Distribution?

John Heckendorn

Reiss, in a thread over on the Coffee forum, you said something interesting:

once i get the L1-P out the door the focus will completely swing back to two core issues; coffee and an extensive enhancement of the website, in particular enhancing our ability to ship from multiple locations.

Does this translate as to more outlets for Londinium coffee, or more broadly about establishing distributors for your machines across different continents (e.g., North America, Australia), and perhaps alleviating shipping/customs/other issues?

Reiss Gunson

hi john

no, none of those things, i should have been less ambiguous

we are and i expect always will be, a workshop business that uses the internet to achieve sufficient demand for a relatively niche product

in this way i don't have any staff to manage and i control the customer experience and if anything is not up to the mark i take responsibility for it, including every bean of coffee roasted

there are no shipping, customs, or other issues that i am aware of. at times like christmas all distribution networks will obviously be running at or above their design capacity and delays and issues can occur at such times. but it is not unusual for us to deliver machine to the east coast of the US the day after we despatch them in the UK, which i feel is adequate

no my comments were more to provide reassurance that we are going to continue with coffee, as we are in a position now where we could just do machines. i think it is important that we offer a one stop shop for all things pertaining to lever espresso, so against that backdrop we going to invest in both our coffee, roasting, and website to get even better at this activity. at the moment our website is really holding us back, but the changes required require a major piece of work and when you are a small business you have limited bandwidth, so the fact that we haven't made these changes before now does not mean it is no longer going to happen

additionally i have been giving our coffee pricing a lot of thought. we now have a large number of our espresso machines dotted around the place and it seems daft that we are not putting an offer on the table to owners of our machines that really encourages them to try our coffee. so you can also expect to see me completely re-cut our coffee pricing strategy as i don't think that our current approach is as effective as it could be

for example, we currently try to use basic economic theory to reward customers for buying multiple bags of the same coffee. it helps reduce our wastage and we are firmly of the view that most home baristas make life much more difficult for themselves than it needs to be by chopping and changing from one coffee to the next and onto another one. notwithstanding our efforts it is very clear that this is not what the customer wants, so at some point you have to concede defeat and give people what they want

we will also be on the lookout for any third party bolt ons that come along that we feel enhance the performance of our machines, the first of which is being posted to us today we understand

hope that clears up the ambiguity

kind regards



reiss.