How to reinvent franchising with tech and transparency

This is our future Hangzhou commissary; here we’re going to produce special dough for our new pizzeria in China. What’s different about our new dough? I’ll tell you soon.

Interestingly, builders in China prefer thin brick walls to plasterboard—they say it’s simpler, stronger, and cheaper.

Our construction managers are Eric and Ali. They’ve been with us for two years and have come to Hangzhou from Yantai, where our first Chinese pizzeria is located. We couldn’t embark on such a high-risk project, a new kind of pizzeria in one of the largest cities in China, without our team and our partners. The team is the key.

 

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Hangzhou, day 2. 

It’s been raining all day. We’ve had a meeting with our real estate agents and the managers of a big shopping mall, and we’ve done a presentation of our company and our future pizzeria. In China’s business culture, they value modesty. Two laobans (“bosses”) of a huge shopping mall were unpretentious and wore casual suits and no ties. They asked very precise questions about our business model and Dodo IS. I think we all liked what we saw, and maybe now we’ll rent a space belonging to a former bakery. Bakeries are a big hit in China right now. Also, we drank tea from beer glasses.

In the evening, we were at WeWork. The atmosphere was dandy, and the creative community of startuppers here is the potential clientele of our Hangzhou pizzeria. WeWork is planning a big party for residents and guests on Friday, so today they’ve been mounting professional equipment, projectors, laser lighting, and a DJ stage. WeWork doesn’t skimp on money :-) Stand by for a full report.

Also, yesterday evening, I’d been looking for an ATM in the rain. This proved to be an ordeal, as China is almost completely cash-free now. The ATM where I withdrew cash in August has been dismantled already. Two ATMs were out of operation, and two more didn’t accept Visa or Mastercard. I had to walk two kilometers to another neighborhood, and only there I finally got lucky :-)

Soon we’ll know if we are getting premises at the shopping mall. Stay tuned.

 

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Alibaba Group lobbied for a direct Beijing Capital Airlines flight between Moscow and Hangzhou and succeeded :-) It suits Dodo Pizza just fine, as Hangzhou, the Internet capital of China, is the very place where we are going to launch our cashier-less “pizzeria of the future.” Our target opening date is April 1, 2019. For the next week and a half I’ll be with our team in China.

It is our first day in Hangzhou in the photo. This is our China team, Bauyrzhan, Patty, and Cheng. You don’t see Eric and Ali here, since they are at the construction site—we’re building the “pizzeria of the future” production facility already. Here we are at the Dodo Pizza China headquarters, meaning a small room at the WeWork coworking space in downtown Hangzhou.

Today, we’ve met with real estate agents, and I’ve told them about our company and our plans. Together we’ve been getting ready for tomorrow’s meeting with the administration of the most fashionable shopping center in Hangzhou. In the afternoon and in the evening, we checked premises where we may open our pizzeria, and counted foot traffic there. After that, we ate frogs with pepper (and it still burns something terrible), and talked about our project concept a lot. And then, we took the subway to the hotel and took a walk through the evening city…

 

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Our international competitors have long been baking half-and-half pizza, combining two recipes in one product. But in my humble opinion, how they do it is pretty awful. Their interfaces are cumbersome and too complicated, so kitchens make a lot of mistakes.

This year, we set a daring goal for ourselves—we are going to reinvent half-and-half pizza. And if we take up a job, we want to do it in the best possible way.

In December, we’re going to launch a system for ordering half-and-half pizza in all our pizzerias in Russia. We’ve been testing it...

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The R&D team is working on our new products for Dodo Pizza China. Super tasty) I almost went crazy, honestly 🤪

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