Already a subscriber?Solomon Lew has made plenty of good decisions in his career, but backing Jim Clayton to become chief executive of Breville Group nine years ago is surely right up there.
Breville makes a range of manual and automatic coffee machines, but its top-of-the-line automatic gadgets – the Oracle Touch and the new Oracle Jet, which retail for $3499 and $3699 respectively – are the focus for Clayton and his team. “We are rarely, I think, a consumer’s first coffee machine, or probably their third or fourth, or whatever it is,” Clayton explained. In the US, a coffee drinker might start with a drip coffee machine, or in Australia, it might be a Nespresso device, or similar. Eventually, as their passion for coffee grows, they step up towards something fancier.
There is a lot of competition at the manual end of the market, but Clayton says he “couldn’t be happier” with the company’s positioning.More competitors, spending more marketing dollars, help grow the overall coffee machine category, and help push coffee lovers further up the quality curve – towards Breville’s whiz-bang automated machines.