Running a business the AeroPress way
For the last 10 years it’s been the Sanders’ family secret weapon in the kitchen - and no doubt has provided the fuel for ideas of quite a few LinkedIn posts too. It’s the AeroPress.
If you don’t know this coffee maker, it doesn’t need refill pods. It’s not even plugged into the mains. It’s a simple, portable, one-cup system that uses the palm of your hand to plunge.
This miracle of design was dreamed up by Alan Adler, now 85, in 2005. Adler is a self-taught engineer who holds 40 patents including that of the Aerobie frisbee.
Pilita Clark wrote about the AeroPress in her FT column this week. In ‘What a cultish coffee gizmo says about 21st century capitalism’, the AeroPress fan attributes Adler’s success to how he overlooked conventional business thinking. Clark praises his strategy which includes:
Using word-of-mouth instead of advertising. He sent his invention to coffee aficionados and joined online forums to talk about it. Within three years of its launch, fans had set up the World Aeropress Championships: he’d craftily got coffee fans to do the heavy lifting for him. This was years before Insta and TikTok.
Ignoring conventional profit-maximising logic. By 2014 Adler was making 500,000 AeroPresses a year and demand was growing. Traditional logic would have him ship it out to China, hike up the price and hire cheaper staff. Instead he stuck with the same Californian factory and kept the price below $40. As for the staff in his small business, many have worked there until retirement,
Remaining self taught. Alder embraced what he calls the ‘joyful experience’ of learning and even became an engineering instructor at Stanford, despite not having a degree himself.
In 2021 Adler sold the business, retaining a minority stake.
Clark notes her beloved AeroPress does a much better job of making great coffee over the fiddly, expensive devices out there. For a classy, easy, amazing hit of wonderful black stuff, I totally agree.
Thank you Tim Ferris and Dan Rubin for recommending it to me back in 2014. Cheers!