Morning is a Singaporean coffee brand, having designed a machine that is aiming to bring quality coffee to at-home drinkers with innovation, technology and select capsule producers.

Brand Snapshot

When it comes to making coffee at home, there’s a dichotomy at play between convenience and craft. For the former, there’s Nespresso. For the latter, there’s a long line of expensive coffee machines and shiny accessories. Each option comes with its own trade offs.

Choose Nespresso and you’ll get a passable coffee made at pace. It’s minimal effort and low involvement. The coffee itself will satisfy but not knock your socks off. Choose a smart coffee machine and you lighten your wallet, loose a lot of kitchen space and must dedicate your time to perfecting the art: the idea of a quick coffee becomes paradoxical. However, the coffee itself is undeniably better, and because more effort is invested in making it, the enjoyment of drinking it is much higher. It’s the same reason we are willing to pay a lot of money for a barista made coffee, but feel fobbed off when we order tea and it comes dunked in a bag.

What’s proven difficult has been trying to bring craft into convenience. Nespresso, ultimately, taps out at giving buyers lots of choice around the capsules (plus aesthetically pleasing stores.)

But now, enter Morning. With its attempt to bring some user tinker-ability (or skill?) to the machine, it is going beyond delivering better coffee through better capsules and borrowing from the success of the process-oriented approach. The brand’s success, should it come, will be one of psychological arbitrage. The Morning machine is giving convenience hunters just enough ability to influence the brewing “process” so as to give them a sense of ownership over it, but without requiring any of the off-putting heavy lifting. It allows just enough micro adjustments to be made to enable personal preferences to be made. It puts an otherwise multi-step process into a single component machine. It, more than anything, balances the need for speed with the desire for a ‘fancier’ coffee.

In truth, using Morning is much like driving an expensive car. It has a dashboard full of bells, whistles and lights, and whilst you may not know what they all do, you feel more reassured for knowing they exist. And like believing the car thus performs even better, my guess is that we might just believe the coffee thus tastes even better.