John Buckman (founder/CTO) is a software programmer with a history of creating companies that cause some heck.
He founded the fair trade music service Magnatune and the book-swapping service BookMooch.
He is the former Chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Scott Rao (product designer) is one of the world's leading coffee authorities.
Due to the impact of his many definitive books, his master classes are frequently standing room only.
His goal is making the best espresso in a repeatable, easy-to-achieve manner.
Harriet (Bugs) Harpley (founder/CEO) has an advanced degree in conservation management, a degree in astrophysics and previously worked in London for Frontier Economics, the largest UK-based economic consultancy.
Johnny Au (senior mechanical engineer) has 27 years experience covering all aspects of designing and making consumer products such as mobile phones, LCD panels, and toys. He has led products through UL/CE safety approval, written the assembly line manual, and even designed shipworthy packaging.
Ray Heasman (lead designer, all internals) is an electrical engineer and inventor, with a particular interest in physics and mathematics. He has been especially excited to apply his insights gained in the world of audio ("moving air") to the coffee world ("moving water").
Ben Champion (engineer) comes to us with a vast and eccentric knowledge in coffee as well as piping and mechanical design.
Mirjam Sulger (customer support) is a writer and translator whose Costa Rican host family were worried she drank too much coffee! She is fluent in English, French and German, se apaña en Spanish and Mandarin, and squeezes by in Italian and Portuguese.
Winnie Lin flies off to factories to oversee production and quality control of our products, on-site. She can entertain French and Italians with bits of their language and convert them with her fine cooking skills. She is also our sales representative in China.
William Tan is part of our Mainland China team and works on customer support, machine repairs and quality control.
Teddy Wong (the finaliser) responsible for final assembly of all our machines once tested. He then polishes them to a shine and boxes them with kid gloves, ready to cause a decent amount of havoc around the World. Teddy deals with a staggering amount of boxes each day and knows exactly where everything is located across two massive factories.
Miriam Sun (Order Fulfilment manager) Miriam has spent most of her working life in purchasing and supply, dealing with customs and duty forms and organising logistics so that we don't have to. Fluent in English, Cantonese and Mandarin, Miriam will make sure you order is processed, boxed and shipped the same day.
Cary Norsworthy (Wordsmith) has worked as an editor in both technical book publishing and for a certain trillion-dollar computer company. She oversees our manuals and Internet marketing. She's a DJ podcaster and home sound-proofing expert.
Shinguk Kwon (South Korean representative) Shin wanted to be a professional dancer, even while still in engineering school. Then, while working as a barista in college, he fell in love with coffee. He decided to dance for the love of it, but to build a career in coffee. He moved to Australia to learn from the experts. He now trains baristas and cafe managers, and repairs machines from his base in Seoul.
Tsz (mechanical engineer) joins us as an assistant to senior engineer Johnny. He has experience on large scale construction sites as well as detailed drawing and parts recording which is great given that we have nearly 400 parts in each machine.
Terrence Kwong (Manifold Engineer) If it's made of an exotic resin and has water going through it, Terrence is your expert. Regularly running over tens of thousands of tests on our manifolds, Terrence makes sure that the pipes are squeaky clean and performing at top speed.
Kei Cheng (senior electrical engineer) for final testing on the finished machines. Nothing leaves the assembly line until he's happy and nothing is sent over to be cleaned and polished for shipping unless he's given the OK. Kei also analyses each batch to see what parts failed and needed to be replaced in each machine.
Collin Arneson (senior tech support) is a professional violinist and huge fan of espresso. Being one of the most helpful and knowledgeable people on our customer forum, we hired him!
Levi Lo (project engineer) has a very useful background as a mechanical engineer, industrial designer, and barista. He's worked on coffee grinder design at another company, as well as having completed several SCA coffee certification courses.
Keith Ko (electrical engineer) applied to work in boxing but then when we asked if he could do any computer programming he turned up with a, Arduino, some circuits he's made, and C++ code for us to look at. Needless to say, we gently persuaded Keith into the testing area where he happily sits amongst 2000 AC and DC boards, testing each one to make sure they pass all the diagnostic tests before they are assembled in each machine.
