Excel Dryer cut hand-drying from 40 seconds to 12 — and sales grew 10% a year

Denis Gagnon bought Excel Dryer, a family-owned manufacturer in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts, in the 1990s, and quickly diagnosed the problem: 'We had an experienced and dedicated workforce; we built a quality product, an excellent reputation for customer service — and we had a product that people hated to use.' Traditional dryers took 35–40 seconds to dry hands, by which point users wiped hands on clothes or grabbed paper towels.

Searching for a fix, Gagnon partnered with Invent Resources, a firm of four retired scientists — three from MIT — led by physicist Richard Pavelle, who pitched a faster hand dryer after Conair passed on their faster hair dryer and World Dryer, the market leader, turned the idea down. Gagnon's first visit sold him: 'They would be one after another at the chalkboard, screaming at each other in Yiddish.'

The team determined that old hand dryers wasted 90 percent of the energy going into them. After three and a half years of R&D — funded by Gagnon borrowing against his home, his life insurance, and money from associates and relatives after banks were tapped out — Excel's Xlerator dried hands in 12 seconds. At trade shows staff had to coax people out of the aisles to try it: 'you could see the expression in their face; there was a real wow factor to it.'

The bet paid. As of NPR's February 2013 visit, sales at the family-owned company had risen more than 10 percent every year for a decade, with about 40 workers assembling dryers in a deliberately unautomated plant. Dyson followed with the dip-in Airblade and World Dryer eventually launched its own high-speed model — validation that Excel had redefined the category. The basic Xlerator cost about $400 in a market where paper towels sat in 90–95% of America's roughly 30 million away-from-home bathrooms.

Old dryers wasted 90% of their energy as heat. Concentrated high-speed air dries hands in 12 seconds — trading loudness for actually working.

The product's failure was measurable and singular: too slow, so users abandoned it — a clear target for redesign.

Outsider physicists found the structural waste — 90% of energy spent on heat that did almost nothing — that incumbents had normalized.

The owner staked personal assets on a multi-year R&D cycle no competitor was willing to run.

Speed created the demo effect: a 12-second dry at a trade show sold itself where spec sheets had not.

Loudness was an acceptable trade, because the old trade-off — quiet but useless — had been the complaint.

When customers hate your product, ask what the design wastes: incumbents had optimized cost for decades; an outside team optimizing the physics beat them in 3.5 years.

NPR reported in February 2013 that Excel's sales had grown more than 10 percent annually for a decade, the plant still assembled products by hand with roughly 40 American workers, and high-speed drying had become a category with Dyson and World Dryer in it. NetDryers founder George Campbell, a former Dyson employee, still sized the prize as the 25 million-plus US bathrooms that paper towels had not yet lost.