Gtech: The window-fitter who became a UK success story

“I find it really painful if a club comes here and wins,” says Gtech founder and CEO Nick Grey. “Fortunately, it doesn’t happen too often.”

It’s midweek and he’s sitting in the empty stands of the Gtech Community Stadium, the home of Brentford FC in West London, while ground staff work on the pitch. He grew up a staunch West Brom fan, but he’s now emotionally as well as financially attached to Brentford.

Gtech, the household appliances company he founded in 2001 and still owns, signed a 10-year sponsorship deal with the football club in 2022, the year after it was promoted to the Premier League. It’s a sign of how far Grey’s company has come from the early days, when he was tinkering with inventions in his garage.

Gtech is a UK innovation success story. It developed the world’s first cordless, battery-powered floor sweeper, but is probably best known for its AirRAM range of vacuum cleaners.

Grey was inspired by his 80-year-old mother, who used a dustpan and brush on the stairs to avoid tripping on the cord while dragging a traditional, heavy, mains-powered vacuum cleaner.

Gtech has since expanded into products such as hedge trimmers, power tools and hair dryers, but Grey remains very involved in the design process. The company has annual revenues of close to £50m and employs around 100 people, based at the Gtech Hub in Worcester.

He’s a fiercely independent entrepreneur who has bootstrapped his company rather than taking investment, preferring to keep full control of his business and its innovative designs. He knew he had a passion for product design from an early age, but his path to making a career out of it was a winding one.

Grey grew up as one of seven children, so he was forever trying to fix the second-hand toys he received from his siblings. “My mum was busy, obviously, so I just got on with things on my own.” This stoked an early passion for hands-on engineering.

He spent a lot of time mending objects in the family’s garage, encouraged by his father, who also inspired him to want to own a business one day. His father was an entrepreneur who started a metal-casting company, making objects such as stirrups for horses, which took the family to Ireland for a period.

They eventually moved to Worcester, where Grey found school less than inspiring. “When a teacher’s got 30 kids and they need to get through a curriculum, they say they want creativity, but really they don’t,” recalls Grey. “They only want their kind of creativity. For me, creativity was exploring different concepts and not just reading the book that they wanted and making notes – that was boring for me.”

He realised the academic route wouldn’t suit him. So he worked for a while as a window-fitter on building sites, saving money and weighing up his options. Then he saw an advert to be a lab technician at Vax, which makes household appliances. He joined in 1989, beginning in a junior role assisting design engineers. But he continually asked for more responsibility and within 12 years had risen up the ranks to become head of the engineering department.

“I didn’t ever feel wanted at school; I felt like I was a pain in the neck,” recalls Grey. “But at Vax, they wanted my ideas and they wanted creativity, so I really thrived.”

He taught himself computer-aided design (CAD) in his lunch breaks and was given autonomy to develop his own original products. He played a key role in creating a household hit, the Vax Power 4000 vacuum cleaner. But he continued to experiment at home on his own ideas and in 2001 finally left Vax to start his own company, Gtech.

Grey believed he had spotted a gap in the market for a cordless household cleaning device. He’d been experimenting in his garage and was confident he could go it alone. Vax had been bought by a Hong Kong-based manufacturing company, but his colleagues there remained supportive.

He agreed to continue working for the company part-time until they could find his successor. His first popular product for Gtech was the Sweeper. “Cordless [back then] was little dust-busters, six-volt handhelds that cleaned a few crumbs from a toaster, but they couldn’t really do anything else,” says Grey.

Manufacturers had struggled with the weight of battery packs when designing cordless vacuum cleaners. The Sweeper was basically an electric dustpan and brush that swept the floor very efficiently. Later the AirRAM would add vacuum technology.

Gtech’s early products picked up good reviews and customers seemed to appreciate them. But how do you scale a company that makes innovative consumer appliances when you don’t want to take external investment? “I hear lots of people say, ‘Oh, I raised this much!’ And I’m like, ‘But that means you’ve lost your business, so did you need it?’,” he asks. “You know, the less you raise, the more of your company you still own.”

He grew the company organically, putting profits back into the business. In the early days, he made money by licensing his designs to other companies in markets abroad – companies he would later consider rivals.

A lack of capital also meant he felt like an underdog when larger rivals with deeper pockets realised he was a serious threat. According to Grey, once his products were stocked in big high street retailers, representatives from other manufacturers with a presence in those stores would steer customers away from them. “Well, that’s not cricket, I thought,” he recalls.

This is one reason why Gtech still prefers a more personal approach. “Probably 60 per cent of our sales are direct to consumers, so we’ve stuck with that.” His company finds customers through channels such as direct mail, social media and digital advertising.

This makes cashflow easier because you don’t have to worry about ordering stock, shipping it to retailers and then waiting for payment after sales data.

“There’s this huge gap where you have to lend everybody money or at least invest money in that long period of time, whereas with direct response, you sell the product and they pay you for it straight away.” Adopting tactics such as promotional codes helps a business trace exactly where they are spending the money and getting the benefit.

“Gtech isn’t that big a business,” Grey says. “There’s still 100 of us, that’s it. We’re a small, owner-run company, so we have to make sure everything’s paying its way and everything’s adding to either a better product, a better service or building our awareness. Otherwise, I don’t want to spend it.”

After nearly a quarter of a century, does Gtech aspire to be a large, global company? “Very much,” says Grey. “But Gtech was always a labour of love. I’ve been fortunate enough that I’ve made enough money that I could have stopped doing it. But I love working for Gtech and trying to do things right. I’ve been probably too obsessed with products and changing the industry. But I’m a designer at heart.”

The sponsorship of Brentford might be Gtech’s ticket to a bigger league. The games played at the stadium are seen by millions, due to the global popularity of the Premier League. The deal will certainly help to build brand awareness, says Grey, even if it’s not yet clear how that will convert to people buying its products in places such as China.

“There needs to be an emotional path all the way back to you when people buy something,” says Grey. Many people who bought his original products are older now. After a while, the word-of-mouth effect loses power.

“We need to reach the generation making their first homes in their late 20s and 30s,” says Grey. “We don’t advertise to that age group and we need to tell that story. But now lots of them have heard of us through this stadium, so we need to fill in the gaps and explain what Gtech is about. They might think, ‘You’ve got a stadium, but who are you?’”