How to Make It | the New Yorker

8/22/2019 How To Make It | The New Yorker Annals of Invention September 20, 2010 Issue How To Make It James Dyson built a better vacuum. Can he pull off a second industrial revolution? By John Seabrook September 13, 2010 n the fall of 2002, the British inventor James Dyson entered the United States I market with an upright vacuum cleaner, the Dyson DC07. Dyson was the product’s designer, engineer, manufacturer, and pitchman—its auteur. The price was three hundred and ninety-nine dollars. At the time, a bad one economically, most of the major vacuum-cleaner manufacturers were in a price war to produce a machine that could sell for less than a hundred dollars at the retail chains, where low-priced, high- volume sales are the standard business model. The idea that a mass of big-box-store shoppers would spend four hundred dollars for a vacuum cleaner was far-fetched indeed. “Dyson? Who’s he?” one vacuum-cleaner dealer said at the time, in a Forbes article. “If I were Hoover, I wouldn’t be quaking in my boots.” Not only did the Dyson cost much more than most machines sold at retail but it was made almost entirely of plastic, a material commonly associated with cheap products. And whereas other vacuum cleaners were frosted with sleek exteriors that hid the machine’s innards, the DC07 looked as if it had been turned inside out: it wore its guts on its skin. In the most perverse design decision of all, Dyson let you see the dirt as you collected it, in a clear plastic bin on prominent display in the machine’s midsection. “Of course, there were comparably priced vacuums on the market,” Bill McLoughlin, the executive editor of HomeWorld Business, a trade publication, said recently. But they were niche products sold by door-to-door salesmen who were employed by high-end brands. Dyson had only one salesman, essentially: James Dyson himself, a handsome silver-haired inventor, then in his mid-fties, who appeared in his own ads. Dyson didn’t hawk his vacuum; rather, he explained why it was superior in the calm manner of an engineer (though he didn’t look like an engineer, either—he looked like a British actor playing a Roman senator in an “I, Claudius”-style production). In its packaging, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/how-to-make-it 1/17 8/22/2019 How To Make It | The New Yorker the company did not rely on a striking logo or a “brand image,” such as, say, the red squiggly tail of the Dirt Devil. Instead, Dyson offered a brand story. One day in 1978, James Dyson was cleaning his house when he became frustrated with the way his vacuum cleaner quickly lost suction. Tearing several bags apart, he saw the problem—the bags’ pores, which separate the dirt from the air passing through the bag, quickly became blocked with dust, constricting the airow and reducing the suction. It was an obvious design aw, and yet vacuum cleaners had been made that way for a hundred years. As the brand story goes, Dyson thought about the problem, built thousands of prototypes, and nally came up with a vacuum cleaner that used centrifugal force, rather than a bag, to separate the dirt from the air. By creating a powerful cyclone inside the two-chambered circular bin—the air inside moves at nine hundred and twenty-four miles per hour, according to Dyson—his “Dual Cyclone” vacuum cleaner could spin even the tiniest motes of dust to the sides of the bin. Because it was bagless, Dyson explained in the ads, the machine “never loses suction.” Best Buy was the rst national retail chain to carry the DC07. The chain’s merchandise manager, David Kielly, had taken the vacuum cleaner home with him, and he had undergone the transformative experience that would soon become familiar to many of Dyson’s customers: the thrilling sight of the bin lling with the dirt and hair that your existing vacuum cleaner had failed to suck up. Dyson had grasped what the companies trying to make hundred-dollar vacuum cleaners had forgotten: that a lot of people get their kicks from buying appliances, and are willing to pay a premium for a machine that will deliver an emotional experience. By October, 2002, Best Buy had sold ten times more DC07s than it had expected to sell, and soon Target began carrying the machines, as did Home Depot, Sears, and Bed Bath & Beyond. Small children related to its vaguely anthropomorphic shape; it looked like a big toy. But it also looked serious—the solid yellow used for the body of the machine was a shade familiar in power tools but not in household appliances, and it