Honours design team efforts.
Breville Global CEO Jim Clayton (pictured below) has made a rare public appearance to support the company’s design focus as it prepares for the important Christmas sell-in season.
In a speech conducted during an event to honour the contribution of Breville design and innovation director, Richard Hoare, Clayton described the architect of the company’s key products including The Oracle and Juice Fountain as “a truly impressive individual”.
“I have only had the opportunity to work with Richard for a year and you cannot overstate the impact that Richard and his team have had on this company.
“Breville is a product led company – it is the strength of that product portfolio that has driven the success that Breville has had. On a personal note it is the reason I am here – simply put. It was when I saw the product portfolio – that’s what’s caused me to come and I know I speak for our new COO and GMO exactly the same.
“It is the strength of what Richard and his team have done that have effectively made Breville what it is and what it will be. The reason is there’s a lot of things you can do to help a company perform better, but there is one thing you can’t do which is you can’t teach a team that makes bad products to make great products and that is the core essence and soul of this company and its true asset that resides with Richard and his team and the team he has built and drives.
“If you look at Richard’s accomplishments they are long – lots of design awards, lots of firsts in the worlds, five star customer reviews which is the true test of whether Richard and his team are getting it right. But there were two things that I noticed before I came that really drew me to this company and it is pretty interesting.
“The first thing is the design language itself, – as a general rule US companies have a really hard time being successful in Europe and European companies have a very hard time being successful in the US. That is basically the two different cultures in a sense reject the design language of the other. Somehow, Richard and his team from all the way at the bottom of the world, have found a way to create a design language that threads through those two cultures and is accepted by both. That forms a foundation that allows us to build a truly global company because that single design language is accepted.
“The second bit that I think is really truly more impressive is if you look at companies in this vertical and in others – what you see is the company tends to be really good at one thing and that comes from the design and engineering team truly understanding the deep domain of that particular category whatever it is. But there are very few companies in the world that can hop across category and continue to deliver the world’s best product in those categories.
“I would put Apple as one example – which if you think about the phone and the laptop and the watch – they have nothing to do with one another but they set the standard for each of the categories in which they play. Richard and his team have found a way to hop across vertical whether it be espresso machines or ovens, or juicers or tea makers – whatever it is and every time they focus on that category and touch it and dive deep into and do what they do, they birth a product that sets the standard for that category and that is truly the unique engine that sits in this company that is going to allow it to become what it is going to be.
“I have had a couple of meetings with the market and said the same thing which is – my job, and everything I have done this year and everything I will do is about getting behind this engine, cultivating the engine and scaling it and that’s what’s going to allow Breville to become what it is going to be in the next five years and that sits behind Richard and his team continuing to execute the way they have executed.”
“I think the challenge for Richard is that I only need one more thing from him and which is I need twice the number of products in half the time, with the same level of obsession, quality and precision that the Breville brand commands. I would like to acknowledge the great work that Richard has done and the great work that his team is about to do,” he concluded.