James Dyson Sold Us on a $400 Hair Dryer. Now He’s Trying a $499 Toothbrush.
The inventor known for household appliances is turning to oral care; ‘We don’t really structure things on a business plan.’
- James Dyson’s company unveiled the Dyson CameraJet, an AI-powered toothbrush that marks the firm’s first foray into oral care.
- The $499 toothbrush features a tiny camera that analyzes live images to trigger a burst of mouthrinse that flosses between teeth.
- Dyson said he has no idea of the market size or how many units will sell, noting that the company does not structure things on a business plan.
The inventor James Dyson has a winery, a knighthood, an English country pile, and an estimated net worth of more than $15 billion. He also has a sense of dread when it comes to trips to the dentist office.
“Although I’m quite a religious flosser, she always gets out the pickax and starts hacking away bits of hardened plaque,” he said on a video call from his superyacht, Nahlin. “I’ve had to undergo the pickax every time I go to the hygienist, and get ticked off.”
The common man just grins and bears the metal scaler scraping his teeth. But Dyson, 79 years old, spent six years inventing an AI-powered toothbrush that promises to floss teeth at the same time as brushing them.
The Dyson CameraJet toothbrush, unveiled Tuesday, is the first foray into oral care for Dyson’s company that is known for harnessing the power of air, be it in a vacuum cleaner, a hair dryer or a purifier.
Dyson and his team of engineers this time had to manipulate liquid. They developed a pump mechanism and gravity-free tank that works no matter the angle the brush is held at to control the flow. The brush head features a tiny camera that analyzes 28 live images a second to identify gaps in the teeth, triggering a conical burst of mouthrinse that flosses in between.
Dyson hadn’t worked with water since he codesigned a high-speed landing craft, the Rotork Sea Truck, as a student at London’s Royal College of Art. “This is something completely new. But why not?” he said.
Arriving in pink and blue colors, the toothbrush will be available in Sephora and BestBuy and on Amazon.com in September, and in Costco later in the fall. Dyson aims to convince consumers to swap out their analog toothbrushes and dental floss for a $499 machine—as well as a special nonfoaming Dyson toothpaste. The overall market for oral care is large, saturated, dominated by a handful of companies, and expected to grow at a moderate rate.
“I had no idea of the market size, and I’ve got no idea how many we’ll sell,” he said. “We don’t really structure things on a business plan.”
Dyson’s laissez-faire attitude to revenue projections is rooted in his independence. His father died before his 10th birthday, and his mother struggled financially to raise the family. He left his home of Norfolk, England, to study furniture and interior design at the Royal College of Art, and began his career designing products for other companies. One early hit was the Ballbarrow: a wheelbarrow that featured a ball instead of a wheel.
By the time Dyson married, had children, and became obsessed with improving the suction of vacuum cleaners in his early 30s, he had tired of having a boss. He obtained a bank loan and went into debt cycling through more than 5,000 prototypes in his quest to perfect his signature bagless cyclonic system. His mentor, the designer Jeremy Fry, initially invested in the business. Dyson later bought out Fry’s 49% stake for £45,000 and has held 100% control ever since.
Last year, the company generated around $8.3 billion in revenue.
Dyson built a sprawling steel-and-glass campus nestled in the shoulder of Malmesbury, about two hours’ drive west of London. He banned suits and ties in the workplace as far back as the 1990s. In 2019, less than three years after the Brexit vote he supported had passed, Dyson announced he was moving headquarters to Singapore. Critics labeled him a hypocrite; Dyson said that the company had outgrown the Malmesbury campus, and maintained his belief that Asia was the future of manufacturing.
He shunned the shiny sales techniques of the big advertising agencies. Over the years he instead appeared in Dyson commercials as the company’s sole spokesman, taking the tone of a lecturing physics professor. He became known, also, for admitting publicly to his failures. Among them: An electric car, announced in 2017 and abandoned due to a lack of commercial viability in 2019; and a washing machine, which hit the market in the early 2000s but ultimately was too expensive to make, repair and sell.
“Sometimes circumstances change, and sometimes we make mistakes,” he said. “You call time when it’s hopeless.”
The Dyson CameraJet will be advertised on billboards, in streaming TV commercials and in posts and videos across social media. The selling point is that it’s simply a toothbrush that also flosses your teeth.
“If it turns out not to be a good commercial idea like the car, we’ll stop it,” Dyson said. “But the board doesn’t all get sacked because we did something silly.”