The Accidental Innovator: Blendtec's Tom Dickson

Oh, yeah, it's kind of a mess. All right. Kind of a mess in here. But see the face?

Where's the glasses, man? Yeah, you gotta be like Bono, you know, wear those all the time. We don't recognize you without the glasses.

I have to go like this. And.

He wears them all the time at his desk just in case.

I'm always looking for trouble, always looking for things that will blow up.

So what's changed for you since the videos started? You do the Will it Blend? Videos?

Yeah, we do the Will it Blend? Videos. I just got a nice article this morning that people are always pulling articles, and this is just similar to the one in Harvard Business Review. It. And this is, as I recall, this was in November, and then there's another one in December. There's four great articles in December and Harvard Business Review. The last one's kind of about me. But the first one, my very favorite, is the first one of those four articles. But anyhow, in November, it talks about how some CEO did some presentation, and after someone came up to him and asked a question and he really messed up, he said something he shouldn't have said. And that's the problem with this kind of stuff. You know, you do a. No, no. Everybody in the world knows about it when he did bad, and what happened is his employees about killed him. And then a company almost died because of this. And then they go on to say, and then there's Tom Dixon, will it Blend? At Blendtec. You know, and this is a good example. And that's kind of this article. It just came out today in something. I don't know. I didn't even have somebody highlighted. But anyhow.

When did you start Willow Blend? It's been five or six years.

Yeah, no, it's been a little over four years ago. In October.

Yeah.

So it's a little over four years ago. And this is when. I mean, my marketing guy came up to me. I just hired this guy, and he sees a pile of sawdust, and he says, you know, I don't. He says, what is this? And someone says, oh, that's Tom fooling around, trying to break blenders again. So he went out with a $50 budget because he says, what's my budget? I said, you know, we've never had a marketing budget. We don't put money into marketing. We put money into engineering. And so he said, can I have 50 bucks? I said, yes. So he put my name on a lab coat. He went out and bought a six pack of Coke and a rotisserie Chicken and a bunch of stuff like that. Some marbles and a rake and so on. And so then he put it up and he came to me. I mean, I didn't know what he was doing, and he came to me five days later, says, we hit a home run. We have 6 million views on YouTube. And I said, who tube? I didn't even know YouTube was. And now, of course, Google and YouTube take real good care of us, and they make sure that we're involved in some of their big things. It's just been great.

Back then, YouTube was hosted on Rackspace. There you go. So your videos were hosted inside our company for a little while.

Yeah.

Pretty crazy what's happened in your life since then, because now you're a face that everybody recognizes no matter where you get stopped on the street.

Yeah, we go recently in China, or I guess we were in Hong Kong at the time, down in the subway and at night, I think this was the day before Christmas or something. And all of a sudden they get mobbed by a bunch of. There's half a dozen guys anyway. And they said, hey, can we take your picture? So we get up out of the subway and get under some light, and they start taking pictures of. We were in Peru recently, and same thing. I mean, to be in the airport in Peru or even out where you don't know anybody could ever know who you are. And especially without glasses and lab coat and the same thing. But one of my favorite ones, we were in, I think Estonia in Scandinavia, and there's one of these guard booths, and it was a nice day. And this guy's standing out in front of this thing with his rifle, you know, real, you know, no smiles. And I went up to him and I said. I said, do you know who I am? And he says, will it blend? I said, really? What is your. What is your favorite video? Glow sticks. And I said, can I video you? And he said, okay. And so my wife gets out the high def camera, you know, and she's ripping away. And I went through the same thing. I said, can I put this up on YouTube? No, I lose my job. I can't do that. I said, can I put up.

We took a bus south by southwest to Lockhart, Texas, and I had the camera guy for NBC at the lighthouse on my bus. And he's like, I can't give interviews, but he tells the stories. Yeah, it's like, you know, walking around Kabul with a bulletproof vest on, shooting a high def video.

Wow.

Yeah, it's pretty crazy.

And we've had some great experiences in the White House too, but I can't talk about that a whole lot. But we had. Really, it was great. We had cameras in there. But Michelle Obama, did you try to.

Blend something in the White House?

We blended in the White House. No, they have the best kitchen. The busiest kitchen in the world is in the White House. And anyhow, a great experience. But Michelle Obama, she wants us to get healthy and especially her little girls. And you know what they're doing? They have a soft serve machine in the White House. And on weekends, those little gals are making these big honking sundaes. You know, they're pigging out. Mom says, Michelle says, get these puppies out of the White House. We want to make smoothies. And so now the best blenders in the world are making smoothies in the White House. So it's a great experience, which I'm not supposed to talk about. That's fine.

Hey, do you mind if we go down to the.

Well, no, we can go down there.

We've seen the set. I mean, we want to talk.

We can stand on there and put my laptop.

What has it meant for your business?

Oh, our sales are up 1000%. Our retail sales and online sales. A thousand percent. Yeah. Now everybody knows we have the best blender in the world. I mean, nothing can touch it. And we just. It was so wonderful. Not that will blend had anything to do with it, but our competitor Vitamix, seven years ago, stole our jar. And they had. Let me show you something. Hand me some jars. That one. Hand me little Vitamix jar. I'll tell you a funny story.

Who are you?

I'm Tim Provost. He's my assistant. So, yeah, hand me those other jars, ones that are nested right there. I'll tell you what happened. This is a good story. Now, once upon a time, first of all, seven years ago, this is what Vitamix had. This is our competitor. They had this jar. And for 15 years, they've been pushing this off, not only on home people, but also they've been pushing off on their commercial customers. I'm talking about restaurants all over and smoothie shops and scoop shops and so on. But this is what they had. You had to use a plunger. Well, I invented this jar. And we call this the wild side jar. And it is so cool. Just unexpected results. This jar does things that nothing else could ever do. So what happened is we're taking all these, the very best accounts away from Vitamix and they're going out. And so what Happened is they copied my jar. They came out with this jar.

You didn't patent it, did you?

Yes, I did.

So now you're getting a licensing fee, right? I worked at Microsoft. You got to get invited to some of those lawyers because they figure out how to get a licensing fee out of nothing.

