What if the hardest engineering problem in the room is also the one nobody wants to admit they'd be proud of?
In this episode of Why Design, Chris Whyte shares the belief that sits at the heart of Kodu's work with Vax: that some of the most demanding engineering jobs are hiding inside products nobody dreams of designing.
Rather than dress this up as a neutral interview, Chris chose to disclose the commercial relationship upfront and make the case anyway. That decision led to an unusually direct pitch for a very real, very live hiring mandate.
This conversation isn't about vacuum cleaners. It's about what it takes to rebuild an entire engineering function from a blank sheet, and who actually wants that job.
"Why Design is powered by Kodu, a specialist recruitment partner for the hardware and physical product development industry."
"Through honest conversations with designers, engineers and creative leaders, we explore not just what they build, but why they build it; the beliefs, decisions and responsibility behind meaningful work."
About Kodu
"Why Design is produced by Kodu, a recruitment partner for ambitious hardware brands, design consultancies and product-led start-ups."
"We help founders and leadership teams hire exceptional talent across industrial design, mechanical engineering and product leadership, bringing structure and clarity to one of the hardest parts of scaling."
Full disclosure: this one is sponsored by Vax and TTi Floorcare, and it's Kodu, my own company, running the hiring. So you know exactly what you're reading.
Transcripts
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This episode is sponsored by Vax and TTI Floorcare.
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And Kodu, my company, is running the hiring I'm about to describe.
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So you know exactly what this is.
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This is why I wanted to make it anyway.
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I've recruited for Vax for more than 10 years.
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Over 50 people, including a VP of engineering and a head of design.
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I know that building well. Right now they are rebuilding their
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UK engineering and innovation function from the ground up.
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Advanced development, design engineering,
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and industrial design.
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all at once. I've not seen them move at this pace in a decade of working with them.
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So I'm going to tell you what is actually happening and you can decide.
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Back started in Droitwich in 1977.
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Alan Brazier, a local man, had been cleaning carpets commercially and
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got fed up that nobody had made a machine a household could use.
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So we built one. A milk churn,
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a shower pump and a water heater.
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It washed carpets in your own home and it was a world first.
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By 1987, Bax was the best selling vacuum cleaner in Britain.
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Hold on to that. The company was founded on wet.
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Water was the whole idea. Now the honest part.
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Nobody grows up wanting to design a vacuum cleaner.
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I've sat opposite enough industrial designers to know the dream is usually a car,
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a bike, a watch, something with a badge on it.
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But look what the problem actually is airflow,
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acoustics, filtration, sealing,
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mechanism design.
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and water, all in the same object,
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all fighting each other. It has to survive being dragged around a house
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for ten years and hit a price point that never moves.
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Get one of those wrong, and the customer knows within a week.
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It's a harder engineering problem than most of the things with badges on them.
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It just does not look like one from the outside.
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And what sits behind it is not small.
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Fax is part of TTI, Tectronic Industries.
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fifteen billion dollars of revenue last year,
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And more than forty-eight thousand people.
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The brands include Milwaukee,
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Ryobi, AEG, and Hoover,
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as well as Vax. Floorcare across the group has been pulled into
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a single global business. In their words,
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one product development, marketing,
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manufacturing, and engineering team.
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Droitwitch is where a meaningful part of that gets done.
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And Droitwitch has form here. The team there built serious computational fluid
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dynamics capability in-house.
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Cut prototyping time by around sixty percent and launched six premium platforms
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off the back of it. That work made the site the group's lead
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on separated development and fluid dynamics.
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Not the UK's lead, the global groups.
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So what is happening now is not a bolt-on.
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Advanced development standing up as its own team,
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working from a loose brief, exploring,
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testing the risky part early, proving it before anyone commits to tooling.
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An industrial design and research team
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Owning concept, CMF, and visual brand language,
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and wet product development built here from the ground up,
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pumps, impellers, ceiling, ingress protection,
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mechanism design, plastics. Forty nine years after Man in Droitwitch invented
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wet floor care with a milk churn,
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they are building that capability in Britain again.
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So why leave a job you're perfectly fine in?
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I've spent the best part of fifteen years telling people a role is a once
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in a lifetime career opportunity.
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So I know how that lands. And here's three reasons.
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One, you build the team rather than join it.
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People going in now set how this works.
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It does not come around twice at the same company.
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Two, the brief is deliberately loose.
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If you've spent three years executing decisions somebody else made,
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this is the opposite of that. And three,
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on WET you would be the person who built that capability in Britain.
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In five years somebody is the answer to who did that.
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It may as well be you. It will not suit everyone,
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and I would rather say so now.
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If you want a tight brief and a clear runway,
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this is not it. If your instinct when somebody says this has never been done before
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is to explain why it cannot work,
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you're gonna hate it. What they need is short,
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real hands-on product development experience.
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Comfort working from ambiguity.
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And the confidence to present your thinking to people well above you
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and hold your ground. The roles run from design engineer through
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to senior leadership. Every single role is live over at teamcodu.com slash jobs.
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And if you're not looking, but you know someone who should be,
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send it over to them. That's usually how the good ones get found.
