James Dyson leaps out of his chair like a restless child and picks up a big yellow-and-gray vacuum—one of several Dyson contraptions congregated around the podium at the Wired Business Conference last May. The audience laughs uneasily. Will he break into song? Start vacuuming the stage? “Do you want to know how to empty it?” he asks, ejecting the transparent chamber where hypothetical dust bunnies collect. “You take the bin off and …” There’s a click and the canister’s bottom flaps down, releasing a cascade of imaginary grime. The thing is, the audience probably does know how it works. Many of them own Dysons. It’s the top-selling upright vacuum brand in the US.
Twenty years after he launched his business—now a multinational enterprise with nearly 4,000 employees and $1.5 billion in annual sales—Dyson, at 65, still radiates a nuclear inventor’s heat.
via Wired