No, no, no, no. So here's two patents. Isn't this wonderful? There's two beautiful patents, 38 claims, and the USPTO has confirmed these eight times in a row because Vitamix keeps going back with Mickey Mouse kind of things and say, oh, this is an original stuff. Well, anyhow, that's the jar. Notice any similarities? Same pouring spout. It was fun when the judge did this. The judge called this the Rolls Royce of blending jars.

Look at that.

It's exactly the same. And they even nested it. So they copied my handle. They copied everything. Awesome. Isn't that. And the other thing is, God bless America, right? Yeah.

Of course, in our industry, China does it to us. And the Germans and the Russians.

Well, see, and every other blender has little criss cross blades in it. Well, 18 years ago, the first jar I made. Which is a background, by the way. Engineer. I'm an engineer.

What kind?

Manufacturing. So that's why we have all these engineers. We have 25 engineers and, like, no marketing. And that's why this whole viral. I mean, then we had no marketing. Now it's wonderful because we have all this viral stuff. We have the BYU 1971. January. Yeah, yeah. And so anyhow. And I made the first single blade with little winglets on it, just like a jet airplane. That's 18 years ago. And that's in our original jar. Well, lo and behold, Vitamix put a single blade with winglets in their jar.

So I have a feeling this is in the quartz, right?

Yes, it's out of the. It's out of the quartz. What is so cool.

Did you win the case?

Yes, we won. Of course you won. What happened in. In June, federal court Judge Campbell ruled literal infringement. And then there was a trial in June. No, let's see. April, she ruled. And the trial was in June. And there's eight wonderful jurors and a wonderful judge, and they ruled willful infringement and validity of my patents. And then, lo and behold.

So now you own another blender company.

Not quite. We don't want to own Vitam. They can have Vitamix. We got real technology. We don't need Vitamix. We just want their money. And I'll tell you how much we got so first of all, right in the middle of that trial, a U.S. patent Trademark Office came back for the eighth time, confirmed 38 claims of my two patents. And then the jury ruled literal infringement and validity of patents and so on, and then $11 million. So now the judge recently came back and awarded us double that, plus some other interest pre and post. And then there's more coming. So we're up at $24 million right now and growing. And so now what will happen is Vitamix will appeal, they'll post, you know, like a 30 million dollar bond or something like that. We'll wait for a while, but the odds of that ever coming back are about zip. When you got judge that rules twice, you got a jury and you got a wonderful US Patent Trademark Office. You know, it's not going to get reversed. So it's wonderful.

Tell me a little bit about the innovation process that you go through to come up with new ideas.

Oh, that was very interesting because is there a regular jar? Oh yeah, here's a good example.

Come up with a new idea. Not copy somebody else?

No, not copy someone else. And this was so funny because the opening remarks by their attorney in the courtroom was Mr. Dixon didn't even have a piece of paper with one line on it. He never sketched it. There's no documentation showing anything he did the day that he said he invented this jar. And so what I did is I took this jar, this is a Memorial Day weekend. And it was about maybe 4 o' clock in the afternoon, everybody just bailed. And I said, you know, I'm going to solve this weekend, I'm going to solve this cavitation problem. Cavitation is a phenomenon when you form a bubble over the blade. And so everybody, you put too heavy a stuff in no liquid and nothing happens. That's why Vitamix, their solution was a plunger. For all these years, for the last 25, 30 years or whatever, they've had a plunger. And we never have plungers. Even with our original jar 18 years ago. This will do most, you know, very rarely does it cavitate, but people are doing more and more solids. And so I said, iPads? Yeah, yeah, not quite that solid, not that much fiber. Marbles. And so I thought, you know, I can solve this problem. So what I did is I went out in the machine shop and I cut one of these jars up a whole bunch. And what I did is I took this is pieces from one of those jars. This is actually exhibit from the. And so what happened is I Glued it all together on a Friday and a Saturday, Friday night and Saturday, and it leaked like a sieve. But I kept plugging holes. And then Monday I came in and I made that radical blade and plugged some more holes. That's a four inch blade. It's huge still with winglets. And I patented the winglets. And so where did that come from?

The winglets?

It actually. No, no, actually.

Were you hanging out in a bowing factory or something?

No. You think so? No, what I did is what I did. The way I did that is, is when I first. When I first had this mold finished and I didn't have the base for the mixer finished yet, which this originally went on, and I actually screwed a motor to the bottom. Then I had to make a blade. And so I made the blade and it was too long. I didn't know how long to make it, so I didn't know how close I wanted to come to the wall. So I bent it up. I figured, okay, I just keep bending different places and make different blades. Then finally I got the right length and I cut the winglets off. And it didn't work. It didn't work as good. So then I went back, I said, okay, I bent them up with the winglets, and it worked much better. Just like a jet, just like a plane. And you get much better fuel economy in a plane, and you get much better blending in a blender. It was another unexpected accident, just like the jar was. So anyhow, so that was the jar. And then the guys came in. Moment of genius. So then I bring this puppy, and everybody's back to work on Tuesday, you know, And I was. So I said, look at my jar. Isn't this cool? Now, this isn't the original one, but it's a mock up of it. And so the first time they. They started running this, my guys, the engineers and stuff, they said, whoa, this is so cool. Because in a regular jar, what happens is you can look right down at the nut and you see this vortex. Just like when water is running out of the bathtub or down the sink, you just look straight down at it. But with the Wild side jar, it shifted the vortex off toward the wild side, and everything was low right here and high on the opposite corner and just an unexpected dynamic that just blended everything. You couldn't make it cavitate, you know, it was so cool. And so then, of course, then they start putting minus 20 degree IQF fruit, that's individually frozen fruit, in it. And without, in no time, they blew it up. So it's pieces all over the place. So I said, okay, glue it back together. So this is the next iteration. So the engineers that night put everything back together so it wouldn't blow up so, so easily. So this one can survive some pretty cold frozen stuff. So anyhow, how did you come up with that side? Well, I just started gluing stuff together and I needed to have clearance for the hand and so that meant there's one. Another accident, you know, that meant that one side was going to be trump.

This is how Clear was developed, by the way. You think we're kidding?

No, no, I believe it.

Like, oh, let's make a flagging tool for people who don't like to type.

That's me. So anyhow, no, just, just accident after accident. That's, that's life. And so we just go with the flow.

A lot of other executives, in fact, I'm speaking to Procter and Gamble, I think next Friday. They asked me how do we do what you did with YouTube? You know, I think it's an accident.

