A $22B Empire Built on Fluid Dynamics

The meteoric rise of the Dyson brand has been nothing less than astonishing.?Sure, it hasn’t hurt that his vacuums were sexy, but what really mattered was meeting an unmet customer need by repurposing a centuries old fluid dynamics design.?

It was 1978 and James Dyson was fed up with changing vacuum bags. While working at the Kirk-Dyson company, Sir James had the need to remove particulates from an air stream in his factory. He learned from colleagues of a device known as a cyclone separator which uses the centrifugal forces resulting from fluid vortices to separate materials by density. He also learned that a local sawmill used such a device. As he tells it, he covertly scaled a fence at night to take measurements of the cyclone which he would rather unscrupulously use to create a replica cyclone. Once built, it worked like a charm. It was only natural for Dyson to draw the parallel to his nemesis the vacuum bag and begin working to disrupt the vacuum cleaner industry.

Incumbents Don’t Hear Opportunity Knocking

Here is where the story gets interesting. Dyson first took his idea to his fellow directors at Kirk-Dyson and was met by what is a familiar rebuttal to some, “If it was that easy, the incumbents would already be doing it.”? After insisting, he was eventually kicked out of the partnership. Leaning on a bank loan and seed funding from a mentor, Dyson set out on his own. Lacking a fluid dynamics background and the computational tools used today, Dyson took a build-and-test approach to prototyping in his backyard shed. A few years and grey hairs later, he had a working prototype.?

At this point Dyson made what could have been a strategic error; he took his invention to the incumbents in hopes of a licensing deal. Hoover, Electrolux and a few other domestic appliance companies were shown the details of the design and test results, but, luckily for Dyson, declined. They were so heavily invested in the “razor and blade” business model, profiting heavily from selling replacement vacuum bags, that they failed to recognize the potential for a tectonic shift in the market if a key user preference for bagless technology could be realized. All except Amway, that is, who declined and then produced a remarkably similar machine the following year – a patent infringement for which Dyson was later awarded a hefty sum.?

After a briefly successful licensing deal in Japan in the mid-80s, Dyson believed he could do better and sought financing to expand the design and manufacture of his invention. He first approached venture capital firms who turned him down on the basis that a designer turned entrepreneur would not be a good fit to run an appliance company. This setback again turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as he was later able to secure the funding needed without sacrificing equity from Lloyds Bank.? He founded Dyson Appliances Limited in 1991.

What might have been if incumbents had been more forward-thinking? Or what if venture capital had been more accepting of non-conventional business leadership? Would the vacuum market be where it is today? While incumbents and equity funding can accelerate getting products to market, it is perhaps innovative entrepreneurs who can maximize their value the best.

Two Are Better Than One

Cyclones function because momentum is conserved in a closed system absent of dissipative forces. You might recall that momentum conservation is one of the concepts underlying the derivation of the Navier-Stokes equations that govern fluid dynamics. Here is how it works. A fluid inlet is oriented tangentially to the axis of a cylinder or cone. The walls of the cone provide a centripetal force causing the fluid to spin around the cone’s axis.?In the case of a conical cyclone, flow accelerates as it progresses towards the smaller end of the cone in order to conserve angular momentum, much the way an ice skater spins faster when their arms are drawn in. Solid particles entrained in the flow behave similarly.

When flow reaches the bottom of the cone it turns in the direction of an outlet pipe located centrally on the cone axis and leading in the opposite axial direction.? The fluid follows in this direction because, well, it must go somewhere. Solid particles, on the other hand, are now spinning sufficiently fast such that the centrifugal forces pinning them to the outside wall are greater than the drag forces that struggle to keep them moving in the direction of the fluid flow. Gravity is often an additional factor when the cyclone is oriented vertically.? Only the least dense particles stay entrained in the flow and avoid capture by this method.

Dyson undoubtedly started his prototyping adventures with a typical single cone cyclone but quickly realized two daunting challenges. Cyclones are not great separators of particles of less than 20 microns nor particles with high drag coefficients that get sucked along with the fluid, such as lint and dust bunnies. Further, cyclones designed to capture one of these groups of particles will be “particularly” poor collectors of the other. Somewhere along the way, as evidenced by Dyson’s first US patent, he hit upon his now famous Dual Cyclone idea, in which a first, “low efficiency” cyclone is used to remove the large and heavy particles and a second “high efficiency” cyclone is used to collect troublesome small and light particles. This Dual Cyclone technology was the basis of all Dyson bag less vacuums released between 1993 and 2000 and which captured 47% of the upright vacuum cleaner market in the UK.

Well Then, Let’s Try 36

But why stop at two cyclones when submicron particles are begging to be captured?? Dyson quickly realized that a build-and-test design cycle wasn’t the most economical of approaches.?He also saw the potential of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to speed up the design process and hired a young postdoc with CFD expertise, Dr. Ricardo Gomiciaga, in 1997. A typically low-key engineer, Mr. Gomiciaga has been, by the sound of it, a central figure in all Dyson cyclone technology development programs. This included the next generation Root Cyclone technology, a multicyclone concept of which Mr. Gomiciaga is listed as a co-inventor. First incorporated in the DC07 model released in 2001, the Root Cyclone technology increased suction power 45% over previous models without increasing motor power by distributing dirty air to more and smaller high-efficiency cyclones and thusly reducing parasitic drag losses through flow path parallelization. These models helped Dyson move smoothly into US markets and capture 20% market share by the end of 2004.

Dyson has continued to innovate since then. New technologies have been developed to support vacuum performance, such as digital motors that spin at 125,000 rpm, battery technologies than have enabled high-performance cordless vacuums, and lasers! The cyclone count is now up to 36 in the latest Cinetic Big Ball model, an admirable manufacturing feat in and of itself, and capable of sucking up and capturing sub-micron particles like mold and pet allergens.

Creativity as Commodity

We can’t end without noting another important pillar of Dyson’s strategy and corporate culture – maintaining a competitive advantage through invention and intellectual property protection.? Dyson himself has attributed his focus on IP to an early failure to maintain ownership of the inventive rights to his “ballbarrow” machine design, listing it as one of his greatest failures. Dyson, the company, owns over 5000 original US patents and has filed and won numerous lawsuits defending those patents against the biggest names in the appliance industry. Dyson even makes IP education a core curricula at the James Dyson Foundation.?

The Bottom Line

You might call him “the king of suck” if you want, but Sir James has recently become the UK’s richest person amassing a net worth over $22B despite a recently abandoned investment in electric vehicle research and development. And while a few other products have undoubtedly contributed to revenue, most notably hand dryers and bladeless fans, most of Dyson’s wealth can be directly attributed to repurposing a century old particle separation technology and a bit of luck in staying out of his own way. As fellow designers, inventors and entrepreneurs, we should all be proud of Dyson’s success.