James Dyson: UK must focus on growth not inflation

“I started with nothing to lose,” he says. “I had lost a father. I think there is a kind of determination and [a sense of] demonstrate something to someone that exists in the brain, somewhere. Recover a life lost by my father, something like that? I don’t know. “A large number of prime ministers and businessmen have lost a parent when they were 10 years old…”

The school where Alec had taught classics, Gresham, educated James and his brother Tom free of charge (James also has a sister, Shanie). As an investment, the decision has paid off well. Dyson recently donated £35 million to the school, bringing his total contributions to the school to more than £50 million. (He has also been trying to donate £6 million to a local state primary school for a new science and technology centre, but has been rejected by the council.) The son of his father, young James liked the classics, art and racing cross country. He went to study at the Royal College of Art, but soon discovered that he was more interested in industrial design and changed courses.

“I was just behind David Hockney and Peter Blake and I’m a little younger than Norman Foster and Richard Rogers. [who died two years ago]. It was a revolutionary time. I was lucky to be in the middle of all this and it was an entrepreneurial moment. Unfortunately, not so much in the industry: there was confidence in pop, rock, fashion and art, but confidence in the industry was lacking. It’s strange because we had every reason to be confident. Look at the things we developed in the war and were developing then: the atomic bomb, the radar, the Mini, the Concorde.”

He married Deirdre, a successful rug designer, in 1968. and they had three children. A gallery to house some of his collection, which includes pieces by Hockney and Blake, is being built near his stately home in Dodington Park, Gloucestershire. Dyson is proud of its heritage in British design. An English Electric Lightning fighter plane, salvaged from a scrapyard and refurbished, is suspended from the ceiling of the Malmesbury canteen. A Mini Cooper, cut in half to reveal its cross section, abuts a wall.

But Dyson’s most famous work owes at least as much to the visual qualities of Pop Art as it does to British engineering. There has always been a tension with Dyson between the background and the presentation. After college, he began working with inventor Jeremy Fry, who put him to work designing a flat-bottomed landing craft called the Sea Truck. One example is located outside Dyson’s headquarters, not far from the boss’s Rolls-Royce. It was all about operation, a fiberglass boat designed to allow land landings without a port. It was used by the Egyptian army in the Yom Kippur War. His next key invention was the Ballbarrow, a dissonified wheelbarrow with a large round ball wheel. The Ballbarrow was popular (it reached almost 50 percent market share), but it didn’t make any money for its creator.

By the time Dyson started working on its vacuum cleaner, it had learned valuable lessons about design, marketing, pricing, and ownership. His research began in 1978, inspired by a centrifugal extraction system in his factory. The machine went through a legendary 5,127 prototypes, during which time Dyson and his young family lived on money borrowed against the family home. He founded the Dyson company in 1991 and launched the first vacuum cleaner two years later. The company was in the black from the beginning and Dyson owned 100 percent of it, as it does today. While he benefits from his successes – and has the yacht to prove it – he also feels the failures: in particular his electric vehicle, a project that was conceived in 1993 and was canceled in 2019 without reaching the market, after he decided it. It was going to be too expensive to compete with the motor majors.

“The raw engineering is very exciting – think Brunel or Concorde,” he says. “I’m not making bridges or Concorde. But I like to make a product I don’t like, like a vacuum cleaner, and make it interesting. I would like you to feel that when you use a Dyson it is like a Ducati motorcycle: that there is engineering and technology that helps you, and you can see it.”

As with Apple products, all the talk of improved features allows the user to feel less guilty about spending money on something that looks cool and costs more than the competition. Whatever else Dyson may be, he’s a marketing genius. There’s also a feminist aspect to his work: he took products traditionally used by women (vacuum cleaners, hair dryers) and gave them the kind of attention to detail usually reserved for cars or watches.

This may explain why his policy receives so little attention. It was disappointing to many on the other side of the argument, not all of them Daily Mirror columnists, that James Dyson, a dashing feminist inventor with Hockney glasses, turned out to be a Brexiteer. He says he would always have had to move his headquarters to Singapore, reflecting the shift in the world’s center of gravity: the UK accounts for just 4 per cent of his market.

“I knew that to be successful in Asia we had to be part Asian,” he says. “It sounds a little racist to say it, but we had to understand those markets. Often it is the markets that want the new things first. Their needs are different and they have a different attitude.” Is there naivety in Britain about its place in this new world? “Yes I think so. It’s strange, because Britain was a very international nation and now it seems like it’s not so international anymore.”

The center of gravity of its market had already moved to Asia, but the optics of moving the headquarters, after defending Brexit for the opportunities it could present for the manufacturing industry, were terrible.

“I tried to make [in the UK]”, he says. “I built this factory and spent hundreds of millions on equipment for it. I wanted to make it work. I tried it for seven or eight years and gave it everything I had. But our profits were going down, not because of labor costs, because they are the same [in Asia] – in Singapore, they are much higher – but because of the management and bringing in all these components from all over the world. Going overseas and doing everything in one place reduced those overheads.