It's an accident.

So try to make an accent that's good for your company.

Yeah, yeah, try to come up with an accent.

What would your advice be to another executive?

You know, all of the planets aligned perfectly. I mean, you got YouTube, which is just starting and we don't know anything about it. You got the most powerful device in the world, blender in the world. Nobody has anything like it because you're always goofing off and trying to break things. I mean, I drive 193 mile an hour car and I go out on the race track and I just do crazy things. I grew up racing motorcycles. When I was 15 and a half I held a record in the M class in Northern California drag racing motorcycles. This is a 650 Triumph detuned, I mean with a de stroked and not highly tuned. But I'm 15 and a half years old. I weigh about 110 pounds or something like that. And it scared me to death riding across the San Francisco Bay on the bridge, looking at the little low, little low thing there and looking at the waves are up and I'm going across the bay to Fremont to the drag strip. That scared me more than drag racing and motorcycles because I wasn't used to writing over. But anyhow, just doing crazy things and unfortunately I've survived. There is a God who wanted me to live to do will it blends or something or take care of my 11 children and 33 grandbabies. Anyhow, so I'm alive and I'm very careful now. And I said, a little bit better example, at least I wear safety glasses. And I tell the kid, don't do this at home. People are good about listening to that. You know, we haven't had, knock on wood, any accidents. Nobody's done anything really crazy. We had one guy and, bless his heart, he put scissors in a junky blender. I mean, there's things you don't put in other people's blender, but he put scissors in the blender and he had a lab coat on and his goggles, and he wanted to be a Tom Dixon, you know, and he did a great job, except the scissors blew through the. Through the. The jar. And you haven't seen this one yet. And I mean, this guy hit the deck so fast you wouldn't believe it. And he's. He unplugged it and he goes, you don't want it. It's scared to. And he said, you don't want to do this at home anyhow. That's the last one you saw that it did.

It did quite.

Yeah, it's pretty cool.

Is there anything that won't blend?

Oh, sure. And I'll tell you the crazy. Well, one thing, everybody wanted to see us blend bullets. You know, this is going to be really cool. And so I said, yeah, we're going to blend bullets. Let's blend bullets. And so what did my guys do? They said, well, we better check with the authorities, you know. I said, no, no, no, no. You just do it. Well, they did. They went to the city of Orem and they said, can we blend bullets? Can we? And they said, oh, no, no, not in the city limits. I think, wait a minute. These guys are out there shooting, you know, right behind our building because we're at the edge of city limits. Then they said, oh, you need to talk to atf. They'll see if they. And I said, give me a break. So we had to wait. We waited almost a year, and finally we set up a blender with a foot pedal on it, put it on the other side of concrete this thick and with two cameras on it. And we tried 410 shotgun shells. 10 gauge, 12. I mean, we tried.38s,45s. We tried everything and nothing happened. You could even see where the blade hit the primer on some big projectiles. I mean, 223s like I use in my M16. I mean, we had some heavy stuff. You know, this is how he keeps.

His employees in line. He just keeps telling them all the.

Oh, yeah, nobody goes postal around here. We're well armed here at Blendtec. 30 round magazines and all, you know. Welcome to Utah. Welcome to Utah.

That's what I see.

Welcome to Utah. So we're welcome. We're well protected. My wife and I both have permits to carry concealed weapons and we're well taken care of here. But anyhow, nothing happened. The blade hits, the firing, the firing, the primer, nothing. You can see nothing happened. It was the most boring, one of the most boring blends we've ever done.

We don't post all of the blends because some of them are boring.

Some of them are boring, but one was not the boring. And I probably shouldn't talk about that, right? The blade knife. Yeah, I won't talk about that.

We'll talk about that off camera.

Yeah, we'll talk about that off camera. That's not a good one. But we've had some not too pretty ones. That one almost killed me.

Well, the butane, like as we put that one on, that one was dangerous, huh?

Yeah, that one was quite interesting because what happened is first we put. I put a. I put a Bic lighter in a blender, you know. Now keep in mind, 20 years ago, I told you how I screwed a motor to the bottom of the thing. I put it in a vise. I had a foot pedal on it. And I looked around and there was a box of a hundred matches, wooden matches, diamond matches. I threw them in a jar. I didn't even have the lid made yet, so I put a piece of plastic over it. I was showing someone how powerful it was and what it would blend. I'm in the lab and I have a sports coat on and, and I put my hand over it and turned it on, hit the pedal and it blew up. And it blew up like this. And smoke went up my sleeve and I go, whoa. And it just filled the building and it kept coming down. All the production people had to leave the building. It was horrible. And by the way, I tried this recently with the Willett blend. I thought, oh, this is cool. This is how the whole thing started. And they wouldn't light, they wouldn't go off. And I get on the phone and I say, diamond, what's wrong with your matches? I. Oh, we had too many truck semis blow up. So we detuned them. They don't, they don't spark so good anymore. So it was kind of a waste. I wish someone would send me some old diamond matches from like 20 years ago, because that would be Good. But anyhow, so where was I? Oh, yeah. So I throw a Bic. Like, I got a guy for you.

To meet over in Israel. We have this geek camp. Well, they don't do it anymore. Actually, they used to make homemade fireworks. You would have enjoyed that. Unfortunately, that guy got a little burned one year, and they stopped.

Yeah, not good. But anyhow. And remember, I'm ADHD, and I'm dyslexic, so I have trouble staying on the subject and stuff. But anyhow, I remember I can't go more than about three things off, but we're talking about bic lighters. I threw a Bic lighter in, put the lid on, and nothing happened. So then I said, okay, I put six Bic lighters in, and we had one camera on it. That's it. And it was right on the jar. And all of a sudden, it blew up, and it was scary. I mean, it was hot. I didn't know what happened, but I did know that it burned all the hair under my hairy arm. And I went home that night, and my wife said, what happened to your eyebrows?

Because my eyebrows were all singing.

