5000 Decents birthday!
We had a big celebration today for our 5000th Decent Espresso Machine, which happened to be a few days from the 50th birthday of Bugs Harpley: CEO, co-founder of all this, and my partner.
In the bottom right I'm holding a photo of us, just 2.5 years ago, when there were 8 of us in the photo, but we'd somehow managed to build 500 machines at that point. It felt like success at the time https://www.instagram.com/p/Bvd7eD7hMLn/ - Miraculously, 6 of the 8 people in that photo are still with Decent, though Simon (center) no longer solders every heater together (he's our head repairer), Hannifa no longer builds group heads (she's coffee R&D with Paul), and Alex no longer does anything and everything (he's was employee #1, and now is a product designer).
When I was 11 years old, my grandmother asked me what I wanted for my 12th birthday. “Homemade lasagna!” I said. “Too much work!” was her reply… and we had steak instead.
When Bugs asked me to make lasagna (which in our 13 years together I never have made, and it turns out to be one of her favorites) I could not say no.
Michael and I started at 9am with whole tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, pasta sheets, ground pork and dill see(to make Italian sausages), and beef cheeks.
4 hours later, we'd produced 4 huge lasagnas! The beef cheeks turned out to be overly ambitious, and didn't make it into the lasagna, served on the size instead. Mohammed is giving a big thumbs up in the photo as he got his own pork-free lasagna, that everyone agreed was the best looking of all (extra cheese and sauce!).
A BIG HUGE THANKS to the 4500 great people, all over the world, who have bought one of our hand-built espresso machines in the past 2 1/2 years.
Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you for helping us make this dream a reality.
You can see Bugs getting quite emotional in the middle photo. We've always wanted to make a contribution in the world of food, but didn't see how to do so (don't want to open a restaurant). Decent manages to allow us to live the life we want, applying the skills we have, in a field that we feel so happy to be able to contribute to. Thank you again.
Let's keep having fun together, and making ever better drinks.
- John & Bugs
#milestones #growth #celebration #DE1history
Updated 2021/11/26