Originally posted on an experimental WordPress install at swimmingcostume.co.uk

Apprentice reject Syed Ahmed is bothered about the reuse of towels in gyms. On the one hand a lot of energy and chemicals are used cleaning them, and on the other towels may still contain bacteria from up someone else’s bum. (Syed exudes bullshit 24/7, so it’s unsurprising he’s concerned.)

So he “invented” a hygenic, environmentally friendly “body-drier”. In fact, he hasn’t stopped inventing - he adds new features and benefits to it every time he talks to someone. By the end of the Sky One programme “Syed Ahmed - Hot Air”, it had a huge list of features - one or two of which were actually working.

Of course, he’s not the first to invent a body drier. Within minutes of the show starting, he’d found that there are 3 outfits selling them in the UK, so he went to try one out at a pool in London. It’s about the size of one of those stand-up tanning cabinets. He complained it’s not sexy. It takes “exactly 5 minutes going on for 6 minutes”, and at the end of it he’s still a bit damp - and his shorts are still soaking wet. It isn’t mentioned that people rarely towel-dry their swimming shorts, nor that there’s a perfectly good cossie dryer in many gyms. Nor is it mentioned that this “non-sexy” body-drier has a coin slot.

Still, he’s convinced that he can make something sexier, faster and better with an R&D & marketing budget of £20k. Whether that’s the exact amount that Sky paid him for the show is not stated.

There are people who point out that he needs to worry about electrocuting people, and that the electricity required would run a small factory. But he manages to get people to design some bits. There’s a shift in tone as Syed starts to try and raise funds as after two weeks it becomes apparent that £20k is not enough.

Somehow, Syed meets up with Peter, an inventor type who thinks he should “exploit the vortex technique”. The idea is that air with a spin on it will throw water over a longer path sideways. So Peter goes off to tinker while Syed interviews a number of women to be his PA. He asks each of them what they’re doing that night, and presumably this is after his split with Michelle. He picked the blonde. Plus there’s some guy that turned up from somewhere. Possibly family.

Now, there are quite a number of high-profile meetings set up, so it looks like *someone* does a good job. But all we see his PA doing is helping with a half-cocked market research questionnaire. Syed kicks it off with “Do people understand the energy consumption of a towel?” and “What would you like to use, other than towels.” “Does it dry hair as well?” asks the blonde.

How much of this reaches the actual questionnaire is unknown. Syed appeared to concentrate on elderly people who couldn’t run away quick enough, apart from one women who was clearly drawn by the idea of it giving her “a bit of a massage, like a jacuzzi.”. The blonde’s stock question was “Would you object to air being blown at you from a number of nozzles?”

Sadly we never got to see a PowerPoint slide revealing that 90% of people do not object to air being blown at them from a number of nozzles. Nor how many nozzles people find acceptable.

Now, I can understand how a ping pong ball being blown off a table by a vortex is a key stage in the development of a body drier, but I don’t know why you’d want to show a noisy ball displacer to someone that you want to help market a method of drying wet skin. When this goes badly, Syed drafted in an award-winning designer to do something on the cheap.

Some of this can be seen on the website - http://www.savortex.com/

Syed is a bullshitter. The notion that this “will change drying throughout the world” is ridiculously ambitious. “Compact, slick, fun to use” is very different to what they’ve actually achieved. The internals are copper, which “dates back to ancient times”. When questioned about his claim that “everything in it is recyclable”, as many motor parts aren’t, he resorts to the old standby “we’re learning something new every day”. So clearly he feels it’s fine to make up things he hasn’t learned. Most people he speaks to realise the level of guesswork pretty quickly.

He locks on to words that sound good - vortex, array. So we have a unique “array” drying technique.

Sure, people are interested in it, but two of the companies who take an interest are competitors. Excel, a high-profile hand-drying company, and Triton. Others, like Stelios, probably wouldn’t have shown any interest if it wasn’t for the opportunity to get an easyHotel on the telly. (An easyHotel has tiny tiny rooms and a body drier just won’t fit.)

Syed’s pricings seem to be based on What People Can Afford, which is a common model. £2k for an easyHotel, £6k for a larger hotel with a spa etc.

So what does a body dryer need to do to appeal?

Stelios is concerned “how many people care that much about the environment that they’ll take more time to do something” and says that “Branding it easy~ is not an option at this stage”.

Duncan Bannatyne blew away Syed’s reliance on Energy Trust figures that say 30% of a typical gym’s running costs are spent in energy. Rightly, he pointed out the assumption that “if it happens in London, it happens everywhere” is wrong. Duncan reckons that 80% of healthclubs in London supply members with towels. Outside London, 5%.

Syed really didn’t get this point, and talked up the inconvenience of a damp towel. But Duncan is not stupid. He’s been in business 10 years and knows the real-world towel / no towel situation. Ask for an extra £5 for towel - no chance. Offer them for free - everyone says yes. His conclusion brought it down to the simple financials. “I’m not going to spend money on a drying machine to save people who don’t have towels money on towels that I don’t give to them.”

And of course he’s right. Syed’s invention is flawed. It’s not compact enough to fit into a hotel room, so it needs to be in a communal changing area - which then limits it to gyms… and gyms either have to do towels anyway because they’re part of a hotel, or they’re competing with other city centre gyms, or they don’t do towels and are not bothered about the dampness of your gym bag.

By focusing on the energy-saving aspect, he introduced a new obstacle. If he had instead focused on the hygiene, it might have been possible to convince people to pay to use a body drier. With the electricity covered by the user, the Vortex goes from a cost to a profit centre, and might be worth finding a spare wall for.

So Syed managed to see a hotel that doesn’t have a gym, and a gym chain that don’t do towels. Duncan Bannatyne has no spare walls - they’re all covered by lockers. As he thought there was “nothing new about it”, it seems he’d already have a body drier if he thought he wanted one. I’d have to agree with him that it was “one of the worst presentations I’ve seen in a long long time.”

But was the show entertaining? Well, no. Suitably soundtracked by Ian Brown’s FEAR, Bjork’s There’s More To Life Than This, Hawkwind’s Silver Machine and Lemon Jelly’s ubiquitous Nice Weather For Ducks, the show covered 88 days in one hour. One ‘highlight’: engineer Peter got a new suit - but managed to get it wet before meeting Triton. Syed dragged him away from the workshop many times - mostly to meetings with big names, but he also got him in to ask him to speed things up. So there’s the dry voiceover bringing your attention to idiocy but not spelling it out, common to business programmes.

Engineers worked through the night to put the prototype together before a big meeting, but ran out of time to put the vortex in the body drier. A model hired by Syed demonstrated it with non-swirly air, and it seemed to work. Judging from the hand-drier (which does have the vortex), some people can’t tell whether the air is swirly or not anyway.So we’re left with something where the power consumption still needs to come down, that phs think is “not significantly different from [their] own version” but which some industry players are still positive about - if the maths work out.

I wouldn’t hold my breath.

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Comments from the original posting

John (of Business Opportunities & Ideas), June 22nd, 2007 at 5:17pm:
Thanks for taking the time to write that it’s a brilliant and highly amusing summary of the program.
(There was also a trackback to his site.)

nev, June 24th, 2007 at 4:29am:
hello, very good account of the show, my fear is that sky when trying to show an entertaining business programme will fudge the final result so as not to end the series on a downer, ie failure in case no one tunes into the next one, which will give an unrealistic picture of business. as regards the product, small hand dryers for home use could be huge business, worldwide. remember mr dyson has gone into the commercial hand drying market and hes no mug. also has mr bannatyne ever developed a product or indeed invested in anything on dragons den?