Venice is beautiful and historic, it used to be much more. For centuries it was the heart of trade in Europe and really the known world, at least for Europeans. This was powered by the Venice Arsenal, the state-backed shipyards and armouries that made the city into a dominant force.
Then the idea of nation states became more of a thing, the Ottomans moved into Europe, and the new world changed trade. The Venice Arsenal was still a hub of innovation in trade but factors beyond its control meant it lost relevance.
That’s why I’m writing about robot vacuums today. To be precise, the Roomba. On Sunday iRobot, the company behind the invention, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US. Ownership of the business will transfer to Picea Robotics, the Shenzhen-based manufacturer of iRobot’s products.
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It is a tale of great invention, brilliant processes and a world to which the maker of the wonderfully useful device simply couldn’t adapt. At its height, in 2021, iRobot was valued at just over €3 billion but that had fallen to under €120 million at the time of the filing.
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This collapse came despite Roomba remaining the robot vacuum of choice, with 42 per cent of the US market and a 65 per cent share in Japan. Its name was as synonymous with the product as Hoover was for most.
The business was originally focused on defence projects before iRobot shifted to the much friendlier concept of the Roomba, which launched in 2002.
For all the talk of artificial intelligence (AI) in recent years, including in this column, iRobot had fulfilled a core goal of it more than two decades ago. The Roomba took a menial and repetitive task and allowed humans to spend their time doing something else.
It kept doing that, and got better at it, all while waiting for the AI revolution to come. Yet in what would have been assumed to be its time to shine, the business that created this device has gone bust.
So what happened?
The economics stopped working. The iRobot model relied on a few core factors that weren’t fully within its control. There was a long research and development cycle, which naturally required some up front investment. This would lead to a product that was ready for market and could be improved incrementally over the years.
Unfortunately, all of that cost a lot, even with investment, so manufacturing was offshore. The bulk of this was in China. Picea became not only the maker of the Roomba but also the main lender to iRobot so it could keep pushing the device to market.
That wasn’t ideal but it was manageable so long as there were no major international affairs that could doom the project. Naturally enough, when Amazon tried to acquire iRobot in 2022 for just under €1.5 billion, that was exactly what happened.
The deal was blocked by EU regulators who had good cause to intervene. Amazon’s capacity for scale along with its ecommerce empire meant it was in a position to make competition a nightmare for competitor devices to Roomba.
That was bad but not fatal for iRobot. There was still enough power in the Roomba brand to ensure the company could continue to fight.
Then Donald Trump got re-elected to the White House and immediately started focusing on tariffs. The brains in iRobot did what they could to adapt ahead of time, moving production of devices for the US market to Vietnam as that seemed less in the crosshairs than China.
In the end, though, the 46 per cent tariff imposed on goods imported from Vietnam to the US proved the killing blow to a battered but once brilliant business.
This was a case of first-mover disadvantage. With iRobot having done the hard work, not just in research but in also creating a product category, cheaper manufacturers were able to develop and sell robot vacuums quickly.
Undoubtedly mistakes were made by iRobot but too much was beyond its direct control. This was not a business with the type of power or sway to persuade the minds of EU regulators, get the White House to change tariff policy, or completely upend close to a century of geographic shifts in the global manufacturing sector.
The brilliance of design and innovation at iRobot simply wasn’t enough to overcome all of that.
Venetian shipbuilders never lost their capacity for innovation. They just couldn’t compete with Atlantic trade routes and the competition that came from all sides. The world simply stopped rewarding the way Venice built ships.
Just like the Venetian Arsenal, albeit in a matter of decades rather than centuries, iRobot became exposed. It’s not just sad, it’s a little concerning about the future of innovation.
Simply being clever and recognising a market opportunity isn’t enough and the price of scaling is only rising. Political insulation is now a necessity in order to hope to do so.
