Sir James Dyson is a man that needs very little introduction – the inventor who heads up Dyson, present in 85 countries worldwide, has dedicated his life to solving problems and creating often ground-breaking products and becoming a household name in the process.
While IFA 2025 was on, I got to sit down with the man himself at the Berlin Dyson Demo Store and ask some burning questions about the company’s new products and what went wrong with some old ones, too.
The new Spot+Scrub Ai robot addresses a big issue with robot vacs
“When you wash the floor, you get some of the dirt up, but not all the dirt, so if you’ve got a particularly difficult stain, at the moment, robots just go over it and that’s it, and the difficult stain is left there. So, our big thing with the Spot+Scrub is that we know if we haven’t cleared the stain, we go back and go over it, until we’ve cleared it and we know that we’ve cleared it. That’s a particular issue we think we’ve answered with ours.”
Separate wet and dry robot vacs would be my preference
“These products that do wet floors and dry floors don’t have the suction power of our [existing] machine (the Dyson 360 Vis Nav). So, if you’re happy having poorer suction and poorer carpet cleaning but you want it all in one product, that’s fine, that’s your choice. But I would want this [the Dyson 360 Vis Nav] and then I’d want a separate wet machine. People seem to like it all in one!”
Deciding when a product is ready for release is simply a judgement issue
“It’s got to work, be reliable, do the job well and do the job that we thought it would do when we started work on it. Sometimes we change our minds halfway through and do it better or add something to it. But to stay alive you have to launch a product at some point. We don’t rush into a product, or do a product, if we think it’s not doing well enough. I don’t think wet robots are doing well enough at the moment, so that’s one of the reasons we haven’t rushed into it.”
Dyson has built stair-climbing robot vacs
“It’s very dangerous climbing stairs by the way – there are huge liabilities over that. We’ve done that, we’ve built robots that do that, but we don’t launch them because if they fall down they hurt somebody.”
Sometimes things work and sometimes they don’t: Dyson Zone
“We actually started it [Dyson Zone] before Covid, so it had nothing to do with Covid – it’s just so you can breathe clean air. We sold an awful lot in Los Angeles during the fires. I think nowadays you can’t see pollution, except maybe in India, but it’s there – so people don’t see the need for it.
“And also it’s a slightly confusing product because – what is it? – is it headphones or is it an air purifier? So people I think didn’t understand it. I think people felt slightly self-conscious wearing it, although they wear motorcycle helmets with things round the front, but then they have to don’t they.”
Copycats are a problem for consumers
“I think it’s bad, but it’s not only bad for me, it’s bad for the customer because a customer doesn’t get choice. You know – do your own motors, do your own designs, don’t copy ours – give the consumer a choice. There are people who think that people copying each other is good for the customer because it creates competition – actually, I think it’s the reverse – the customer gets less choice, and I think it’s immoral.”
“At school, if you copy someone’s work, you get expelled – we allow it here. The plagiarist, the people copying, haven’t had to do the research, they haven’t had to experiment and see if people will buy it or not – they haven’t had to go through that process, they just copy something that’s successful. We don’t allow it in music, why is it allowed industrially, where the investment is huge?”
I wish I’d have invented the jet engine
“It went from 16,000 moving parts to one moving part and has changed the world, literally. The story is extraordinary – this apprentice aircraft engineer came up with the idea and nobody believed him. The reason that it exists at all really – or probably not the reason it exists, the reason it happened – is that Helena Bonham Carter’s grandfather funded it and never got the recompense for it.”
Billy Connolly has something in common with engineers
“You know Billy Connolly, the comedian, he doesn’t know what he’s going to say when he goes on stage, so he thinks of something that makes him angry and that gets his juices flowing and it all happens from there. I think it’s a little bit the same for engineers…”
Imperfect products keep me awake at night
“What keeps me awake at night…to say I get angry is probably the wrong word, but I get frustrated that products won’t perform as well as they could or things they won’t do. That’s what sort of irritates me and keeps me awake and once I’ve discovered a product has a problem, it gnaws away at me and I want to solve it. It’s a horrible disease!”
