From dissatisfied customer to vice president of R&D, how does an ex-military engineer design a coffee machine? Gabrielle Brown speaks to Fellow’s Nicholas Terzulli about the company’s passion for perfect coffee
We all have that person in our lives who is obsessed with coffee. They may deliberate endlessly on grind size, fixate on bean health, or become engrossed with finding the perfect water pressure for a rich and creamy espresso. For them, the morning cup of coffee has gone from a grab-and-go affair to a perfectly performed ritual.
Home-brewing gadgets have flooded the market in recent years, but for one coffee fanatic who also happened to be an engineer, there was still room for improvement. This is the story behind Fellow, a company that produces a machine that is not just intuitive and aesthetically pleasing, but also happens to make a great cup of coffee.
After earning degrees in mechanical engineering and aeroballistics and starting out as a designer of military robotics, Nicholas Terzulli’s passion for
coffee eventually found him working part-time as a barista and sent him, fully caffeinated, down a fascinating rabbit hole.
Terzulli initially reached out to Fellow’s CEO Jake Miller to off er advice when the company’s ODE Brew Grinder did not fit his custom burr, the blade in a coffee grinder. One thing led to another and from that initial conversation, Terzulli eventually becoming vice president of R&D at Fellow, where he still gets excited about solving hard problems.
“My bosses are like, ‘Hey, we want to do this thing that has all these crazy functions and features.’ And I’m happy I get a blank piece of paper and get to figure out how to crack it. It’s so awesome,” he says.
Coffee break
A career highlight for Terzulli was the 2024 launch of the Fellow Aiden drip coffee brewer, a product designed entirely in-house using PTC Onshape.
“Automatic drip coffee has a reputation problem. Whether serving a crowd or managing only a few moments of free time, the trade-off for many has been either bad coffee or no coffee at all,” says Miller. “We designed Aiden to solve this problem. Even the busiest people no longer have to choose between their time and phenomenal coffee.”
Fellow Aiden offers precision temperature control, built-in brewing guidance and presets that support customised recipes or downloadable brew profiles to recreate signature flavours from your favourite roasters.
Terzulli credits Onshape with helping the design team take the Fellow Aiden precision coffee maker from a blank sheet of paper to a physical product that manages the niche challenges of at-home brewers.
The Fellow R&D team uses the professional license of Onshape for all its CAD modelling, plus the integrated simulation and rendering tools available on the SaaS platform.
“You never have to save anything. Many times, when I used another CAD platform, I’d be working for an hour or two and then I’d have a crash. Hours of work were gone and I’d have to start over,” Terzulli says.
“With Onshape, I can leave the CAD on a computer screen at my office and drive to my house to open up another computer and keep working on that CAD without any headache.”
With plenty of new product development underway at Fellow, it’s great news that the company’s designers won’t face a headache, either from CAD challenges or from caffeine withdrawal.
This article first appeared in DEVELOP3D Magazine
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