This post will age. It’s a snapshot frozen in time, a brief pause to acknowledge how our past informs the present and future of Six Simple Machines.

We began designing The Juggler in 2010 and in 2012 we built and sold our first small handful of machines. 10 years later in 2022 a fair number of those machines are still in cafes doing exactly what we designed them to do. Some have been retired having dispensed milk for literally millions of milk based coffees and have since been replaced by updated and improved versions of their former selves.

Over the years The Juggler has changed. We’ve made it more robust, easier to maintain and more environmentally friendly. We’ve redesigned the taps, the trays, the milk connection manifolds and many other parts. We’ve even worked with our pump supplier to build new pumps that better meet our needs. The Juggler can now dispense plant milks as well as dairy.

Despite the many improvement we have made we continue to resist changing The Juggler’s core functionality: to reduce plastic packaging and to serve cold milk to assist baristas operating traditional espresso machines. We’ve always been clear where the line lies between assistance and automation. For many cafe operators this line has blurred over the years but we’re still crystal clear that our mission is to support coffee as a craft. Not coffee as a commodity.

There are now 1000’s of Six Simple Machines products operating across Australia, New Zealand and on just about every continent in the world. We are immensely proud of this and we love knowing that many of these machines will still be going strong for years to come.

Thinking back to our humble beginnings in the worst little shed you could possibly imagine, we never gave ourselves time to think that this would eventually become our reality. We never seemed to have time for anything other than building machines and now as we look ahead with all we have learned and experienced, we can see that it has been time very well spent indeed.

As much as we look forward to seeing what the future has in store for us, we’re no longer in any great rush to get there.