Startup Stories

The Shed, the Knighthood, and Singapore

In 1979, James Dyson ripped the bag out of his Hoover Junior, taped a cardboard cylinder to the back

By Conor Healy

April 7, 2026

In 1979, James Dyson ripped the bag out of his Hoover Junior, taped a cardboard cylinder to the back of it, and discovered he was onto something. He then spent the next five years building 5,127 prototypes in a cold coach house in the Cotswolds, kept financially afloat by his wife Deirdre’s salary as an art teacher, before he had a version he was willing to sell.

That is a genuinely remarkable story. Dyson tells it often, and he is right to. It is the kind of founder origin story that most people invent and he actually lived. Every vacuum manufacturer in Britain turned him down. Hoover told him that if a better vacuum cleaner were possible, Hoover would have built it. He built it anyway, launched it himself in 1993, and within a year the DC01 was outselling every other vacuum in the UK.

By 2023, Dyson’s annual revenues had reached £7.1 billion. He is, as of the last Sunday Times Rich List, one of the five wealthiest people in Britain.

And almost none of his products are made there.

800 Jobs and a Story He Told Himself

In 2002, nine years after the DC01 made him famous, James Dyson moved all vacuum cleaner manufacturing from his factory in Malmesbury, Wiltshire to Malaysia, where production costs were 30% lower. Eight hundred jobs went with it. The following year, washing machine production followed, taking another 65.

Dyson said he had agonised over the decision. He blamed international competition, soaring UK labour costs, and the need to expand into Asian markets. He said the move was about survival, not profit. That same year, the company reported profits of £40 million, up from £18 million the year before.

The trade union response was pointed. When the washing machine jobs followed the vacuum jobs to Malaysia, union leaders marked the occasion by singing Britney Spears. “Oops, I did it again.”

What made the move sting beyond the job losses was the timing of the brand mythology. Dyson had built his company on a very specific identity: the scrappy British inventor who beat the establishment. The clear bin, the bright colours, the bagless technology that every manufacturer said was stupid until customers bought it in their millions. The brand was British ingenuity in physical form. The factory in Wiltshire was part of the story.

And then the factory was in Malaysia.

Dyson’s argument, which the company still makes today, is that moving manufacturing freed up capital for research and development, that the UK operation retains thousands of engineers and designers, and that what matters is where the ideas come from rather than where the components are assembled. That argument is not without merit. It is also the argument every Western manufacturer has made for thirty years while the industrial Midlands and the English countryside quietly emptied out.

The Brexit Chapter

In 2016, James Dyson became one of the most prominent business figures in Britain to publicly campaign for Leave. He wrote op-eds. He gave interviews. Dyson argued that Brexit would liberate British manufacturers from EU regulation, open up new global trade opportunities, and create jobs. He was knighted the same year, though the honour had been in the pipeline before the referendum.

The Leave campaign used him extensively. Here was not a politician or an ideologue but a self-made industrialist, a man who had built something real with his hands, arguing that Britain would be better off out.

In January 2019, two and a half years after the vote, Dyson announced that his company was moving its global headquarters to Singapore.

The company said the decision had nothing to do with Brexit. It was about proximity to Asian markets, about being close to the manufacturing and supply chain hubs in Malaysia and Singapore, about future-proofing the business. CEO Jim Rowan asked, in the press announcement, that Dyson now be referred to as a “global technology company” rather than a British one.

The British press did not take this well.

The Daily Mirror ran a column calling Dyson a man who had “championed Vote Leave due to the economic opportunities it would bring to British industry before moving his global head office to Singapore.” Dyson sued for libel. In December 2023, he lost. The judge ruled the article was opinion, declined to find that Dyson’s reputation had been damaged, and noted he could not demonstrate financial loss from the publication. The column stayed up.

The Supply Chain Problem

There is one more chapter that does not get mentioned alongside the 5,127 prototypes story.

In February 2022, Channel 4 News reported allegations of forced labour conditions at ATA IMS, a Malaysian manufacturer producing components for Dyson. Twenty-four migrant workers from Nepal and Bangladesh subsequently filed a lawsuit in UK courts, describing conditions that included passports being withheld, workers being beaten, denial of toilet breaks, and being forced to work upwards of twelve hours at a stretch in unsanitary conditions.

Dyson terminated its contract with ATA IMS and denied liability. The case proceeded through the UK courts and set a significant legal precedent: that British companies can be held accountable in English courts for the actions of their foreign suppliers. In February 2026, Dyson settled the case. The compensation amounts were not disclosed. Dyson maintained it admitted no wrongdoing.

The company’s statement described the settlement as reached “in recognition of the expenses of litigation and the benefits of settlement.” The workers’ lawyers at Leigh Day issued an almost identical statement. Neither side said much more.

What the Prototype Story Leaves Out

None of this cancels the five years in the cold coach house. The 5,127 prototypes are real. The rejection letters are real. The wife’s teaching salary keeping the lights on is real. James Dyson built something from nothing and the product genuinely works better than what came before it, which is more than most people who have ever run a company can say.

But the prototype story, told alone, does a particular kind of work. It frames everything that follows as the natural extension of one man’s grit. It makes the brand feel like a craft project that got bigger, rather than a corporation that makes its products in Southeast Asia using contract labour, headquartered in Singapore for reasons that remain contested, selling aspirational Britishness at £500 a vacuum cleaner to consumers in the country whose manufacturing jobs it moved twenty years ago.

James Dyson is a complicated figure and Dyson is a complicated company. Both of those things are true at the same time, and neither the hagiography nor the takedown quite captures it.

What the story of James Dyson actually tells founders is something more uncomfortable than either version: that the narrative you build around your company will eventually be tested by the decisions you make when the numbers get large enough to matter. Dyson built a story about British craftsmanship, independent thinking, and doing things differently. Every decision since has been a negotiation with that story.

Sometimes the prototype is not the vacuum cleaner. Sometimes it is the founder himself.