The Devon-based brand behind the “world’s loudest bicycle horn” to increase cyclists’ safety, Hornit, has reached over £1 million in export sales and £3 million in global sales despite being rejected on Dragons’ Den back in 2015.
Hornit’s founder Tom de Pelet appeared on BBC’s Dragons’ Den in 2015 where the Dragons turned down the chance to support his patented Hornit Bicycle horn. Since then the company has appeared to go from strength to strength – it’s also behind the 26g Clug Pro bike rack (we were very impressed with the original when we reviewed it) and the Hornit AIRO balance bike, which we liked too.
Hornit has now achieved export sales worth over £1 million after a growth of 220% to Australia since 2019, as a result of the southern hemisphere country experiencing a boom in cycling activity during 2020 – one survey found that 63% of respondents increased cycling during COVID-19 restrictions.
Hornit says its dB140 bike horn is four times louder than the nearest competitor for alerting drivers of cars, buses, lorries as well as pedestrians about your presence. At 140 decibels, it’s 30 decibels louder than the standard on cars and vans. .
road.cc reviewer Shaun Audane had a go at alerting road users with the first model when it was released in 2015, and confirmed: “Loud enough for congested town centres, it’s assertive, rather than aggressive, alerting pedestrians to your passage without making dogs howl, babies cry and elderly gentlemen wave their sticks in outrage.”
> 13 of the best bicycle bells to get you heard on the road
In addition to the piercing 140dB “road mode” a lower pitched car horn sound at 121dB can be used when riding along cycle paths.
Review: Hornit Clug bike rack
A remote trigger is included to allow ease of use when braking, and it also now includes a Garmin style mount developed in collaboration with K-Edge.
Unlike Hornit’s bike horn, cycling-related products have successfully secured funding from BBC’s Dragons’ Den time and time again including, for example, Rehook’s tool that reseats the chain without you having to get your hands or clothing dirty.
CYCL also won £45,000 of funding for their handlebar-mounted indicators in 2017, but road.cc’s John Stevenson suggested that maybe – just maybe – there wasn’t an enormous market for such a thing and that the Dragons’ got it wrong, asking: “How did cycling’s least successful product category get the dragons’ attention?”
26 thoughts on “Dragons’ Den reject who designed ‘the world’s loudest bicycle horn’ hits over £3 million in global sales”
Quote:
Sounds good. Perhaps we could test out Shaun’s claims by putting it right next to his eardrum and letting it off 50 times in a row.
That’s nice, you’ve moved on
That’s nice, you’ve moved on from advocating physical assaults on various cyclists whose actions you don’t agree with and the physical abuse of young children to suggesting assaults on road.cc staff. You need help.
Why can road.cc not just
Why can road.cc not just suspend his account? Ample toxicity evident in so many of their comments…
Does seem a weird comment
Does seem a weird comment doesn’t it. Just because the reviewer stated it doesn’t seem loud enough to make babies cry he should be tortured with it? I expect all the other youtube users who reviewed / use it should also have the same treatment. As I’ve mentioned before, he definitely has never got the “Sticks and Stones” childrens rhyme definition and seems to see it as “use words, deserve to be sticked and stoned”.
Well, as is freely available
Well, as is freely available on the interwebs, 140db poses an “immediate danger to hearing”, equivalent to a jet engine taking off. So either the 140db claim is incorrect, or the “assertive rather than aggressive” claim is incorrect. They cannot both possibly be true as claimed in the article.
As it was the reviewer who made the assertion, what better way to test his claim than through my proposed experiment?
Garage at Large wrote:
Bizarely I find myself agreeing here. And I did raise eyebrows at the assertive not agressive description for something which is 30db louder than would be standard on cars and vans, so 2x2x2x as loud as a car horn. with 130db being described as the threshold of pain.
Now of course it depends at what distance the 140db is measured at, as db reduce by 6 each time the distance from source doubles.
So 140db at 1m -> 134db at 2m, 128db at 4m
Therefore this horn at 32m away would be as loud as a jackhammer 1m away.
Well it doesn’t really matter
Well it doesn’t really matter does it. The Trolling Prick now has it in his thick head that 140db horns are killing people and spooking Ponies in the New Forest into the paths of innocent motorists.
In the USA, the maximum legal
In the USA, the maximum legal decibel level for a car horn on a passenger vehicle is 100-110; all states have a line in their vehicle laws and regulations that states a car horn can not emit an unreasonably loud or harsh sound. Not all of them have that exact wording, but they all make the same point.
