• 8:04Speaker 01

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

• 8:11Guy Raz?

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

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Pretty much that. And I said, I don't, I know nothing about selling.

• 8:20Guy Raz?

  Uh huh.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  He said, 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.

• 8:33Guy Raz?

  And who was buying it? Was it designed for the military initially?

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Well, military use, construction use, oil companies, as a diving platform, as a bridge building platform. So it had many, many uses. And I mean, within a couple of years, we were selling 100 or more a year.

• 8:51Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  It was a very successful business.

• 8:53Guy Raz?

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

• 9:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah. Some 20 years older.

• 9:03Guy Raz?

  Almost like a father, probably.

• 9:04Speaker 01

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

• 9:10Guy Raz?

  So I guess you worked with Jeremy Frye 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?

• 9:18Speaker 01

  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 barrel, which is a wheelbarrow with a ball instead of a wheel.

• 9:31Guy Raz?

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

• 9:36Speaker 01

  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 those 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.

• 10:03Guy Raz?

  What was it? What was different about it?

• 10:05Speaker 01

  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 this quite interesting plastic.

• 10:16Guy Raz?

  I should say soccer ball for Americans.

• 10:17Speaker 01

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

• 10:20Guy Raz?

  So instead of having the one wheel in the front, it would be this 360-degree rotating ball, and it was more stable?

• 10:28Speaker 01

  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 side.

• 10:35Guy Raz?

  Why aren't wheelbarrows like that today?

• 10:37Speaker 01

  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 thing, Continence Pants or the Baldness Cures. And there would be this advert for a wheelbarrow, strange, modern looking, actually nicely designed, I think, wheelbarrow. And I started to get quite a lot of business, people sent cheques.

• 11:09Guy Raz?

  So you had this company, the Bald Barrow, and it seems like it's going pretty well, so...

• 11:13Speaker 01

  Well, it never made money.

• 11:15Guy Raz?

  Why? What happened?

• 11:16Speaker 01

  There's no money in wheelbarrows.

• 11:18Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 11:33Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  And we had to explain why it was different and better.

• 11:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  And that was all fine, and we got fifty percent of the market, but never made any money. I should have charged a lot more.

• 11:43Guy 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?

• 11:50Speaker 01

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

• 11:54Guy Raz?

  Yeah, why'd you do that?

• 11:56Speaker 01

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

• 12:04Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:16Guy Raz?

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

• 12:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:49Guy Raz?

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

• 12:56Speaker 01

  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 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. Now, I thought this was very inefficient, so I asked these kind of people who made this equipment, you know, what smart people used.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  And I learned that they use giant cyclones. Now, I'd seen giant cyclones on sawmills for collecting fine sawdust. 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.

• 14:02Guy Raz?

  So how how does a cyclone actually work?

• 14:05Speaker 01

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

• 14:12Guy Raz?

  Ah, I see.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  But it is exactly a wine bottle and the dirt 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 because it's too busy spinning around the walls of the bottle by centrifugal force. That's the basic principle of it.

• 14:30Guy Raz?

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

• 14:36Speaker 01

  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 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 you you see a cyclone, a huge metal cyclone.

• 14:57Guy Raz?

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

• 15:01Speaker 01

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

• 15:14Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 15:40Guy Raz?

  This is around 1978, 79.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:45Guy 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?

• 15:58Speaker 01

  Well, I just bought my, our own home 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.

• 16:26Guy Raz?

  Yes.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 16:39Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  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 the 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?

• 17:04Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:13Guy Raz?

  Ah, wow.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:22Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 17:22Speaker 01

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

• 17:27Guy Raz?

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

• 17:37Speaker 01

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

• 17:40Guy Raz?

  Let's make this vacuum cleaner.

• 17:41Speaker 01

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

• 17:44Guy Raz?

  And they said, of course.

• 17:45Speaker 01

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

• 17:53Guy 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?

• 18:00Speaker 01

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

• 18:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  They were quite happy selling bags.

• 18:09Guy Raz?

  Sure.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:26Guy Raz?

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

• 18:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:47Guy Raz?

  How much did you have to borrow?

• 18:48Speaker 01

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

• 18:53Guy Raz?

  And you did not have any of your own?

