Dyson requires 'radically different' first products before entering a new category, Jake Dyson says

Asked whether any category would be off limits, Jake, the son of founder James Dyson, said it would not. "It has to be radically different," he said, adding that the first product must carry performance claims and show a difference against a competitor "by a magnitude," or the company would not consider it. He described the 2016 launch of the Supersonic hair dryer as a model for that approach, saying it brought change to a market that had barely shifted in decades.

The CameraJet fits that description, according to TechRadar. It carries a camera that streams a live view of the inside of the mouth back to the user and is trained to recognize gaps between teeth, then directs water or mouthwash at them to handle flossing. Whether it repeats the Supersonic's commercial success is not yet known.

Jake set a second condition before a new-category product reaches the market: "It's got to work properly." He said the CameraJet could probably have been launched two years earlier, but that it would not have reached every gap perfectly, which he called unacceptable. Shortly after the interview, TechRadar reported, early adopters began reporting faults with the toothbrush. Dyson attributed the problems to an isolated production issue that it says is now under control.

A third rule is that Dyson does not launch a new category with a single product. "If we're going to go into a new area, then we'll do that knowing we've got more products behind it," Jake said. Pressed on whether that meant further iterations, he said the aim is "expansion in that category, quite quickly," and confirmed the company would begin with a roadmap of multiple products. More oral care devices are therefore expected to reach the market before long.

Jake also described how Dyson reuses engineering work across product lines rather than repeating development that is expensive and slow. "I think you try not to do things twice that take an awful long time and a lot of investment," he said. "You try to use it again in another product." He pointed to the scaled-down mechanics and battery system developed for the Airwrap, which also appears in the Supersonic r hair dryer, in a version used in the brand's new hot brush, and in the PencilVac and now the PencilMop.

That transfer between teams is not a defined process, he said. "It happens naturally. You cross-pollinate, you join the dots. 'If we put that with that, we could do this.'" He added that as a company Dyson is getting better at predicting such combinations in advance. The same cross-pollination, he said, sometimes exposes technologies Dyson still needs to develop behind the scenes so it can enter new areas and, in his words, do something better than anyone else.