对话 Bre:zi 创始人 Jackson：从半导体到一杯冷萃

This article shares the entrepreneurial experience of cross-industry founder Jackson, who transitioned from the semiconductor industry to build the cold brew coffee maker brand Bre:zi. It offers actionable insights on product innovation and entrepreneurship that general readers can learn from.

1. On product innovation: Founders do not need to pursue distant, cutting-edge new technologies. By combining mature technologies from other sectors, you can solve long-standing pain points in existing markets. Bre:zi adapted homogeneous material dispersion technology from semiconductor manufacturing and noise reduction and heat dissipation tech from projectors for its cold brew machine. This cuts traditional cold brew time from over 12 hours down to just 5-10 minutes, while keeping noise under 60 decibels — low enough to use at a desk without disruption.

2. On entrepreneurial mindset: Founders do not need to chase viral traffic, jump on the AI hype bandwagon, or splash out on prominent brand logos. By focusing on real user needs, refining product details, and building trust and emotional connections through user communities, you can achieve organic growth. Even when cheaper copycats emerge, core users will stick with the brand they trust.

This article offers practical, actionable insights for building new consumer brands that align with today's segmented consumer market trend.

1. Product R&D: Cross-industry innovation is a viable path: use mature technologies from other sectors to solve pain points in your category. Stick to first principles to dig into real user needs, rather than just copying and reverse-engineering existing foreign products.

2. Brand marketing: You do not need to force prominent logos, splurge on paid traffic, or hype irrelevant AI concepts to tell a story. Build your brand moat by winning over core users with product strength, driving organic word-of-mouth, and establishing trust and identity through community operation.

3. Pricing and distribution: Stick to value-based pricing and avoid price wars. Be selective with channel expansion: first deepen your connection with niche core users and partner with premium boutique channels, and only move into mass-market channels once user awareness and your team's capabilities are mature. This effectively avoids the high return risk that comes with premature scaling.

4. Consumer trend outlook: Today's market is clearly segmented, and users are willing to pay for genuinely valuable, high-quality products, rather than paying for empty brand premiums.

This article shares new business models and entrepreneurial insights for players in the cold brew coffee industry.

1. Market opportunity: The premium coffee equipment market has long been dominated by legacy European brands, which lack innovation and fail to adequately address user pain points. No unified industry standard yet exists for the cold brew equipment segment, leaving blue-ocean opportunities for new brands to break through.

2. Risk warning: Mass production of cross-industry hardware innovation is far more difficult than expected. Developing brand-new core components brings many unforeseen challenges: for example, Bre:zi once encountered a problem where low temperatures caused pipe blockages from ice buildup. Founders should reserve 9-10 months of buffer time for R&D, production, and trial-and-error in advance.

3. Business model: Instead of the old playbook of pouring money into traffic to chase scale, adopt an organic growth model focused on deep community engagement. For overseas markets, go with DTC standalone sites and partnerships with local boutique coffee shops; for the domestic market, rely on organic platform traffic. Avoid rushing into mass-market channels to prevent high return rates.

4. Competition strategy: Avoid price wars, focus on building high-value products for quality-focused core users, and build competitive barriers through rapid product iteration and community trust. There is no need to over-worry about copycats and plagiarism.

This article offers valuable insights on product innovation and transformation for hardware manufacturing factories.

1. Product design and production insights: Today's users no longer only calculate the cost of visible product parts; they are willing to pay a premium for invisible details. For example, Bre:zi uses full aluminum alloy even on the unseen back of its machine body to improve overall texture, which has won recognition from core users.

2. Business opportunity: The premium coffee equipment market has long been monopolized by European brands, which are slow to adapt, lack innovation incentives, and fail to adequately address pain points for Chinese users. Leveraging Shenzhen's complete, robust hardware supply chain, domestic factories can seize cross-industry innovation opportunities to launch new products tailored to local user needs.

3. Insights on digital transformation: Do not force irrelevant AI functions onto hardware just to follow a trend. AI can be applied to operations to boost efficiency — for example, AI can scrape and analyze user reviews and generate marketing content to reduce reliance on large execution teams. But unnecessary functions added to hardware just for a fundraising story only hurt user experience.