And I said, oh, I was doing some blending. What did you blend? Some Bic lighters and all we had. And if you watch this video. In fact, if you watch the video, Kells didn't have enough footage, so he had to go back. And there's one where I blended 53 cars from the grandkids. And so that's actually what's in the blender jar, because he didn't have the footage. And then he had to get this footage of this mushroom cloud, and he had to fake this thing and show fire people putting the fire out. We literally. We put it out. Yeah. And so then the next thing that happened, the Germans are all saying, this is a hoax. The Willett blend is a hoax. So they send over their Mythbusters. Four people, two guys and two women. And this guy's name was Harrow. He's 32 years old. Wonderful guy. They came over, they went to Walmart, and they bought a dozen blenders off the shelf. They brought them. And we never like to compare ourselves to other people and other blenders, especially here in our building. But we said, okay, we'll humor you. And so we set them up with these blenders, and everything that I would do, Harold would do in this blender. And it got scary. We had to have our machine shop build this screen to protect him, because he kept blowing the jars out, like the glow sticks. Bang. Blew the jar out. And the stuff. And the lights are out. You see the stuff run down on the table and down on the carpet and everything, you know. And of course it works fine in our blender because these are bulletproof. But then he, we do, we do golf balls. And he kept blowing the jars out and stuff. But finally it came time to do. At the end of the day, I said, anything else you want to do? He says, yeah, I want to do Bic lighters. Now, of course, he didn't volunteer to doing with those junkie putters. I said, I'm not gonna do it, you know. He says, I'll push the button. And I. And I. So I put the lid on, put the Bic lighters in and put duct tape over it so it wouldn't blow the lid off. And then all he had to do is push the button and run. He had to join me in the back of the room because that's where I was standing. And then. So we did it and we got. And they had high speed cameras. They brought cameras from Germany. They rented cameras here. And it was quite amusing. But then I still didn't know what ignited. I thought it was the flint in the lighter that lit it that did it. And so then we did the first. This is a Discovery Channel thing, which was wonderful. It was time warp. And it was their first big show in their new studio in Boston. So we show up there and these guys are wonderful. What a great show. And so they went out and for the first time they have really high. I mean, this is 10,000 frames per second, full high definition cameras. And this was way cool. And these guys were the best. And so what happened is we put the lighters and this time it's like seven lighters. This is the world record, you know, seven lighters. Put the lid on. And then for the time first, first time we found out what really happened. You can see the butane coming out through the hole in the lid, coming around this gas you could see. And then up, around into the brushes in the motor. That's what ignited it. And so you see these red and blue flames coming out here. And all of a sudden when it blew up, I could see now for the second time, really what I was standing like a six foot ball of flame. I mean, this is like 3,000 degrees. I mean, bang. It's quick, you know, got it over with, but it didn't sing well. We ran. In fact, the host, he got out of there before I did, so I was getting a little braver. But we still got out of Dodge, I said, you don't need to use a fire extinguisher. It self extinguishes. But the blender was still running. It's a great show on Time Warp on the Discovery Channel.

How much does one of These blenders cost?

$400 for our basic. Our basic blender has this jar on it. Not the Wild side jar, the Wild side jar. This is the latest and greatest. I mean, this is now with our big win. You can imagine seven years Vitamix used this commercially and they got the Jamba count with this. They recently got Starbucks away from us because before the jury met, they took this into Starbucks three and a half, four years ago, our jar into Starbucks to take the account away from us. It was their number one corporate goal. And guess what? They pulled it off. But when we've been there, and it was costing Starbucks a third to do a billion drinks a year, to use our jar to do. Actually, this jar they were using, and it cost them a third, as it does right now, to do their. To do their drink. So it was a great deal. But anyhow, that's the jar they use. And then when the jury ruled and the judge wouldn't, you know, ruled that they couldn't sell it anymore, they have another we call a baseball jar. It's another jar. It still has a single thread with winglets and. Nope, that's not it. That's not it. Anyhow, they came out with another jar that was one of the. Here, let me see that. That was one of their first attempts. They thought this would be real cool. They would get around my patent by rounding it. So their CEO wrote an affidavit saying, oh, we destroyed the mold that made this jar. We destroyed it. It's gone. Well, they didn't destroy it. They put a little insert in it which rounded the wild side a little bit. Same function. And the judge said, that's still a wild side, even though they rounded it. But no, the new one is rounder even and it has a different shape, but they use the same type blade, a single blade with some half winglets. But anyhow, they got the account away from us. And the problem is you can't do a Willett blend in a Vitamix because they have plastic couplings that break. And so Costco or Starbucks called us and they said, what is your history of breaking couplings on your motors drive sockets? And I said, we don't even have it on our form. We've never broken one. They're made out of Rockwell C60 hard ball bearing hard material. And they said, oh, okay. Because they're breaking them like crazy. They're made out of plastic on the Vitamix. So now the guys have to get in and clean out all the silicone and stick an Allen wrench in and replace these just like Jamba's had to do. So these people have paid millions of dollars more by using Vitamix equipment than they would have ever paid using our equipment. But we just sit back, they figure it out, and they'll be back.

So I heard you make a great margarita.

Oh, yeah, everything. What's so neat? I don't like to make alcoholic drinks, but there's one reason I like.

You're like Jesse.

There's one reason I like. And what we used to do, there's one reason I like to make them, and that is because it's antifreeze. They blend like crazy. And we used to, we'd go to these, we would go buy alcohol, the rubbing alcohol, isopropyl alcohol. We'd mix it with water and try to fake alcohol because we don't like to have it in the building. And then here we do the nightclub and bar shows and we see cases and cases of booze, you know, and they're throwing it in the garbage. And we used to break the bottles and throw it in the, you know, at the end. And so then we start. I thought, wow, we may as well just bring that stuff back. So that's what we do. You know, we got it, we got, we lock it all up so nobody's going to find it. But anyhow.

But it really. I heard the marketing department found it.

Look at. I have to hide it for the recipe. Oh, boy, Tom, that's good stuff.

I knew you made good margaritas. I heard that. Especially when I do speeches and I talk about you. I always say, well, if it blends a rake handle, it'll make a great margarita, especially.

This is the very finest stuff that the Mexican government gave us in Guadalajara. Number two in technology in Latin America.

My producer, if he was here, he would be opening it already. Thank you very much.

Great stuff. So 60% of the blackberries are made there. Number one is Brazil. And so those people really appreciate our technology. And I was blending, I was blending in Guadalajara. I was blending a cell phone. I said, anybody have a cell phone? No. So I used my cell phone and then someone says, oh, I got one. And I blended and then I gave away new BlackBerry with a two year contract. And then everybody's lined up. Here's my phone.

