How to reinvent franchising with tech and transparency

Dodo Pizza in Hangzhou has been closed for almost one month due to the quarantine measures in China. On February 23rd we reopened for delivery and so-called non-contact takeaway. The team has been using this time to focus on strategic rather than operational tasks.We’ve been conceptualizing our menu, digging deep into analytics and financials, thinking through our promotional campaign for launching our second store and so on.

Growing Dodo Pizza in China is not only about establishing an efficient business model and finding the right product/market fit, it’s also about building a brand and forging a strong...

In 2019, Dodo Pizza launched 141 new pizzerias and closed 5, capping off the year with 576 units in 13 countries. Outlets outside of Russia generated 11.4% of total revenue, up from 9.5% a year before. Our annual system sales exceeded 20.2 billion rubles—around $314m. In US dollars, that’s a 46% year-over-year growth in sales. Building at such a pace, Dodo remains one of the fastest-growing QSR brands in the world.

In the spring of 2019, we opened our pilot Dodo Pizza in Hangzhou, China. Our goal is to create a brand new pizza shop format that will perfectly fit the Chinese market and in the future can let us scale quickly with franchising. In October, our daily revenue reached ¥10,000 for the first time. We've learned a lot this year. Let me share some of our key insights and new plans.The most important news is that we will launch our second pizza shop in Hangzhou on 13 January 2020. It will...

In mid-July, our team in China set an ambitious goal—to achieve average daily revenue of ¥10,000 in our pilot pizza shop in Hangzhou by the end of September. Where were we at that time? Somewhere around ¥4,000.We'd only just launched delivery (and connected to delivery aggregators), and our sales in the dining area were growing, but slowly. We conceptualized our goal, estimated the breakdown of revenue across different channels, and decided that dining area revenue was to be increased by a factor of 2, and delivery by a factor of 4. All in all, those...

How many pizza shops, operated by one brand, can a country accommodate? In the UK, this number is just over 1,000. In Russia, Dodo Pizza’s home market, it will probably be close to 1,500. In China? Much more than that even.While many people still see China as a place that produces all the stuff that the rest of the world consumes, its huge internal market is developing rapidly. And that is the reason why Dodo Pizza founder, Fyodor Ovchinnikov, has chosen China as our primary market for the future—along with the UK.

Having built a market-leader in Eastern Europe...