The Art of Excellent Products by Riccardo Illy

Author:Riccardo Illy [Illy, Riccardo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781400225118
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2021-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

SIMPLICITY IN THE BUSINESS LIFE

As you seek out new products and new markets to expand your business, vigilance is essential. Most large European businesses will eventually consider expanding into the United States. Some with success, some otherwise. In 1980, my father decided to try selling espresso in Phoenix, Arizona. We reasoned that there were already many Europeans living in New York City and San Francisco who appreciated espresso and would be interested in trying our product. But before expanding to these cities we wanted to understand if an American unaffected by European attitudes and opinions would also appreciate our espresso. We were confident that our product’s quality was superior to the other coffees available to these consumers.

We decided to create a new product for American consumers: an espresso machine specifically for restaurants and hotels. We were already using a similar product to great success in the Netherlands, Germany, and France. With a few tweaks in the electronics, we figured that the US market would love it just as much. The machine was heavy duty and not exactly a thing of beauty. It was also manual, which we did not realize would be a problem. But very quickly, our new clients reported back to us that their bartenders and waiters, unlike their counterparts in Europe, did not have the time to stand vigilant over the coffee cup, turning the machine off at the perfect point (roughly twenty seconds), just as the cup filled to the correct depth. Instead, they would run to serve another table or pour another drink. The cup would run over, and the coffee would be ruined. We took the machines back and reconfigured them with an automatic feature, but now they began mysteriously shorting out at random points of the day because they weren’t built to handle American power surges. Eventually we fixed this problem, too, but at great expense and frustration.

I took two lessons from this. The first was that I had made my life, and the challenge of expanding into the United States, overly complex. From that moment forward, I never again attempted to introduce a new product into a new market. Instead, we focused on one or the other. Second, I realized that simplicity could mean different things to different markets. Our European customers appreciated the control that the manual machines gave them. Their staff members were themselves connoisseurs of good coffee. They took pride in perfectly timing the brewing cycle, standing guard for the exact moment to flip the switch and finish the brew. Our American customers did not have the time or the same feeling toward coffee that we did. For them, our simplicity was a flaw. It made life more complex.

Even though we eventually created a product that worked for our brand, I realized the importance of simplicity. If you start simply, you can educate your customers and win them over until they are familiar enough with your products that they no longer require explanation.

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