140dB? Is that measured at
140dB? Is that measured at the typical distance of the other party? Or at 1m, or at 1cm? Without knowing the distance the dB on its own is meaningless. It’s like measuring the brightness (lux) of a torch shining on a white wall – depends how far the torch is.
I bought one a while back and
I bought one a while back and it is undoubtedly loud but the problem I found was nobody actually *heard* it because it doesn’t sound like anything that would come from a vehicle so it just gets ignored. You’re better off shouting “hiya” or ringing a bell and not being an obnoxious git.
One of the reasons I went for
One of the reasons I went for an AirZound, recharges with bike pump.
I did have a siren by NightSun, had a high pitched tone, not a car horn. The AirZound attracts drivers attention.
Garage at Large wrote:
Since a bike bell or horn will never be right next to someone’s ear drum when it’s actually being used, I think there are any number of better ways to test it. Duh.
Ahh, but as Boo likes his
Ahh, but as Boo likes his violence, the better ways won’t be torture and painful. Remember if he can propose violence, especially against a cyclist, he will.
I’m surprised he didn’t mention that if a car driver was “spooked” by having one of these horns sounded near them, they had every right to force the cyclist into a ditch and drive off triumphant.
Not sure you understand ‘jet’
Not sure you understand ‘jet’ engine noise. For starters commercial airliners have gas turbine rather than jet engines. Also they have reduced their noise footprint by over 90% since the first ‘jets’ came into service.
High bypass ratio gas turbine engines are getting quieter and quieter still – this info below from NATS doesn’t even include the latest generation such as the Boeing 787 which is even quieter. Plus of course, you can’t actually get close enough to an aeroplane to hear your quoted 140db.
https://www.nats.aero/environment/noise-and-emissions/measuring-noise/
Can we have an inventor come
Can we have an inventor come up with a samurai sword or cattle prod that is hidden in your handlebars with one handbar grip as the hilt? Seems we need em when faced with the muderous demolition derby out there to defend ourselves.
joe9090 wrote:
— joe9090I think a rather more overt AK-47 strapped to your back would work better.
I tried wearing a Hells
I tried wearing a Hells Angels vest to intimidate drivers but they just laughed at me.. what’s wrong with a outlaw biker riding a bicycle if his hog breaks down?
There do seem to be a
There do seem to be a surprising number of businesses which turn up in the media, who are making shedloads of money despite having been rejected on Dragons’ Den. Perhaps the dragons don’t have as good an eye as they (and their producers) think they do…
I think a lot of the reason
I think a lot of the reason they reject pitches is often down to the valuation/size of the stake in the company that’s being offered, while there’s plenty of terrible products or badly run business on there, there’s lots that would be likely to succeed regardless but aren’t going to provide a great return on investment at the levels they’re asking for.
brooksby wrote:
Well, they didn’t take Moss’s comfy bra.
Mind you, it did have an unintended pyrotechnic feature.
Well it’s a TV show with a
Well it’s a TV show with a highly artificial setting that bears little to no relation to how they’d normally pick an investment. They’ve got 20 minutes to make a decision about a sector they may know nothing about after hearing the details from someone who might just be crap at pitching ideas, and who presumably has already been struggling to find investment if they’re willing to contemplate giving away the enormous chunks of ownership the dragons usually demand. If they got it right every time it’d be a flat out miracle.
It’s a pitch in its own right
It’s a pitch in its own right – “Dragons Den didn’t realise how awesome our product is – but you can buy it today at 20% off!”.
One of the Dragons Den rejects is very spammy, which irritates me.
I’m shocked and amazed that a
I’m shocked and amazed that a bunch of self-absorbed, heavily chauffeured money-men would reliably favour products that they want cyclists to want over ones that cyclists might actually want.
Shocked, I tell you.
Velo-drone wrote:
Strange as I find it to defend the likes of that bunch of spivs, in fairnes you don’t need to get it right every time
You don’t even need to get it right more times than you get it wrong.
You just need to get it right when it matters, and that need only be once.
In all fairness to them, it
In all fairness to them, it can be a completely rational decision not to make an offer on a product even if it is profitable.
If the product is something unethical that would impact their brand image and portfolio, for instance, it wouldn’t be wise to touch it. Imagine, for example, if a misbehaving cyclist let off a 140db horn in a crowded shared use path “for the lols”, and an elderly person had a heart attack and died… and the product was linked back to a Dragon?
The bloke who made the
The bloke who made the TangleTeezer was also turned down by the dragons, which is great for long easily knotted hair.