gave the Dyson a gravitas that the lime greens and mulberries of the other brands did not possess. And it was beautiful: the durable polycarbonate plastic was ecked with aluminum to lend the nish the pleasing, glossy sheen that Jeff Koons brings to the surfaces of his balloon-dog sculptures. Within two years, Dyson was the market leader https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/how-to-make-it 2/17 8/22/2019 How To Make It | The New Yorker in dollars spent, and today has a twenty-three-per-cent share of the market. And Sir James Dyson is known to millions as the man who made vacuum cleaners sexy. yson came to New York for a day in June to launch his newest product, a desktop D fan—the Dyson Air Multiplier. With the Air Multiplier, Dyson is attempting to do a Dyson to portable electric fans: to introduce a three-hundred-dollar product into a market in which a top-of-the-line desktop fan sells for about eighty dollars, and a serviceable box fan can be had for less than twenty dollars (and for not much more than a hundred dollars you can buy an air-conditioner). By 11 .., it was already hot on the sidewalk of West Twenty-third Street, along which Dyson was rapidly making his way to the Best Buy at the corner of Sixth Avenue. He looked comfortable in white sneakers without laces and the Y-3 sportswear that Yohji Yamamoto designed for Adidas—navy slacks and a white warmup jacket, with a T-shirt underneath—and he walked with the gliding gait of the cross-country runner he was in the early nineteen-sixties, when, as a schoolboy in the East of England, he rst discovered how much he liked to win. He had not managed to get the ten hours of sleep he enjoys when he is at Dodington Park, the sprawling country estate he owns in Gloucestershire, but he did not appear tired. He wore the air of stoic forbearance that he often brings to public appearances for his products, smiling a wan, I’d-rather-be-in-the-lab smile. As the face of a company that is all about design and engineering, Dyson is in the paradoxical position of being the chief marketer of an anti-marketing philosophy, and the name behind a brand that pretends to have nothing to do with branding. On entering the store, Dyson took the escalator down to the windowless lower oor, where consumer products are sold. Pulsating colored lights emanating from screens in the nearby electronics section ickered in the faces of the customers and staff. He stopped by the aisle where the vacuum cleaners were displayed. At the end was the latest Dyson upright, the DC25 Animal, retailing for ve hundred and fty dollars, sitting next to a Dyson cannister vacuum, for three hundred and ninety-nine. The Dyson Animal handheld (two hundred and seventy dollars) sat next to that. Picking up the handheld, he said, “I think the main thing is that our products look like what they do—the engineering leads the design.” He explained that at Dyson there is no division between the engineers and the designers, such as exists in the automobile industry, for https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/how-to-make-it 3/17 8/22/2019 How To Make It | The New Yorker example. “We don’t have industrial designers. All our engineers are designers and all our designers are engineers. When you separate the two, you get the designers doing things for marketing purposes rather than functional reasons.” There were two Air Multipliers on display at the end of an aisle that featured conventional fans; both were switched on, and air was owing out of them, although at rst glance it wasn’t clear how this was possible, because all you can see is a large plastic ring—like an upright basketball hoop—sitting on a pedestal, with no visible blade. Whereas Dyson’s vacuum cleaners proudly display what other vacuum cleaners conceal, the Air Multipliers make a mystery of what in other fans is obvious: where the air is coming from. “First we took the bag out of the vacuum cleaner,” read the ad copy that went along with the in-store display. “Now we’ve taken the blade out of the fan.” An older woman with her hair piled up on her head and covered by a scarf was examining the other desktop fans in the aisle. She had walked right past the Dyson display without looking at it. “Excuse me, Madam, have you tried these?” Dyson beckoned her toward the display. “No, I haven’t.” “Well, you see, it’s a different kind of fan.” Dyson put his hand through the empty portal, with the air of a magician about to pull something out of his hat.

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