Doubling your business with creative growth strategy

Illy is an established, premium coffee company with profit growing steadily year on year. Illy’s core business is selling coffee beans and coffee equipment to more than 50,000 restaurants and cafes in over 130 countries.  

Illy believed that it could double sales over five years primarily through the organic spread of its core bean and equipment business to new markets (e.g. China). An investment bank approached us to explore alternative growth strategies for this storied and well distributed brand.

Challenge
To uncover and quantify new sources of revenue capable of doubling Illy’s business in 5 years through leveraging their existing assets – coffee and coffee equipment. 

We we did
We explored three innovation platforms to spark nuggets of opportunity. We generated multiple ideas in each platform and then asked 'what would need to be true' for each idea to step-change the Illy growth trajectory.

Illy Rocca
A simple idea, Rocca makes and dispenses ice cubes made from coffee, so as you drink your ice coffee, it gets stronger, not more watery.