23 stories
Dodo Pizza China relaunch: our concept in detail

13 November 2018

Dodo Pizza China relaunch: our concept in detail

So what have we come up with for China? We are going to open a small pizzeria in Hangzhou, where Alibaba Group HQ is located, in a very high-profile neighborhood with dense pedestrian traffic. This pizzeria won’t do delivery at all, at least for now. It will serve the passersby only. The kitchen will be very small because the rent is quite high. Pizza is going to be high-quality, delicious and cheap and the baking process will take just 3 or 4 minutes. For instance, in a Chinese Pizza Hut a small...

Read more
Why pizza delivery won't work in China

12 November 2018

Why pizza delivery won’t work in China

Dodo Pizza came to China two years ago. We opened two units—one in Hangzhou and another in Yantai. You can’t call either of them a success. Sales in Hangzhou are around the break-even point. Yantai brings its owners a modest profit. Yet we’ve gotten experience. Most importantly, we realized that the “western” business model for pizza delivery won’t work in China. Why?

If you ask an American or even a European to close their eyes and think about food delivery, 8 out of 10 will imagine a pizza. For example, in Russia, pizza takes up 50% of the delivery market....

Read more
New hairy goal: 16 to 200 units in Europe, US, and China in 3 years

02 November 2018

New hairy goal: 16 to 200 units in Europe, US, and China in 3 years

A new big, hairy, audacious goal: to grow the number of Dodo Pizza shops in Europe, the US, and China from 16 to 200 by the end of 2021. Quite a challenge for our team—since now our business is struggling hard in these regions.

Dodo in Brighton, UK made it to the top 50 pizza joints in the country, but is still unprofitable, and a year has passed since its launch.

After a good start in the US in Oxford, our second American location, Dodo Pizza Southaven is already nine months old,...

Read more

03 September 2018

We’re preparing the launch of our “cutting-edge futuristic pizzeria” in Hangzhou. We call it this because there will be so many innovations—at least, for our company. We’re going to open a pizza shop of a completely new kind.

Dodo Pizza’s been working in China for two years. Our team has gotten some experience, which now gives us the courage to take risks and try to disrupt the market. Today we have the knowledge, resources, and team needed for such a task. It will be our first corporate, company-owned pizza shop in China, because it’s us and not our franchisees who have to take risks and make experiments in new markets.

I won’t disclose that many details of this project before our launch besides those I shared before. As I mentioned, there will be no cashiers in this pizza shop. All of the orders will go through our app on WeChat. But there is one more thing I want to talk about before our grand opening, because we’ll need to find experienced partners to implement this idea.

The idea relates to our interior design. So what is it?

We want the interior to create an entirely new customer experience. Its main feature will be video design. There will be wall-sized screens all over the pizzeria that will create a unique video experience for our guests. The pizzeria will be changing its color following images on the screens—from orange to green to purple… The screens will be showing crazy “Asian” graphics, lifestyle short movies, our commercials… Energetic, rhythmical music in the pizzeria will be in sync with the rhythms of the videos. All this will create a unique ambience of a futuristic pizza shop. This concept will incite our guests to taste our pizza and will add even more value to our product.

First, we’re looking for an experienced engineering company that can install and set up these screens. If you are sure you can do it, e‑mail me directly at fedor@dodopizza.com. Second, we’ll need studios and freelancers to create videos. We’ll need a lot of them, so our team is prepared to work with a few artists simultaneously. There is a demand for different types of work: stop-motion, animated collages, 2D graphics, photo-animations, videomapping, etc. Send your portfolio to Alina Askarova at a.askarova@dodopizza.com (add “Video for China” in the subject).

See you later!

 

Read more

20 August 2018

A historic day!

This is Bauyrzhan Sadykov. Bau was born is Kazakhstan, but for the last 13 years, he’s been living in China. He came to Beijing to study at a university. He couldn’t understand a word in Chinese back then. For the last two years, Bau has been working with Dodo—managing Dodo Pizza in Yantai and Hangzhou. Now he is responsible for the development of our entire business in China. He is holding a preliminary lease deal for our new pizza shop in Hangzhou. We’ve just come to terms with the landlord and left a deposit to secure the deal. We’re launching our corporate (company-owned) pizzeria in China. It will be a pilot concept with no cashiers. All of the orders will go through our app on WeChat. Why are we doing this? I’ll tell you about it in another post. Stay tuned.

Read more