How to reinvent franchising with tech and transparency

As you know, we are planning to open our first corporate pizzeria in Hangzhou, the Internet capital of China. We call this project “the pizzeria of the future”. Why? Because it will be a unique experiment designed specifically for modern China. There will be no cashiers, and all orders will be processed via the WeChat messenger. The key element of our design will be media screens showing our product ads—and those ads won’t be what the European pizza market is accustomed to. We will serve every pizza-for-one in a beautifully designed small box, and it will be oblong rather than round. In Moscow, such product is sometimes known as “pinza.” There will be pizza with crawfish, duck, tofu, fresh mango, and avocado, and even M&M’s on our menu.

From time to time, I will tell you the latest about our Hangzhou project and also show you a few things. We’ve already started the rough-in there, and the final design draft is just about ready.

This is how it looks at the moment. Those purple panels are media screens. In our pizzeria, the interior and video design will be one and the same. The pizzeria will be changing its colors constantly; when you see an avocado pizza, the pizzeria is green; a mango pizza, it’s yellow, etc. You just can’t walk by—you simply have to come in and try it.

The opening will be in spring of 2019, and meanwhile, you can look around our pizzeria here.

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One of Oxford’s newest pizza restaurants, Dodo Pizza, quickly became one of the community’s most loved places to grab a slice. Now the owner says the brand is pursuing an opportunity of a lifetime by expanding to California.

Alena Tikhova, owner and CEO of Dodo Pizza, began the Russian-based pizza company in Oxford in the summer of 2015. She then led the charge to expand into Southaven and Memphis shortly after. The store uses a unique approach to the regional marketplace by only serving high-grade ingredients like meats and cheeses flown in from New York, dough made from scratch in-store, and fresh herbs that top each slice of their premium pizza.

“The opportunity was a coincidence,” Tikhova said about moving the brand across the country. “We believe the Los Angeles area is a good market for us to be in.”

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Continue reading at hottytoddy.com

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The retail business is like a sport—a constant competition with clear statistics. In 2018, we widened the gap between ourselves and our closest competitors in terms of store count in Russia. Now the question is if Papa John’s will keep second place or lose it to Domino’s in 2019.

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In 2018, our whole chain’s sales revenue amounted to 214 million dollars (13.6 billion rubles). That’s more than we had planned. Russian pizzerias have brought us 12.33 billion rubles, all other countries combined, 1.271 billion rubles. There was a time when we celebrated the first billion rubles in overall revenue, and now just the pizzerias outside Russia bring us more than that. For seven years, our pizza chain has doubled each year (+118% in 2018). And our question is, will we be able to repeat that again in this new year?

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In the very last days of December, the first Dodo Pizza in Los Angeles suddenly appeared :-)

Our American partner Alena Tikhova has reached an agreement with a local pizza delivery service, and now it takes the Dodo Pizza brand and passes under control of our team. Those who live in California will have a chance to try our American pizza in an LA suburb. Stay tuned!

By the end of 2018, we’ve had 440 pizzerias in our chain, though we had planned to reach 450. The figures are as follows:

In Russia, there are 383 pizzerias (20 of them are our own corporate pizzerias, not franchisees).
In Kazakhstan, 28.
In Belarus, 9.
In Romania, 6.
In the USA, 3.
In Lithuania, 3.
In Estonia, 2.
In Kyrgyzstan, 2.
In China, 2.
In the United Kingdom, 1.
And in Uzbekistan, 1.

Our first Belarusian pizzerias opened in October 2018, and by the end of the year Belarus has come out third in this rating. Now that’s what we call a good start :-)

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