“It all started with this,” James Dyson said recently, turning the cork-sized motor in his hand like a jewel. He was sitting in a conference room at his recently opened Soho flagship. A glass wall looked down on the sales floor while an IMAX-grade LED screen played a looped advertisement; the glare lit up Dyson’s circular glasses as he spoke.
That business now spans a worldwide consumer goods enterprise and two gleaming glass campuses in Singapore and Malmesbury, a town in England’s Cotswolds area. There are no statues of Dyson yet, but you get the sense there could be one day. About a decade ago, Dyson raised his already lofty inventor’s profile with the launch of a hairdryer, the Supersonic, whose V9 motor spins at 100,000 revolutions per minute to create gusts of up to 60 miles per hour.
Motors, in particular, have always been Dyson’s specialty. His work as a university student on an amphibious landing craft called the Sea Truck led him, improbably, to the invention of the bagless vacuum cleaner (1983), which in turn prompted him to found his eponymous engineering company (1991), a company now—also improbably—more famous for its contributions to global hairdressing technology than anything else.
Dyson was in New York to talk about the Supersonic “r”, which doubles the power of its predecessor and is shaped like a lowercase “r.” It uses the same motor, but provides more power with less energy, thanks to what may be the smallest heaters ever invented. (They’re about the size of quarters.) This tweakment strategy seems to power Dyson’s latest and greatest launches; this month, the brand is introducing a souped-up version of its styling tool Airwrap, called the “Coanda 2x”: Twice the windpower with 30 percent less heat for only $100 more than the original. Bargain vibes!
He was also keen to bring up Dyson’s first haircare products, the Chitosan collection, though it was a language he spoke less fluently. The marketing campaign for the mushroom-enhanced Chitosan styling range emphasizes other creams’ tendencies to provide a “crunchy” finish. The brand currently offers four pre-style creams designed for different hair textures (i.e. “Curly to coily light”) and a single post-style serum for all of them. More innovations are almost certainly on the way.
Asked if he’s used the products, Dyson said, “I have them,” and then, “I don’t really need them.” It was true: His cloud-white hair bounced at intervals.
For the past decade, Dyson has been the unlikely maverick of hair styling. The company succeeded not only in raising the median price of a hairdryer by hundreds of dollars, but its lavish marketing effort and early inroads with hair professionals have given the vacuum factory a historic glow-up. Dyson has benefited considerably. The UK’s Sunday Times Rich List valued his net worth at just north of $4 billion in 2015, the year Supersonic launched, and nearly $29 billion in 2024.
Lately, it’s been tougher to remain ahead. The critical beauty editor might look at Dyson’s entry into creams as an attempt to better compete against new entrants in the hot tools space — I am speaking, of course, of Shark, which has battled with Dyson in the vacuum market for years and has more recently engaged them on the hairstyling front.
Shark’s FlexStyler, a $280 device regarded by many as a “dupe” of Dyson’s best-selling $600 Airwrap, has demonstrably taken market share away from its more expensive counterpart. Unlike Dyson, Shark is also expanding faster into other realms of beauty tech. (In the past month, about four different people have recommended, unprompted, Shark Beauty’s 5-in-1 face mask that cools undereyes while it emits LED, but all of them received the tool gratis. Dyson also works with plenty of influencers, but wields them with a tighter fist.)
Of the competition, Dyson said, “Better not to mention, really.” He continues, “But of course, when I was in school, we were always told that if you copied someone else’s work, you get expelled. It was a very bad thing to do. I think it’s morally a bad thing to do. And I think in spite of what certain people say, that it creates competition, actually, it doesn’t… They should come up with their own ideas, and then the consumer would have a more interesting choice.”
“And finally,” Dyson adds, “intellectual property does not protect innovation well enough.” While the company has a dense portfolio of protectable patents for specific inventions, like its tiny motor, and for design codes like its logo and color scheme, these do little to safeguard it from dupes, like the personal fans designed to look like mini Supersonics I saw this morning on TikTok. Courts and judges should “be more supportive,” Dyson says.
Dyson confirmed the company is developing beauty tools outside of hair, as well as continuing to shore up its presence in Asia; its Singapore campus, the result of a $1 billion-plus investment, is now where most of its executives are based. “Britain’s a place that’s not very receptive to the sort of thing we do,” Dyson says. He has criticized his home country’s “anti-business” policies in the past, and in November 2024 wrote an op-ed in The Times of London calling a 20 percent family death tax the “death of entrepreneurship.” “I see the Singapore government is much more receptive and understanding, and it’s a wonderful gateway to Asia, the fastest growing market in the world.”
The company also stands to benefit from the conversation change from wellness toward longevity; Dyson has come to think of other inventions, like its air purifiers, as bearing beauty benefits. “Our purifiers are excellent for the skin,” he says, segueing into a list of terrifying anecdotes that approach MAHA territory—”candles are dreadful, and our furniture releases formaldehyde”—that also serve to reify the importance of his technology.
Unlike his fellow billionaires, Dyson does not seem hugely interested in wellness and longevity technologies, unless they incorporate a motor. He goes for daily runs, rarely touches alcohol, and says that everybody needs to take vitamin D3. And does he use skincare? “Yes,” he said. But what? He smiles and says, “It’s rather confidential.”
Brennan Kilbane is a New York–based writer and the beauty editor at The Business of Fashion. He is originally from Cleveland, and his interviews and essays have appeared in Allure, GQ, and New York