Nicole Chow (runs the factory) Her formal job title is inventory and procurement manager, as well as informally princess of purchasing. However, it would be closer to the truth to say that Nicole runs the factory and manages the assembly lines as well as neogtiating with and paying all major suppliers. She created live time tracking of all sub-assembly on the lines so she can allocate staff to the next job without losing time as well as breaking down which assemblies were taking the longest and why.
Celine Huang (e-commerce manager) has a Masters in Marine Shipping which comes in dead handy when we need to trace parcels around the World, she is fluent in "customs" speak as well as "courier" speak and makes sure our customer's parcels are en-route, cared for and delivered on time. Celine also manages to navigate her way through complicated excel engines to make sure the thousands of transactions for shipping each month are loaded up into the accounting system.
J Wang (support engineer) is our top technical person in mainland China. He works directly with our suppliers, to make sure problems are fixed, and parts are up to spec. He also repairs machines, does tech support and helps us create our products.
Harris Lam (assembly) has had his hands round many household appliances, need any random plumbing work in the factory, then Harris is right there behind you with the appropriate wrench. You need people like Harris around, strong, dependable and handy with a spanner.
Harris Cheung is our new marketing officer and has to make Decent look good despite our normal non-corporate image. One day Harris will be shouting "Action" for our live Youtube videos, the next she's re-designing all of our packaging and another she will be making sure all our products are beautifully lit and photographed ready for the webpage.
Shanshan Ho (purchasing, office administration) is multi-talented, need to find a particular washer on a website containing billions, she's on it. Need the factory decorating for Chinese New year and a budget of "go mental on Taobao", you depend on Shan Shan. Need cakes last minute to cheer up the staff, no problem. In short, Shan Shan makes all the tiny but really important stuff happen which is why her informal title is Head of Cake. Everyone loves Shan Shan!
Alfred Nenada (tools master) We didn't know we needed him until he showed us what he coud really do. We quickly learned that rather than building machines, he can design and build any testing jig, assembly jig, speed things up jig as well as work with our product designer Alex to create new products with a builder's brain invaluable for getting designs OFF the computer on ON to the floor.
Kelvin joins us from a testing and certification lab, and so is experienced in running parts through all the rigorous testing we have to do. With his electrical experience he's also hands on in many ways and is happy to help out with the occasional lighting, wiring or cabling job.
Simon Tam (assembly) is one of our trusty machine builders and is really happy working away at power suplies, manifolds, PCB boards. He has a a keen eye for detail and will make sure he never passes a machine down the line without a gold stamp of approval from him.
Hon Wong (assembly) Hon is qualified in electrical engineering, telecommunicatons and communication engineering and makes sure each machine that he builds and passes down the line is A OK
Kenny Lee (shipping) gets in early to sort out all the machine orders, making sure they are clean, to customer spec and well protected before they make their way around the World. He's one of our boxer of dreams!
Tommy Fan (shipping) gets in early every morning to print out all the orders that came in overnight. He won't move until they are all stamped, labelled and set for pick up by couriers. We don't want to call him Father Christmas, but in a way he is sending gifts all over the World to well behaved Decent customers.
Roy Tong (assembly) is the strongest man in Decent, want a stacking shelf lifting, he's right there, want 500 suitcases moving, he's already done it. He's also really handy at building machines and making sure that steam wand is on real tight!
Ruby Wong (assembly) is our top group head controller assembler. It's a demanding role requiring precision and delicacy to line everything up and not damage anything whilst it's all assembled. She thinks it's a bit like surgery and since she's a former nurse we know we are in good hands.
Amy (Company Chef) can put her hand to anything, be it de-veining 200 shrimp for lunch, creating famous HK waffles on our new waffle iron, or hauling a metric tonne of parcels down to the HK post office. Her energy and strength is legendary and we are very pleased she decided to join our team and feed us every day.
Mark (Coding and coffee) joined us from a roastery in HK but made the mistake of telling John he could code. He's now been grabbed by the IT department for a mind blowing array of different coding projects. We're sure he's quite happy though since his background is speciality coffee we placed him in our factory cafe so once in a while he gets to pause and assist any visitors that come in.