Blend My phone.

I think we went through like 14 gave away. 14 new blackberries with sar. Yeah, it was great. But anyhow, the Mexican government gave me this great tequila.

Thank you. Thank you so much. Where do we find you on the Internet?

Where do you find us? Where do we find us? Velda? Blendtec.com or will it blend.com will itblend.com blendtec.com? yeah.

Are you on Twitter?

Twitter, yeah, we're on Twitter.

We have Blendtec on Twitter.

We have Blendtec on Twitter, yeah. And. Yep. Cool.

Well, thank you so much for staying all the time.

You're welcome. Awesome. Wanna go downstairs and see some more? Yeah, yeah. It's kind of a mess. All right. Kind of a mess in here. But see the face.

Where's the glasses, man? Yeah, you gotta be like Bono, you know, Wear those all the time. We don't recognize you without the glasses.

I have to go like this.

And your safety glasses all the time. It is desk. Just in case.

I'm always looking for trouble. Always looking for things that will blow up.

So what's changed for you since the videos started? You do the Will it Blend videos?

Yeah, we do the Will it Blend videos. I just got a nice article this morning that people are always pulling articles. And this is just similar to the one in Harvard Business Review. And as I recall, this was in November, and then there's another one in December. There's four great articles in December and Harvard Business Review. The last one's kind of about me, but the first one, my very favorite, is the first one of those four articles. But anyhow, in November it talks about how some CEO did some presentation after someone came up to him and asked a question and he really messed up. He said something he shouldn't have said. And that's the problem with this kind of stuff. You know, you do a. No, no. Everybody in the world knows about it when he did something bad. And what happened is his employees about killed him. And then the company almost died because of this. And then they go on to say, and then there's Tom Dix and Will it blend At Blendtec. You know, and this is a good example. And that's kind of this article that just came out today in something. I don't know, I didn't even have somebody highlighted. But anyhow.

When did you start Willett Blant? It's been five or six years.

Yeah. No, it's been a little over four years ago. In October. Yeah. So it's a little over four years ago. And, you know, and this is when. I mean, my marketing guy came up to me. I just hired this guy, and he sees a pile of sawdust, and he says, you know, I don't. He said, what is this? And someone says, oh, that's Tom fooling around, trying to break blenders again. So he went out with a $50 budget because he says, what's my budget? I said, you know, we've never had a marketing budget. We don't put money into marketing. We put money into engineering. And so he said, can I have 50 bucks? I said, yes. So he put my name on a lab coat. He went out and bought a six pack of Coke and a rotisserie chicken and a bunch of stuff like that, some marbles and a rake and so on. And so then he put it up, and he came to me. I mean, I didn't know what he was doing. And he came to me five days later, says, we hit a home run. We. We have 6 million views on YouTube. And I said, who tube? I didn't even know YouTube was. And now, of course, Google and YouTube take real good care of us, you know, and they make sure that we're involved in some of their big things, and it's just been great.

You know, back then, YouTube was hosted on Rackspace, so there you go. So your videos were hosted inside our company for a little while.

Yeah.

Pretty crazy what's happened in your life since then, because now you're a face that everybody recognizes no matter where you get stopped on the street.

Yeah, we go recently in China, or I guess we were in Hong Kong at the time, down in the subway and at night, and I think this was the day before Christmas or something. And all of a sudden, they get mobbed by a bunch of. There's half a dozen guys anyway, and they say, hey, can we take your picture? So we get up out of the subway and get under some light, and they start taking pictures. We're in Peru recently, and same thing. I mean, to be in the airport in Peru or even out where you don't know anybody could ever know who you are. And especially without glasses and lab coat and the same thing. But one of my favorite ones, we're in, I think Estonia in Scandinavia, and there's one of these guard booths, and it was a nice day, and this guy standing out in front of this thing with his. With his rifle, you know, no smiles. And I went up to him and I said, do you know who I am? And he says, will it blend? I said, really? I said, what is your favorite video Glow sticks. And I said, can I video you? And he said, okay. And so my wife gets out the high def camera, you know, and she's ripping away. And I went through the same thing. I said, can I put this up on YouTube? No. I lose my job. I can't do that. I said, can I put up on that?

That happens to me a lot, too. We took a bus at south by Southwest to Lockhart, Texas. And I had the camera guy for NBC see at the White House on my bus. And he's like, I can't give interviews, but he tells the best stories. Yeah, he's like, you know, walking around Kabul with a bulletproof vest on, shooting a high def video.

Wow.

Yeah, it's pretty crazy.

And we've had some great experiences in the White House, too. But I can't talk about that a whole lot, but we had. Really. It was great. We had cameras in there. But Michelle Obama, did you try to.

Blend something in the White House?

We blended in the White House. No, they have the best kitchen. The busiest kitchen in the world is in the White House. Anyhow, a great experience. But Michelle Obama, she wants us to get healthy. And especially her little girls. And you know what they're doing? They have a soft serve machine in the White House. And on weekends, those little gals are making these big honking Sundays, you know, they're pigging out. Mom says, Michelle says, get these puppies out of the White House. We want to make smoothies. And so now the best blenders in the world are making smoothies in the White House. So it's a great experience, which I'm not supposed to talk about. That's fine.

Hey, do you mind if we go down to the. Well, one set.

No, we can go down there.

We've seen the set. I mean, we want to talk.

We can stand on that.

What has it meant for your business?

Oh, our sales are up 1000%. Our retail sales and online sales, a thousand percent. Yeah. Now everybody knows we have the best blender in the world. I mean, nothing can touch it. And we just. It was so wonderful. Not that this had. Not that will blend had anything to do with it, but our competitor, Vitamix, seven years ago, stole our jar. And they had. Let me show you something. Hand me some jars. That one. Hand me the old Vitamix jar. I'll tell you a fun story.

And who are you?

I'm Tim Provost, Tom's assistant. He's my assistant. So hand me those other jars. Ones that are nested right there. I'll Tell you what happened. This is a good story. Now, once upon a time, first of all, seven years ago, this is what Vitamix had. This is our competitor. They had this jar. And for 15 years, they've been pushing this off, not only on the on home people, but also they've been pushing off on their commercial customers. I'm talking about, you know, restaurants all over and smoothie shops and scoop shops and so on. But this is what they had. You had to use a plunger. Well, I invented this jar. And we call this the Wild side jar. And it is so cool. Just unexpected results. And this jar does things that nothing else could ever do. And so what happened is we're taking all these, the very best accounts away from Vitamix and they're going out. And so what happened is they copied my jar. They came out with this jar.