• 18:55Speaker 01

  I didn't have a bean. I was in debt. I had a big mortgage, uh, you know, and three kids. So, uh, I started making prototypes for a cyclone to make.

• 19:06Guy Raz?

  Like, where, where did you do this?

• 19:07Speaker 01

  In the shed behind my house.

• 19:10Guy Raz?

  So you did this in your backyard?

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:13Guy Raz?

  And you borrowed the money?

• 19:14Speaker 01

  Borrowed the money.

• 19:14Guy Raz?

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

• 19:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:27Guy Raz?

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

• 19:33Speaker 01

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

• 19:38Guy Raz?

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

• 19:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:26Speaker 01

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

• 20:32Guy 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?

• 20:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:56Guy Raz?

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

• 21:03Speaker 01

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

• 21:09Guy Raz?

  And what did they say when they saw it?

• 21:10Speaker 01

  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 a razor blades. They can make a lot of money out of bags. So essentially, they were curious but didn't want to license it.

• 21:29Guy Raz?

  How bad did your financial situation get?

• 21:32Speaker 01

  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. Yeah, so it wasn't what we wanted to do, but we had that backup.

• 22:02Guy 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?

• 22:15Speaker 01

  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. And if they'd given me a really good reason, then I would have got nervous.

• 22:30Guy Raz?

  What about your friends and family? Did you think people were...

• 22:33Speaker 01

  They all thought I was mad.

• 22:34Guy Raz?

  Right, they must have. 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.

• 22:40Speaker 01

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

• 22:43Guy Raz?

  I mean, it is amazing, because even 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.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:11Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 23:11Speaker 01

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

• 23:22Guy 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.

• 23:46Guy 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.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:22Guy Raz?

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

• 24:26Speaker 01

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

• 24:30Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:38Guy Raz?

  Oh, cool.

• 24:39Speaker 01

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

• 24:44Guy Raz?

  And how did it do? How did it sell?

• 24:47Speaker 01

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

• 24:51Guy Raz?

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

• 24:54Speaker 01

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

• 24:58Guy Raz?

  There must have been, a $6,000 vacuum cleaner.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:01Guy Raz?

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

• 25:06Speaker 01

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

• 25:11Guy 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?

• 25:22Speaker 01

  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 money.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 26:20Guy Raz?

  You actually went to outside investors asking them?

• 26:22Speaker 01

  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, Lloyds Bank, and by some miracle, they agreed to lend me 600,000 pounds.

• 26:35Guy Raz?

  Why did they agree to do that?

• 26:37Speaker 01

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

• 26:44Guy Raz?

  What was the lawsuit?

• 26:45Speaker 01

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

• 26:48Guy Raz?

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

• 26:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:16Guy Raz?

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

• 27:19Speaker 01

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

• 27:23Guy Raz?

  I'm getting nervous for you thinking about this.

• 27:25Speaker 01

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

• 27:28Guy Raz?

  I'm getting nervous.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:39Guy Raz?

  And the tooling is the, is the.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  The tooling is the injection molds that you inject the plastic into to make all the components.

• 27:45Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  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, we didn't make any changes. We got our tooling. And I put the tooling in a plastics factory to make the plastic.

• 28:11Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 28:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  And so I had to go and get some orders. So I got some orders.

• 28:38Guy Raz?

  How, how did you sell, who did you sell them to? How did you know where to go?

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Well, I, 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. Who was sort of curious about this funny man who had done this yellow vacuum cleaner with a cyclone instead of bags.

• 29:05Guy Raz?

  Yellow and silver, right?

• 29:06Speaker 01

  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 and an Electrolux?

• 29:17Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:30Guy Raz?

  How much were you selling them for?

• 29:32Speaker 01

  £199. So it was three times what other vacuum cleaners were sold for.

• 29:39Guy Raz?

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

• 29:45Speaker 01

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

• 29:50Guy Raz?

  I see.

• 29:50Speaker 01

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

• 29:55Guy Raz?

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

• 30:02Speaker 01

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

• 30:08Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 30:08Speaker 01

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

• 30:23Guy Raz?

  How did you do that?

• 30:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:36Guy Raz?

  And this was 199...

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Three. 1993.

• 30:40Guy Raz?

