A recipe for success that took two years to craft
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Jody Clarke Dec 24, 2008
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Eric Fosse's family had been in the Chicago loose-diamond business ever since his great-grandfather Franklin landed off a boat from Antwerp in 1890. It seemed only natural that Fosse, 46, went into the family business himself. But by the 1990s, the prospects for diamond salesmen didn't look so bright. "Everybody was buying their diamonds from De Beers and our ability to make a good margin was diminishing." De Beers was opening stores, getting closer to retail customers and "clearly, things weren't going to get any better". He decided it was time to get out and "look for something else to do". His big idea? Bake-your-own pizza parlours.
"My family thought I was crazy, of course." After all, "why would anyone want to buy uncooked pizza" from Fosse, when they could get it in a box in the supermarket, or cooked and ready to go from outlets such as Dominoes? "But I'd come across a similar business in Denver, Colorado," he says, where customers ordered their own pizza, then picked it up in store, or had it delivered, unbaked and unboxed. "The pizza wasn't great, but the concept was... you could have it when you wanted and it was fresh." His father warned him off, "but I thought nobody was doing it in Chicago or on the East Coast, so we could do it and do it a lot better".
"Too dumb to be scared", in 1995 he packed in his job to set up HomeMade Pizza with $500,000 raised between his wife Audrey and brother-in-law Mathew Weinstein. Fosse began experimenting, inviting friends over on a Friday night to eat "our lousy pizzas". They were so bad, in fact, that they went through 200 to 300 batches of dough over two years. "We had an idea in our heads of what we wanted in terms of texture and flavour. But baking is a real science. It took us longer than we thought."
By 1997, Fosse and family were ready, with their own combination of flour, water, sugar, salt, oil and yeast, "same as it is today". They opened their first store on Thanksgiving, close to their home near Wrigley Field, on Chicago's north side. They spent $100,000 on construction and another $12,000 on a mixer, then began selling a 12" pizza and a 14" pizza for anything from $8 to $15. In the first year, they sold 10,000, turning over $150,000. "We didn't take any salary and we lost about $10,000. I don't think anyone was expecting to make much money at the start. If you do, you're smarter than I am."
In order to boost sales, Fosse and his team handed out free samples of pizza around the city. By 1999, they had opened a second outlet and were selling $700,000-worth a year. By 2000 they were in profit. In 2003, they hit $1.5m sales after opening more stores, then they reached $3.6m in 2006 as they moved into nearby Minneapolis. HomeMade Pizza opened in Washington D.C. this year and the company looks set to hit sales of $9m across 25 stores. "We were intent on building a strong brand from the start. I think in trying to build a business of more than one unit, a great brand is as essential as anything."
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