You didn't patent it, did you?

Yes, I did.

So now you're getting a licensing fee, right? I worked at Microsoft. You gotta get invited to some of those lawyers because they figure out how to get a licensing fee out of nothing.

No, no, no, no. So here's two patents. Isn't this wonderful? There's two beautiful patents, 38 claims. And the USPTO has confirmed these eight times in a row because Vitamix keeps going back with Mickey Mouse kind of things and say, oh, this isn't original stuff. Well, anyhow, that's the jar. Notice any similarities? Same pouring spout. It was fun when the judge did this. The judge called this the Rolls Royce of blending jars. Look at that. It's exactly the same. And they even nested each other. They copied my handle. They copied everything. Awesome. Isn't that. And the other thing is, God bless America, right? Yeah.

Of course, in our industry, China does it to us.

Yeah.

Well, we don't like the Germans and the Russians.

Well, see, and every other blender has little crisscross blades in it. Well, 18 years ago, the first jar I made. Which is. Oh, no, it's a background, by the way. Engineer. I'm an engineer. Manufacturing. So that's why we have all these engineers. We have 25 engineers and like, no marketing. And that's why this whole.

By work, I'm marketing.

No, no, I mean, then we had no marketing. Now it's wonderful because we have all this viral stuff. We have the BYU 1971. January. Yeah. And so anyhow. And I made the first single blade with little winglets on it, just like a jet airplane. That's 18 years ago. And that's in our original Jar. Well, lo and behold, Vitamix put a single blade with winglets in their jar.

So I have a feeling this is in the courts, right?

Yes, it's out of the courts. What is so cool?

Did you win the case?

Yes, we won. Of course you won. What happened in June? Federal court Judge Campbell ruled literal infringement. And then there was a trial in June and no, let's see, April, she ruled, and the trial was in June and there's eight wonderful jurors and a wonderful judge, and they ruled willful infringement and validity of my patents. And then lo and behold.

So now you own another blender company.

We don't want to own Vitamix. They can have Vitamix. We got real technology. We don't need Vitamix. We just want their money. And I'll tell you how much we got. So first of all, right in the middle of that trial, a U.S. patent Trademark Office came back for the eighth time, confirmed 38 claims of my two patents. And then the jury ruled literal infringement and validity of patents and so on, and then $11 million. So now the judge recently came back and awarded us double that, plus some other interest pre and post. And then there's more coming. So we're up at $24 million right now and growing. And so now what will happen is Vitamix will appeal. They'll post like a 30 million dollar bond or something like that. We'll wait for a while, but the odds of that ever coming back are about zip. When you got a judge that rules twice, you got a jury and you got a wonderful US Patent Trademark Office. You know, it's not going to get replaced, reversed. So it's wonderful.

Tell me a little bit about the innovation process that you go through to come up with new ideas.

Oh, that was, that was, that was very interesting because. Is there a regular jar? Oh, yeah, here's a good example. Okay.

Come up with a new idea. Not copy somebody else.

No, not copy someone else. And this was so funny because the opening remarks by their attorney in the, in the, in the courtroom was Mr. Dixon didn't even have a piece of paper with one line on it. He never sketched it. There's no documentation showing anything. He did the day that he said he invented this jar. And so what I did is I took this jar, this is a Memorial Day weekend, and it was about maybe 4 o' clock in the afternoon, everybody just bailed. And I said, you know, I'm going to solve this weekend, I'm going to solve this cavitation problem. Cavitation is a phenomenon when you form a bubble over the blade. And so everybody. You put too heavy of stuff in no liquid, and nothing happens. That's why Vitamix, their solution was a plunger. For all these years, for the last 25, 30 years or whatever, they've had a plunger and we never have plungers. Even with our original jar 18 years ago. This will do most. You know, very rarely does it cavitate, but people are doing more and more solids. And so I said, iPads. Yeah.

Yeah.

Not quite that solid. Not that much fiber. And so I thought, you know, I can solve this problem. So what I did is I went out in the machine shop and I cut one of these jars up a whole bunch. And. And what I did is I took this is pieces from one of those jars. This actually exhibit from the. And so what happened is I glued it all together on a Friday and a Saturday, Friday night, and Saturday. And it leaked like a sieve. But I kept plugging holes. And then Monday I came in and I made that radical blade and plugged some more holes. That's a four inch blade. It's huge. Still with winglets. And I've patented the winglets. And so where did that come from?

The winglets?

It actually. No, no, actually.

Were you hanging out in a bowing factory?

No. You think so? No. What I did is. What I did. The way I did that is, is the. When I first. When I first had this mold finished and I didn't have the base for the mixer finished yet, which this originally went on, and I actually screwed a motor to the bottom. Then I had to make a blade. And so I made the blade and it was too long. I didn't know how long to make it, so I didn't know how close I wanted to come to the wall. So I bent it up. I figured, okay, I just keep bending different places and make different blades. And so I thought. And then finally I got the right length and I cut the winglets off. And it didn't work. It didn't work as good. So then I went back, I said, okay, I bent them up with the winglets and it worked much better. Better. Just like a jet, just like a plane. And you get much better fuel economy in a plane and you get much better blending in a blanket. It was another unexpected accident. Just like the jar was. So anyhow, so that was a jar. And then the guys. The guys came in.

Moment of genius.

So then I bring this puppy and everybody's back to work on Tuesday. You know, And I was. So I said, look at my jar. Isn't this cool? Now, this isn't the original one, but it's a mock up of it. And so the first time they started running this, my guys, the engineers and stuff, they said, whoa, this is so cool. Because in a regular jar, what happens is you can look right down at the nut and you see this vortex, just like when water is running out of the bathtub or down the sink. You just look straight down at it. But with the Wild side jar, it shifted the vortex off toward the wild side and everything was low right here and high on the opposite corner. And it just an unexpected dynamic that just blended everything. You couldn't make it cavitate. It was so cool. Of course, then they start putting minus 20 degree IQF fruit, that's individually frozen fruit in it. And in no time they blew it up. So it's pieces all over the place. So I said, okay, glue it back to. So this is the next iteration. So the engineers that night put everything back together so it wouldn't blow up so, so easily. So this one can survive some pretty cold frozen stuff. So anyhow, how did you come up with that side? Well, I just started gluing stuff together and I needed to have clearance for the hand. And so that meant there's one. Another accident, you know, that meant that one side was going to be Trump.

