This guy sucks large

i'm not into promoting consumer products usually, but i like this guy's story of perserverance



The billion-dollar vacuum salesman
In 1978, Sir James Dyson, fed up with a lack of suction, set out to reinvent the way we clean
Robert Collison, Financial Post
Published: Saturday, February 17, 2007
Not many of us will ever have the opportunity to become a verb, but the billionaire British engineer and inventor Sir James Dyson is, happily, not one of those people. There may be a few benighted souls out there in Consumerland who still persist in "hoovering" their carpets, but for anyone with ambition to be a la mode, that is not the cool thing to do any more.

As James Dyson's revolutionary Dual Cyclone vacuum cleaner corners ever more market share, dust-busting homemakers everywhere find themselves "dysoning" the broadloom and the rec room and the front hall. They're dysoning anything that attracts dirt and debris.

How James Dyson became a verb is one of the most compelling business success stories of recent years. Just 14 years ago, he was a struggling entrepreneur who had mortgaged the family homestead to finance his gizmo. Today, he is the world's 18th richest Brit, worth more than US$1-billion (the Queen is a mere pauper by comparison). He has recently been made a Knight of the Realm by Her Majesty, and his little gizmo, the Dyson vacuum cleaner that never loses suction, commands 46% of the market in the United Kingdom, 32% of the market in the United States, ditto for most major markets in Europe and, in just one year since it was launched in Canada, has become the No. 2 brand. Not even Microsoft commanded such a huge portion of its market so quickly.


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Font: ****Moreover, the Dual Cyclone is an aesthetic tour de force as well as a technological breakthrough and business success. The Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam, are just a few of the museums around the world that feature the Dyson Dual Cyclone in their art collections.

Next week, the lanky and dapper Sir James, 59, still a reasonable facsimile of the trendy Royal Art College student he once was, will jet into Toronto to launch the two most recent versions of the Dyson vacuum cleaner -- the Stowaway and the DC-18 Slim. He will preach to the converted and unconverted alike about the central importance of innovation and invention to the success of any economy -- Canada's included.

To demonstrate his commitment to engineering excellence, last year he launched the James Dyson Award, an international prize worth US$10,000, given to a young engineer/designer/scientist whose invention most vividly demonstrates the qualities that made Sir James such an immense success. "The ability to think differently, persist through setbacks and create functional innovative products, improves the way we live," he says.

Those competing in the upcoming 2007 international competition will have already won national Dyson awards in countries such as the U.K., the U.S., France, Australia and so on. "It's quickly become the Miss Universe contest for young inventors," notes Mr. Dyson. That, or the American Idol for brainiacs, with Sir James a much more benign version of Simon Cowell.

All of this started innocently enough back in 1978, when Mr. Dyson got incredibly frustrated while "hoovering" the carpet at his home in the Cotswolds. "It just wasn't picking up the crap on the floo r," he recalls. Figuring the bag was too full, he replaced it. And the machine worked fine for one room, max, and again began losing suction. "I had been vacuuming since I was a child and this was the first time it ever occurred to me to think about what was going on inside the machine -- rather foolish for an engineer."

He quickly determined that the particles of dust almost immediately block the pores of the membrane bags in all conventional vacuum cleaners, thereby impeding airflow. The result: reduced suction and uncollected dirt.

A month or so later, at a timber yard, Mr. Dyson stumbled upon a solution to this problem. Noticing a duct sucking up sawdust, he followed it to the roof where it connected to a giant cyclone. "I knew enough engineering to know how a cyclone worked," he recalls. "The dust hits the curved walls of the cyclone tangentially at immense speed and falls into a bin and the clean air escapes at the top; it was a filter without being a membrane filter."

Wondering whether this would work in a household vacuum, Mr. Dyson raced home, tore out the bag from his vacuum cleaner, inserted a crude cyclone he fashioned from cardboard and scotch tape and, amazingly, it worked. "I was soon operating the world's first vacuum cleaner without a bag and with no loss of suction," he recalls proudly.

That brainstorm back in 1978 was the easy part. Converting his brilliant idea into a viable consumer product would consume the next 15 years of his life. In a Herculean struggle that on more than one occasion brought him to the brink of financial ruin, he engaged in seemingly endless litigation with competitors -- often foes, sometimes ex-colleagues -- conspiring to steal his technology. Let it also be noted, Mr. Dyson produced 5,127 different prototypes (between 1978 and 1983) before he ultimately perfected the Dual Cyclone to his exacting specifications. As one of Mr. Dyson's great heroes, the American inventor Thomas Edison, once famously opined, "Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration."

The result of his efforts was "a dual- cyclone system that accelerates the dust-laden air to high speed, flinging the dirt out of the a i r," or so Mr. Dyson described it in his book The Mammoth Book of Great Inventions. Initially, he expected to license the technology to established manufacturers. Invariably, he would confront the skeptic's mantra: "If there was a better vacuum cleaner to be had, Hoover or Electrolux would have invented it."

Such defeatism only spurred on the intensely competitive engineer. Reflecting back, he credits his schoolboy success as a marathon runner for the grit to realize his vision.

"The peculiar thing about research and product development and generally making a success of life is that so often the moment you feel utterly exhausted is the moment you are about to succeed," he says. "Running is like that as well; the very moment you feel the most pain and feel the most despondent is the moment you must accelerate and make the extra effort."

Being turned down by the big boys only convinced Mr. Dyson he should manufacture his invention himself. "I felt these guys were not doing what they should be doing, which was to build a better product and, besides, they never gave me a good reason for rejecting cyclonic technology."

Steeling himself for one last battle, Mr. Dyson borrowed $1.2-million -- "it's not a lot of money to start production, but it's amazing what you can do with a small amount of money" -- and launched Dyson Appliances. What ensued astonished even the intrepid inventor himself. "It was the only business I ever started where I made a profit in the first month and every month thereafter."

At the beginning, the marketing was almost entirely word-of-mouth and rave reviews in the media. It was clearly a winning marketing strategy: Within two years, the Dyson Dual Cyclone had sucked up the largest market share in the U.K. and has never looked back.

Like Microsoft's Bill Gates, maintaining ownership and control of a powerful -- and disruptive -- new technology has transformed Sir James Dyson into an immensely wealthy man and he has many of the perks that come with it: the $45-million Palladian estate, Dodington Park, in Gloucestershire, a chateau in France and a townhouse in London's exclusive Chelsea district. But money, he claims, has never been the big motivator in his career. "I just love solving problems and making things work better."