- Dyson Nautik was positioned more like an attachment than a true hard floor washer.
- The author argues that Chinese hard floor washer makers had already moved far ahead in this category.
- The launch still shows that Dyson was paying attention to the China market.
A few days ago, I posted Dyson's new-product teaser on WeChat Moments. At the time I was also discussing it with some friends: had Dyson moved so fast that it had already developed a hard floor washer?
Then this morning I saw Dyson launch a new product called Nautik. Nautik is essentially a floor-washing attachment.
The main unit is basically the V12 configuration, so I will not introduce it in detail. The floor-washing attachment is configured as follows:
Nautik is equivalent to an additional attachment. The original vacuuming attachments still exist. In other words, on the floor there are now two main cleaner heads: dry debris uses the soft roller head, and wet mess uses the floor-washing attachment.
After seeing this product, I was quite disappointed. Dyson is a giant in the cleaning-appliance industry and has led the industry's development since its founding. Not to mention that in recent years it led the development of cordless vacuum cleaners and brushless motors. It is fair to say that without Dyson, the cleaning-appliance boom of the past few years would not have happened.
But in the past few years, Dyson's vacuum cleaner products and innovations have often been hard to describe. If you say it has innovation, the innovation is often impractical. If you say it has no innovation, it often gives you something odd and off the mark. My feeling is that some of the vacuum cleaner innovations in recent years do not feel like the work of Sir James Dyson. They feel more like ideas that product managers in a large company thought up at home and rushed into implementation.
Now let us talk specifically about this hard floor washer attachment. The floor brush has a clean-water tank, a dirty-water tank, and a roller. When it switches to floor-washing mode, the vacuum motor does not work and the clean-water tank starts supplying water. The roller brush scrapes dry debris into the dustbin, while dirty water is recovered into the dirty-water tank. The clean-water tank capacity is 300 ml, and the dirty-water tank capacity is 360 ml. These tanks are far too small. Current hard floor washers generally have clean- and dirty-water tanks of more than 700 ml.
To describe this product harshly: small factories in Suzhou are three years ahead of Dyson. Attachments compatible with Dyson like this were already on sale across major e-commerce platforms three years ago. It feels like saying an Apple phone copied a Gionee phone, or a BMW copied a Zotye car. It is hard to say exactly what is wrong, but it just feels strange.
I also went into Dyson's new-product launch livestream. Many people were asking whether this product could self-clean. In reality, it cannot self-clean like a hard floor washer. The host in the livestream was also being pressed quite hard by the questions. For the record, the host was still very good-looking.
The core reason is simple. Since 2020, China's cleaning-appliance market has been taken over by hard floor washers, while traditional lithium-battery products have declined sharply. Facing this difficulty, the China-market team must have made requests to headquarters. But foreign companies often do not understand the Chinese market, and China changes faster than anywhere else in the world. If you fall behind by one step, you immediately lag behind. Since Dyson's real hard floor washer could not be launched in the short term, it first launched a floor-washing attachment.
The industry has very high expectations for Dyson. No one expected such a product to come out, and everyone was suddenly speechless.
Looking on the bright side, this attachment at least proves Dyson still cares about the China market, so it customized an attachment for China. Perhaps Dyson's real hard floor washer will also come out around May or June next year.