Twitter was developed, by the way. You think we're kidding? Like, oh, let's make a blogging tool for people who don't like to type.

That's me. So anyhow, no, just accident after accident. That's life. And so we just go with the flow.

A lot of other executives, in fact, I'm speaking to Procter and Gamble, I think Friday they asked me, how did we do what you did with YouTube? I think it's an accident.

It's an accident.

So try to make an accent that's good for your company. What would your advice be to another executive?

You know, all of the planets aligned perfectly. I mean, you got YouTube, which is just starting and we don't know anything about it. You got the most powerful device in the world, blender in the world. Nobody has anything like it because you're always goofing off and trying to break things. I mean, I drive a 193 mile an hour car and I go out on the race track and I just do crazy things. I grew up racing motorcycles. When I was 15 and a half, I held a record in the M class in Northern California drag racing motorcycles. This is a 650 Triumph detuned with a de stroked and not highly tuned. But I'm 15 and a half years old. I weigh about 110 pounds or something like that. And it scared me to death riding across the San Francisco Bay on the bridge, Looking at the little low, little low thing there and looking at the waves are up and I'm going across the bay to Fremont to the drag strip. That scared me more than drag racing a motorcycle because I wasn't used to riding over. But anyhow, just doing crazy things. And unfortunately I've survived. You know, there is a God who wanted me to live to do will it blends or something or take care of my 11 children and 33 grandbabies. Anyhow, so I'm alive and I'm much. I'm very careful now and I set a little bit better example. At least I wear safety glasses and I tell the kid, don't do this at home. And people are good about listening to that. You know, we haven't had, knock on wood, any accidents. Nobody's done anything really crazy. We had one guy and, bless his heart, he put scissors in a junky blender. I mean, there's things you don't put in other people's blender, but he put scissors in the blender and he had a lab coat on and his goggles and he wanted to be a Tom Dixon, you know, and he did a great job, except the scissors blew through the. Through the, the jar and you haven't seen this one yet. And I mean, this guy hit the deck so fast you wouldn't believe it. And he's. He unplugged it and he goes, you don't want it. It scared to. And he said, you don't want to do this at home. Anyhow, that's the last one. You saw that it did. It did quite. Yeah, it's pretty cool.

Is there anything it won't blend?

Oh, sure. And I'll tell you, the crate. Well, one thing, everybody wanted to see us blend bullets. You know, this is going to be really cool. And so I said, yeah, we're going to blend bullets. Let's blend bullets. And so what did my guys do? They said, well, we better check with the authorities, you know. I said, no, no, no, no, you just do it. Well, they did. They went to the city of Orem and they said, can we blend bullets? Can we? And they said, oh, no, no, not in the city limits, I think. Wait a minute, these guys are out there shooting, you know, right behind our buildings. Because we're at the edge of city limits. And then they said, oh, you need to talk to atf. They'll see if they. And I said, give me a break. So we had to wait. We waited almost a year and finally we set up a blender with a foot pedal on it, put it on the other side of concrete this thick and with two cameras on it. And we tried 410 shotgun shells. 10 gauge, 12. I mean, we tried.38s,45s. We tried everything and nothing happened. You could even see where the blade hit the primer on some big projectiles. I mean.223s like I use in my M16. I mean, we had some heavy stuff. You know, this is how he keeps.

His employees in line. He just keeps telling them.

Nobody goes postal around here. We're well armed here at Blendtec. 30 round magazines and all, you know, welcome to Utah. So we're well, we're well protected. My wife and I both have permits to carry concealed weapons. And we're, we're well, we're well taken care of here. But anyhow, nothing happened. The blade hits the firing, the firing, the, the primer. Nothing. You can see nothing happened. It was the most boring, one of the most boring blends we've ever done.

So we don't post all of the blends because some of them are boring.

Some of them are boring, but one was not boring. And I probably shouldn't talk about that, right? The blade knife. Yeah, I won't talk about that.

We'll talk about that off camera.

Yeah, we'll talk about that off camera. That's not a good one, but we've had some not too pretty ones. That one almost killed me.

Well, the butane Microsoft, we put that one on. That one's dangerous, huh?

Yeah, that one was quite interesting because what happened is first we put. I put a. I put a Bic lighter in a blender, you know. Now keep in mind 20 years ago, I told you how I screwed a motor to the bottom of the thing. I put it in a vise. I had a foot pedal on it now. And I looked around and there was a box of a hundred matches, wooden matches, diamond matches. I threw them in a jar. I didn't even have the lid made yet, so I put a piece of plastic over it. I was showing someone how powerful it was and what it would blend. And I'm in the lab and I have a sports coat on, and I put my hand over it and turned it on, hit the pedal, and it blew up. And it blew up like this, and smoke went up my sleeve, and I go, whoa. And it just filled the building, and it kept coming down. All the production people had to leave the building. It was horrible. And. And by the way, I tried this recently with a Willett blend. I thought, oh, this is cool. This is how the whole thing started. And they wouldn't light. They wouldn't go off. And I get on the phone and I say, diamond, what's wrong with your matches? Oh, we had too many truck semis blow up, so we detuned them. They don't. They don't spark so good anymore, so it was kind of a waste. I wish someone would send me some old diamond matches from, like, 20 years years ago, because that would be good. But anyhow, so where was I? Oh, yeah. So I throw a Bic.

Like, I got a guy for you to meet over. Over in Israel. We have this geek camp. And they.

They.

Well, they don't do it anymore, actually. They used to make homemade fireworks. You would have enjoyed that. You would enjoy that. Unfortunately, my guy got a little. Little burned one year, and they stopped.