4. R&D insights: Stick to solving core user pain points, rather than just reverse-engineering and copying foreign products. Only products that genuinely solve user problems will win market recognition.

This article outlines the current status and new trends of the premium coffee equipment industry, reveals real pain points for brands, and offers key insights for relevant service providers.

1. Industry trends: The premium coffee equipment track is undergoing new shifts: a new generation of original Chinese brands is rising, and market share is being eroded from slow-moving, ideologically rigid legacy European manufacturers. No unified standard exists for the cold brew equipment segment yet, which will generate strong future demand for standard-setting and industry body liaison services.

2. Client pain points: When cross-industry new brands enter a new category, they develop all-new core components from scratch, which makes mass production and debugging far more difficult. They face many non-traditional problems that traditional kitchen appliance brands never encounter, such as pipe ice blockage at low temperatures. This requires supply chain service providers to support brands through repeated trial and error and adjustments.

3. Service demand: Most new brands operate with small, lean teams that use AI to boost operational efficiency, rather than maintaining large in-house execution teams. They have clear demand for service providers that can offer AI-powered operation support, user community operation liaison, and offline channel connection services.

4. Industry opportunities: Most new brands plan to enter mass-market channels only after 3-4 years of development, and currently need access to specialty coffee shop resources around the world. Relevant channel service providers can prepare in advance to meet this demand.

This article offers actionable insights for platform operation and merchant recruitment layout for premium coffee category platforms.

1. Brand needs: A new generation of high-quality new brands increasingly prioritize organic traffic over paying high prices for traffic to scale fast. Platforms need to optimize their organic traffic allocation mechanisms, giving more free exposure to brands with genuinely good products and high user search demand, to attract and retain high-quality brands long-term.

2. Merchant recruitment layout: For products that require certain operating skills like professional cold brew coffee makers, entering mass big-box channels like Costco in a brand's early stage easily leads to high return rates from user misuse, which drags down the platform's reputation. Merchant recruitment should align with a brand's development stage, rather than blindly chasing scale.

3. Operation management: The new generation of brands increasingly prioritizes user community operation. Platforms can provide brands with community operation tools and traffic support to help brands retain core users, boost repurchase rates and loyalty, and in turn improve the platform's own user retention.

4. Risk mitigation: When evaluating brands, platforms should not only look at funding scale and traffic-spending capacity. They should place more weight on product strength and real user recognition, to avoid bringing in brands that only focus on traffic fraud and lack core product competitiveness, which hurts long-term user experience on the platform.

This article showcases new trends and new business models of cross-border Chinese new hardware startups, offering high reference value for industrial research.

1. New industry trends: In the mature premium coffee equipment market, which has been dominated by European brands for over a century, Chinese cross-industry entrepreneurs have now found opportunities to break through. Leveraging China's complete hardware supply chain, they pursue cross-industry innovation, are working to set industry standards for the cold brew segment, and building original Chinese brands. Unlike the previous generation of brands that won through operations and lacked R&D DNA, this new generation of founders has technical backgrounds and is committed to delivering product value.

2. New business models: A counter-traditional "anti-mainstream business" model has emerged: brands avoid prominent forced logos, do not splurge on paid traffic, do not jump on the AI hype bandwagon, and instead focus on deep community cultivation. They build brand moats through user trust and emotional connection, and take a disciplined approach to channel expansion, deepening core user engagement before scaling up gradually.

3. New industry issues: Many hardware sectors are currently caught up in AI hype, with numerous brands adding unnecessary AI functions just to build a story for fundraising, which ultimately hurts user experience. At the same time, the domestic industry still carries an institutional inertia of relying on foreign standards, and lacks confidence in setting local standards for domestic brands.

4. Industry insights: Leveraging supply chain advantages and cross-industry innovation, the new generation of Chinese hardware brands already has the opportunity to define segment standards and achieve overtaking on curves. This follows the same breakthrough path as China's domestic automobile industry, and is a new industrial direction worthy of in-depth research.