Henry Hoover Another West Country-based vacuum cleaner company (which shifted most of its production to Malaysia some years ago) earns more of the plaudits and garners more press. But Numatic, the company behind the permanently cheerful, bowler-hatted cleaner that is Henry, has built its reputation on no-nonsense functionality allied to durability and longevity. There are an estimated eight million-plus Henrys still putting in a regular shift. It’s a welcome English engineering success story, but it’s curious to think that it’s also one that might never have happened but for the addition of an almost absent-minded doodle.
If you’ve ever worked for or as a builder in the UK, then the chances are you have made use of a Henry. You will know that this bad boy leaves Dyson in the dust when it comes to slamming a vacuum around a floor covered in rubble and nails. You don’t treat Henry with kid gloves almost to the point of abuse. You come to love and respect its capacity to take punishment and keep on ticking. So, this is doubtless a champion of robust fit-forpurpose engineering design. But it also offers a lesson in counter-intuitive branding. If one looks at the core users and the product offer, then brings in a ‘semiotically appropriate’ design, it might have been called ‘the mule’. Or possibly have looked like a powerful piece of kit. A few ‘turbo’ design flourishes perhaps. Something a real man would feel happy wielding. Think Caterpillar or DeWalt.
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Instead, it’s as cute as a button. Super easy to find on-site. And as loveable as the new tea boy (don’t take that the wrong way). This little chap is part of the team, ‘Oi, where’s the ‘enry?’ Visually, this is ‘the little engine that could’. Which just goes to show that being semiotically on message is also to be generic and predictable. Consumers in all walks of life typically have more imagination and will give you more latitude than we might give them credit for. And as a product, if it’s good enough for the builders, it’s good enough for the rest of us, in all its personas. In a house full of women we ended up with a Hetty. But the design means she has a place in our hearts. Not bad for a tough tool designed to do a dull job. SA