Espressivo is a small specialty store that sells traditional espresso machines and related accessories for home use. Our goal is to provide every home barista with the right equipment for their particular needs.
Buying from Espressivo’s online store should always be simple, safe and customer-oriented.
Our espresso machines are all imported to Finland directly from the manufacturers and we only cooperate with brands that provide both excellent products and continuous after sales service. As a customer of Espressivo, we want you to be satisfied with your purchase for a long time to come.
Micro-enterprise with over 20 years of experience in espresso machines
The idea of starting my own business around espresso machines was born out of my own interest in espresso coffee. As a young man I was properly bitten by the espresso bug way back in the 1990s.
Decent espresso machines for home use were a rarity in Finland at the time, so I asked a well-known Italian manufacturer if I could start importing their products on a small scale. When I had already accepted their ignoring my message – as a young greenhorn I had sent them my question during the southern European summer vacation – they finally replied that: “Sure, let’s do it!”.
Espressivo was founded in 1999 and was purely an online web store from the very beginning, which was quite unusual at the time. The first version of the website was – to put it kindly – a simple affair, where orders could be placed only by e-mail.
Espressivo’s website in 2007. The third incarnation of the website had a rudimentary shopping cart and its own domain name. The source files for the original site unfortunately no longer exist.
Orders from Italy were mainly placed by fax, on long strips of paper. The foreign payments were handled by going to the bank office in person and waiting for the bank clerk to fill in all the appropriate forms.
The name Espressivo is Italian and means “expressive”. The word is pronounced pretty much as in English, with stress on the “i”. The idea for the company name was born when browsing through an old Italian dictionary at the library.
Some years later, a Swedish customer thought the company’s name was a rather amusing pun. If the last “o” is pronounced in Swedish – but spelled in Finnish – the end result is “espressivu”, which could be interpreted as “a (web) page about espresso”. This had never occurred to me but, although somewhat farfetched, I guess that works too.
From one enthusiast to another
Over the years, online commerce has been revolutionized. Nevertheless, the basic idea of Espressivo has remained relatively unchanged: the desire to deliver world-class espresso machines to Finnish coffee enthusiasts – in a simple, flexible and reliable way.
I still handle everything from website updates to bookkeeping and warehouse work myself. “Conquering the world” was never the goal to begin with. Rather, treating customers in the same way I would like to be treated has always been my main motto.
Check out what is currently on offer in our online store. If you are looking for a product that is currently not included in our range, or should you have any thoughts related to coffee you would like to share, please feel free to contact me by e-mail.
Sincerely,
Bjorn Hakans
Founder and owner
