Which Dragons Den Category Wins the Most Deals
It is easy to assume that flashy tech pitches or trendy food and drink brands have the best odds in the Den, since those are the categories that tend to get remembered. We went through every pitch in our records, grouped them by category, and worked out what share of each group actually walked away with a deal.
The results flip a lot of assumptions. The categories with the highest deal rates are mostly practical, unglamorous businesses, while some of the most talked about categories on the show have some of the lowest odds of success.
Automotive, 9 out of 9 deals, 100%
Every single automotive pitch in our records secured a deal, a perfect record across the whole category. It is a small sample, only 9 pitches, but a perfect one is still a perfect one.
DDN Ltd's £250,000 for 25% deal in season 6 is one of the larger examples from this group.
Pet Products, 15 out of 16 deals, 93.8%
Pet Products comes in second with 15 deals out of 16 pitches, one of the strongest deal rates of any category we tracked.
Billy+Margot's dog treats deal and Piddle Patch's dog toilet deal both belong to this category, which suggests investors like pet businesses more consistently than almost anything else in our data.
Business Services, 30 out of 33 deals, 90.9%
Business Services pitches, things like Glassbusters and Igloo, secured deals 30 times out of 33, another category with a strikingly high hit rate.
These are rarely the flashiest pitches of an episode, but they are consistently among the ones that walk away with money.
Home and Living, 32 out of 36 deals, 88.9%
Home and Living pitches secured deals 32 times out of 36, putting the category comfortably in the top tier alongside Business Services and Pet Products.
Randy Cow and Bogina Bag both come from this category, and both are examples of practical products that clearly appealed to the panel.
Food and Drink, 59 out of 68 deals, 86.8%
Food and Drink pitches landed deals 59 times out of 68, a strong showing for one of the categories with the largest number of pitches in our records.
Reggae Reggae Sauce and The Snaffling Pig are two of the better known deals to come out of this group.
Fashion and Beauty, 55 out of 81 deals, 67.9%
Fashion and Beauty drops to a 67.9% deal rate, still comfortably above half but a clear step down from the categories above it.
Beach Powder, Skinny Tan and Liquiproof all secured deals here, while Tangle Teezer is one of the category's most famous no deal outcomes.
Health and Wellness, 17 out of 30 deals, 56.7%
Health and Wellness sits almost exactly at a coin flip, with 17 deals out of 30 pitches.
It is one of the categories where the outcome of any individual pitch is genuinely hard to predict from the category alone.
The lower half: Electronics, Kids and Family, Sports and Outdoors, Tech and Software, Green and Clean Tech, and Drinks and Spirits
Electronics closed deals 46.2% of the time, Kids and Family 45.1%, Sports and Outdoors 41.9%, Tech and Software 41.5%, Green and Clean Tech 41.2%, and Drinks and Spirits 40%, a tight cluster all sitting under the halfway mark.
Tech and Software is the most surprising name on this list given how much attention tech pitches tend to get, but the data is clear that fewer than half of them actually convert into a deal.
Other Products, 105 out of 914 deals, 11.5%
Our catch all Other Products category, made up of pitches that do not fit neatly into any of the categories above, secured deals just 11.5% of the time across 914 pitches.
That low rate is partly a function of how broad and varied this catch all group is rather than a verdict on any one type of product, but it is by far the lowest deal rate of any group in our data.