Yeah, not good. Good. But anyhow. And remember, I'm adhd, and I'm dyslexic, so I have trouble staying on the subject and stuff. But anyhow, I remember I can't go more than about three things off, but we're talking about Bic lighters. I threw a Bic lighter in, put the lid on, and nothing happened. So then I said, okay, I put six Bic lighters in, and we had one camera on it. That's it. And it was right on the jar. And all of a sudden it blew up, and it was scary. I mean, it was hot. I didn't know what happened, but I did know that it burned all the hair under my hairy arm. And I went home that night, and my wife said, what happened to your eyebrows? My eyebrows were all singed. And I said, oh, I was doing some blending. What did you blend? Some Bic lighters and all we had. And if you watch this video. In fact, if you watch the video, Kells didn't have enough footage, so he had to go back. And there's one where I blended 53 cars from the grandkids. And so that's actually what's in the blender jar, because he didn't have the footage. And then he had to get this footage of this mushroom cloud, and he had to fake this thing and show fire people putting the fire out. We literally. We put it out. Yeah. And so then the next thing that happened, the Germans are all saying, this is a hoax. The Willett blend is a hoax. So they send over their Mythbusters. Four people, two guys and two women. And this guy's name was Harrow. He's 32 years old. Wonderful guy. They came over, they went to Walmart, and they bought a dozen blenders off the shelf. They brought them. And we never like to compare ourselves to other people and other blenders and especially here in our building, but we said, okay, we'll humor you. And so we set them up with these blenders and everything that I would do, Harold would do in this blender. And it got scary. We had to have our machine shop build this screen to protect him because he kept blowing the jars out, like the glow sticks. Bang. Blew the jar out. And the stuff. And the lights are out. You see the stuff run down on the table and down on the carpet and everything. And of course, it works fine in our blender because these are bulletproof. But then we do golf balls. And he kept blowing the jars out and stuff. But finally it came time to do. At the end of the day, I said, anything else you want to do? He says, yeah, I want to do Bic lighters. Now, of course, he didn't volunteer to do them in those junkie blenders. I said, I'm not going to do it. He says, I'll push the button. And I. So I put the lid on, put the Bic lighters in and put duct tape over it so it wouldn't blow the lid off. And then all he had to do was push the button and run. He had to join me in the back of the room because that's where I was standing. So we did it. And they had high speed cameras. They brought cameras from Germany. They rented cameras here. And it was quite amusing. But then I still didn't know what ignited. I thought it was the. The flint in the lighter that lit it. That did it. And so then we did the first this is a Discovery Channel thing, which was wonderful. It was time warp. And it was their first big show in their new studio in Boston. So we show up there, and these guys are wonderful. What a great show. And so they went out, and for the first time, they have really heist. I mean, this is 10,000 frame per second, full high definition cameras. And this was way cool. And these guys were the best. And so what happened is we put the lighters, and this time it's like seven lighters. This is the world record. Seven lighters. Put the lid on and then for the first time, we found out what really happened. You can see the butane coming out through the, the hole in the lid coming around this big, this gas you could see. And then up around into the brushes in the motor. That's what ignited it. And so you see these red and blue flames coming out here. And all of a sudden when it blew up, I could see now for the second time, really what I was standing in. It's like a six foot ball of flame. I mean, this is like 3,000 degrees. I mean, bang. It's quick, you know, got it over with, but it didn't sing well. We ran. In fact, the host, he got out of there before I did. So I was getting a little braver, but we still got out of Dodge. I said, you don't need to use a fire extinguisher. It self extinguishes. But the blender was still running. It's a great show on Time Warp on Discovery Channel.

How much does one of These blenders cost?

$400 for our basic. Our basic blender has this jar on it. Not the Wild side jar, the Wild side jar. This is the latest and greatest. I mean, this is now with our big win, you can imagine seven years Vitamix used this commercially and they got the Jamba account with this. They recently got Starbucks away from us because before the jury met, they took this into Starbucks three and a half, four years ago, our jar into Starbucks to take the account away from us. It was their number one corporate goal. And guess what? They pulled it off. But when we've been there, and it was costing Starbucks a third to do a billion drinks a year, to use our jar to do, actually this jar they were using and it cost them a third, as it does right now, to do their drinks. So it was a great deal. But anyhow, that's the jar they used. And then when the jury ruled and the judge ruled that they couldn't sell it anymore, they have another. We call it a baseball jar. It's another jar. It still has a single blade with winglets and. Nope, that's not it. That's not it. Anyhow, they came out with another jar. That was one of the. Here, let me see that. That was one of their first attempts. They thought this would be real cool. They would get around my patent by rounding it. So their CEO wrote an affidavit saying, oh, we destroyed the mold that made this jar. We destroyed it. It's gone. Well, they didn't destroy it. They put a little insert in it, which Rounded the wild side a little bit, same function. And the judge said, that's still a wild side, even though they rounded it. But no, the new one is rounder even and it has a different shape. But they use the same type of blade, a single blade with some half winglets. But anyhow, they got the account away from us. And the problem is you can't do a Willett blend in a Vitamix because they have plastic couplings that break. So Starbucks called us and they said, what is your history of breaking couplings on your motors drive sockets? And I said, we don't even have it on our form. We've never broken one. They're made out of Rockwell C60 hard ball bearing hard material. And they said, oh, okay. Because they're breaking them like crazy. They're made out of plastic on the Vitamix. So now their guys have to get in and clean out all the silicone and stick an Allen wrench in and replace these just like Jamba's had to do. So they. These people have paid millions of dollars more by using Vitamix equipment than they would have ever paid using our equipment. But we just sit back, they figure it out, and they'll be back.

So I heard you make a great margarita.

Oh, yeah. You make a great everything. What? Sony, you know, I don't like to make alcoholic drinks, but there's one reason I like.

You're like Jesse.

Yeah, there's one reason I like. And what we used to do, there's one reason I like to make them, and that is because it's antifreeze. They blend like crazy. And we used it. We'd go to these. We would go buy alcohol, the rubbing alcohol, isopropyl alcohol. We mix it with water and try to fake alcohol because we don't like to have it in the building. And then here we do the nightclub and bar shows and we see cases and cases of booze and they're throwing it in the garbage. And we used to break the bottles and throw it at the end. And so then we start. I thought, wow, we may as well just bring that stuff back. So that's what we do. We lock it all up so nobody's going to find it.

But anyhow, I heard the marketing department found it.

Look at this. I have to hide it for the recipe. Oh, boy, that's good stuff.

I knew you made good margaritas. I heard that.