hen Matt Broadway went to Tokyo, he thought he was going to sell vacuum cleaners; he didn’t realise he was going to get nearly hoovered up in an almighty seismic drama. He was in a meeting on the ground floor of a tall building when the earthquake started. Contary to guidelines, he and his colleagues naturally all ran outside. “The road was like a rug,” he recalls. “It was going up and down as the shockwaves rolled through it. The lamposts were dancing around.” Amazingly, there was relatively little damage to the city. “The buildings stood up to it. One old lady out near the airport had a garden wall fall over. It was a vindication of Japanese civil engineering. It was only the tsunami afterwards that caused all the damage at Fukushima.”
That was 2011 and Broadway was marketing director for Dyson. Now he is European president of SharkNinja, who sell more vacuum cleaners than anyone else in the UK, surpassing Dyson. I half-expect him to heap scorn on the enemy (as I probably would in his shoes), but he doesn’t. He is elegantly diplomatic: “I’m fortunate to have worked for two great design-engineering companies.” On the other hand, he adds that he tries to “spend as little of my life as possible talking about Dyson”. I’m the same way, given that Mr Dyson sold the country down the Brexit river before washing his hands, carefully drying them, and then shooting off to Singapore for the sake of sucking up a few more millions.
Broadway modestly puts his career down to good luck and chance. “I never woke up one day and said, ‘I want to do this.’” But he discovered he was good at it. His parents were both teachers; his dad was an organist and his early life was steeped in music. He regrets trying to learn the violin as a child. “If only it had been a drum set. Or a loud wind instrument.” A formative experience, in the realm of producing a lot of hot air, was when, as a choirboy, he was turning the pages and his dad let him pull out the stops on the organ.