  So how long was it before you were actually profitable?

• 30:44Speaker 01

  I was in the black from the first month on.

• 30:47Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:58Guy Raz?

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

• 31:00Speaker 01

  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 at the beginning was, "Say goodbye to the bag."

• 31:18Guy Raz?

  Say goodbye to the bag.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  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 that.

• 31:31Guy Raz?

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

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:42Guy Raz?

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

• 31:46Speaker 01

  I was too busy, actually. It's like going down a fast ski run. You know, 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.

• 32:00Guy Raz?

  How much revenue were you making by the time you were the number one bestselling vacuum in the UK? What was the annual revenue for Dyson? Do you remember?

• 32:08Speaker 01

  I don't know. It was probably $100 million.

• 32:11Guy Raz?

  In two years? That's incredible.

• 32:14Speaker 01

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

• 32:18Guy 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.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. And it's real. 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.

• 32:39Guy Raz?

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

• 32:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 32:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 33:20Guy Raz?

  This is like 2002, 2003, something like that?

• 33:22Speaker 01

  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?

• 33:38Guy Raz?

  Just like you on TV.

• 33:39Speaker 01

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

• 33:46Guy Raz?

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

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Well, I didn't know that.

• 33:52Guy Raz?

  You're right.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  And I, but I, so 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, 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's good.

• 34:11Guy Raz?

  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, bladeless fans, dryers, anybody who's gone to a sports arena or a movie theater in the U.S., or certainly in the U.S. and probably elsewhere, has used a Dyson hand dryer that you just put your hands in and out of.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Oh, good.

• 34:36Guy Raz?

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

• 34:39Speaker 01

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

• 34:42Guy Raz?

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

• 34:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 35:12Guy Raz?

  I, 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.

• 35:21Speaker 01

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

• 35:25Guy 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?

• 35:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 36:04Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  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.

• 36:18Guy 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, I got them, I was right?

• 36:34Speaker 01

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

• 36:51Guy Raz?

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

• 36:56Speaker 01

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

• 37:00Guy 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-

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Minus, being minus.

• 37:14Guy 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.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, it is. In a way, that it's, I find it quite nice that this 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.

• 37:44Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 37:56Guy 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?

• 38:06Speaker 01

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

• 38:17Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  Because luck is around. You know, I'm, I did long-distance running at school.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 38:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  So, and I've learnt 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.

• 38:59Guy Raz?

  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 of marriage.

• 39:36Guy Raz?

  Hey, 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 Sorrentino. And as part of his job, Mike would be out in the field using his smartphone to take pictures for his company's website.

• 39:52Speaker 02

  And 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.

• 40:03Guy Raz?

  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.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, think about it. I mean, you have a camera that you carry around all day, every day, but it doesn't even have a lens cap.

• 40:22Guy Raz?

  So Mike figured he would design an iPhone case where you just slide a switch at the top to cover up the camera lens.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  And on the inside of that lens cover is a fabric lining, and it also wipes the lens clean. Of any smudges.

• 40:35Guy Raz?

  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.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  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.

• 40:51Guy Raz?

  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.

• 41:06Speaker 02

  Even close friends were like, this is a dumb idea. Why are you doing this?

• 41:11Guy Raz?

  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.

• 41:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm not one of these OtterBox or Speck 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 to 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.

• 41:39Guy Raz?

  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 iPhone 5 and 5S cases with lens caps. And then somebody gave him a tip.

• 41:53Speaker 02

  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.

• 42:01Guy Raz?

  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.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  And there were a lot of people that came up to me and said, well, jeez, I feel like this should be on the market already.

• 42:15Guy Raz?

  But no, Mike says he was actually the first guy to come out with an iPhone case that has a lens cover and cleaner.

• 42:22Speaker 02

  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.

• 42:34Guy Raz?

  Since he launched the Eye Patch Case four years ago, Mike's been doing a pretty modest business. He's 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.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  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.

• 43:01Guy Raz?

  If you want to find out more about the company or hear previous episodes, head to our podcast page, howibuiltthis.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 [email protected]. And if you want to send us a tweet, it's at how I built this. Our show was produced this week by Casey Herman with original music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Thanks also to Sanaz Meshkhanpour, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is David Ja. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.