CameraJet uses tiny camera and mouthrinse bursts to floss teeth while brushing
Dyson unveiled the CameraJet on Tuesday, the appliance maker’s first entry into oral care after decades building its brand around vacuums, hair dryers, and air purifiers. The $499 brush enters a market that is large, saturated, dominated by a handful of established companies, and expected to grow at a moderate rate.
The toothbrush is built around a brush head fitted with a tiny camera. The camera captures 28 live images per second of the area being brushed, identifies the gaps between teeth, and triggers a conical burst of mouthrinse from the brush head that the company says flosses in between. The device also uses a pump mechanism and a gravity-free reservoir that controls the flow of liquid regardless of the angle at which the brush is held.
The CameraJet will be sold in pink and blue at Sephora and BestBuy and on Amazon.com beginning in September, with Costco stocking the product later in the fall. Dyson is also marketing a special nonfoaming toothpaste to be used with the brush.
In an interview, Dyson said the product was born from personal experience. “Although I’m quite a religious flosser, she always gets out the pickax and starts hacking away bits of hardened plaque,” he said of his visits to the dental hygienist. “I’ve had to undergo the pickax every time I go to the hygienist, and get ticked off.”
Dyson, 79, said the CameraJet took six years to develop. It also marks Dyson’s first sustained work with liquid since his student days, when he codesigned a high-speed landing craft, the Rotork Sea Truck, at London’s Royal College of Art. “This is something completely new. But why not?” he said.
Dyson framed the launch without traditional market analysis. “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.”
The privately held Dyson company generated around $8.3 billion in revenue last year. James Dyson has an estimated net worth of more than $15 billion. That financial cushion reflects Dyson’s longstanding independence — he holds 100% control of the company after buying out his mentor, the designer Jeremy Fry, for £45,000.
Not all of Dyson’s product bets have worked out. The company announced an electric car in 2017 and abandoned it in 2019, citing a lack of commercial viability. A washing machine launched in the early 2000s was ultimately too expensive to make, repair, and sell. “Sometimes circumstances change, and sometimes we make mistakes,” Dyson said. “You call time when it’s hopeless.”
The CameraJet will be advertised on billboards, in streaming TV commercials, and on social media. Dyson has historically shunned large advertising agencies and appeared as the company’s sole spokesman in its commercials, often in the tone of a lecturing physics professor.
Dyson acknowledged the possibility of failure for the new product. “If it turns out not to be a good commercial idea like the car, we’ll stop it,” he said. “But the board doesn’t all get sacked because we did something silly.”
Dyson built a sprawling steel-and-glass campus in Malmesbury, about two hours’ drive west of London, where 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, Dyson announced he was moving the company’s headquarters to Singapore — a decision critics labeled hypocritical and one Dyson attributed to the campus having been outgrown.