Like Charlie Bucket at the gates of the Wonka Chocolate Factory, I was overexcited as I drove into Dyson’s Wiltshire HQ.
In a morning with some of Dyson’s top engineers at my disposal, I planned to lift the lid on some of the secrets behind those iconic household gadgets.
Who decides what products we next need in our homes? How does an idea become a machine and obviously, most importantly, what is in development right now behind closed doors?
Full disclosure, I am a huge Dyson fan – I don’t have every gadget, but I have spent more wages than I would care to admit on a collection of cleaning, drying, straightening, and cooling machines.
With 30 years as a consumer journalist under my belt, there aren’t many domestic appliances or household tools that I haven’t had my critical hands on.
A machine that I actually want to use, that does the job with ease and efficiency is surprisingly hard to come by.
Beer was here! Alice visited Dyson in Wiltshire to lift the lid on its gadgets
The first time I really registered the draw of a Dyson product, I was filming a TV show in the mid-nineties.
Ordinary street, ordinary house and it sticks so clearly in my mind that when someone dropped a crushed biscuit on the floor, the interviewee reached for a purple and gold wand hanging on a dock by the kitchen door and effortlessly vacuumed up the mess.
No scrabbling in the cupboard under the stairs, no dustpan and brush, no shifting and reaching for a socket. It was a household chore completed in beautiful efficiency.
I was smitten.
Dyson is of course James Dyson and he is woven into every product that leaves the factory. Earlier in the week, it revealed Dyson had sold 20million units in a single year for the first time in its history.
An inventive and curious child, James grew into a questioning adult and one day at home, challenged by a wheelbarrow refusing to move across a soggy garden, he questioned the accepted shape of the everyday object, swapping a slim stick-in-the-mud wheel for a ball that rolled easily over the clay.
Spray painting the new barrows then led to contemplation of the technology of airflow.
It was then the extension of this new knowledge about the movement of air led to a home operation on James’ poor performing vacuum cleaner.
It lost suction power as the bag filled up. I can only imagine the happy domestic scene as James constructed and tweaked it’s structure until the fundamental prototype of the bagless cyclonic vacuum cleaner was born on his floor.
Famously, it was to take 5,127 factory iterations of the machine before it was ready to go to market.
Trial and error, trial and error, many times over, leading finally to success.
Most radical vacuum redesign in decades
The first stop on my Dyson tour was a chat with senior engineer, Ketan Patel.
My opener: Is this building full of brilliant minds making decisions about what we mortals need in our homes and how we want our everyday machines to function?
He put me right. Dyson machines are not made by boffins in white coats disconnected from the real world.
This is not a business where ideas get stuck in the system or stay in an unread email.
The feedback from homes where Dysons have to earn their keep goes straight into a live and receptive process.
If you purchase the new DysonV16 Piston Animal when it is released next year, you have Ketan’s grandmother to thank for the fact that switching a head from dry vacuum to wet clean, no longer requires a stoop to the floor.
The release button has been moved up to near the user’s hands and magnets satisfyingly click the shaft of the machine into the new head.
You are ready to segue from carpet to kitchen floor at ease. Sadly, Grandma is no longer here to enjoy the launch of her influence onto the UK market next year.
In the next laboratory, shelves bear pots of every kind of household detritus that one might possibly need to vacuum off the floor, (even same brand but slightly different cereals from across the world).
Here engineers are testing probably the most radical vacuum redesign since the first Dyson stick.
The motor has been shrunk to the diameter of a two Euro coin and the narrow shaft of the stick, now not much broader than the inner tube of a loo roll, is where the dirt satisfyingly collects.
Miniaturising is obviously a drive for Dyson sales in the East where the PencilVac 15067795 has just launched.
The tweaks that will apparently radically improve the vaccuuming experience have been well received: A green light shines from both the front and the back of the head, illuminating dirt, fine hairs and particles.
Why green? Because it is apparently the most comfortable light for the human eye to see and because research showed that it was the least common floor colour in the UK.
I was…
Read More: Secrets of Dyson: ALICE BEER visits its gadget-laden HQ to try out the products