Pod Insights How I Built This with Guy Raz Ooni Pizza Ovens: Darina Garland and Kristian Tapaninaho About this episode When you think of pizza, the first place that comes to mind probably isn’t Finland…or Scotland. But that’s where the two founders of the outdoor pizza oven brand Ooni grew up. In 2012, Kristian Tapaninaho was experimenting with making his own pizza, but he couldn’t get his home oven hot enough to produce an authentic, Neapolitan-style crust. With no background in product design, Kristian decided to design a portable, wood-fired outdoor oven. He used some basic 3D modeling software, enlisted a nearby fence-maker to build a prototype, and raised about $26,000 on Kickstarter. Since launching in 2012, Kristian and his wife Darina have grown Ooni into a $250 million business, accelerated by the home baking boom that happened during COVID. Based in Edinburgh, Scotland, and sold in 90 countries, Ooni has defined a new product category that has helped transform home pizza making.
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Transcript 13,750 words · 6 speakers
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0:00 Guy Raz? Our presenting sponsor today is Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every founder on this show started with a hard question. Not the marketing plan, the 2 a.m. kind. Is this idea any good? Am I the one to build it? Should I quit my job? Anthropic got built the same way. A public benefit corporation founded on one hard question. How do we make sure AI goes well for people? So they asked over 100,000 people their hopes and their fears and are publishing what they find, even the uncomfortable parts. Me? I've got my own hard question about AI. Here it is. If everyone has access to something that can help them write the business plan,
0:46 Guy Raz? build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea, what separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt. We get support from U.S. Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't.
1:32 Guy Raz? Say you're 18 months in. Business is growing. You've got expenses coming from six directions. Gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings, and you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems. But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands on the table in rewards you never earned, money that could have gone back into the business. Path B, you pause and get The US Bank Triple Cash Rewards Visa Business Card.
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5:12 Speaker 01 Not only did I not have a manufacturer for this product, but also I had to make this thing manufacturable as well.
5:21 Guy Raz? And fast.
5:22 Speaker 01 Within a few months. So I promised the Kickstarter campaign backers at this stage that, hey, it's going to be there for you in June.
5:31 Guy Raz? Wow.
5:31 Speaker 01 So just six months after the campaign.
5:34 Guy Raz? I'm imagining you're starting to call numbers. And you're like, hey, can you make pizza ovens? No, sorry. Can you make pizza ovens? Oh, no, sorry. I can't imagine there are many metal fabrication factories in the UK at all.
5:44 Speaker 01 No, it turns out there's not very many that want to talk to you if you've got a Kickstarter campaign.
5:58 Guy Raz? Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
6:10 Guy Raz? I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Christian Tapaninaho built a portable wood-fired pizza oven, financed it on Kickstarter, and along with his wife, grew uni into a $200 million a year brand.
6:30 Guy Raz? I grew up eating what I would now describe as cardboard pizza. You know, your standard home delivery pies made by the usual suspects. But I remember a moment in my late teens. I was in college, I was visiting a friend in New York, and she took me to Patsy's and then to Grimaldi's. And it was at those places when I first understood why people are obsessed with pizza. The crust was thin, but not like a cracker. It was crispy and chewy. It was smoky and charred, but not burned. And by the way, it took about 90 seconds for that pizza to cook. The pizzaiolos were Italian-Americans, the sauce was a simple combination of crushed
7:12 Guy Raz? tomatoes and salt, and on top, a few dots of fresh mozzarella and some basil leaves. And from that point on, I joined the legions of people around the world obsessed, always seeking out the best pizza wherever I went. Even during times in my life when I went gluten-free or paleo, I secretly made an exception for good pizza. How can you not, really? But the one challenge I always had was making them at home. For years, I would do what most home cooks do. I'd slip in a pizza stone into the top rack of my oven. I'd crank the oven up to 500 degrees Fahrenheit, and then, an hour later, I'd slip in a pizza.
7:56 Guy Raz? And while the pizzas were fine, they were never as good as what you could get at a pizza restaurant. And the reason? You need really, really high heat to get that char on the crust. And home ovens can't get that hot. You need an oven that can get up to 900 degrees Fahrenheit. And to do that, you have to build an outdoor pizza oven, which, for most of us, is both impractical and prohibitively expensive.
8:24 Guy Raz? And then about six years ago, I came across a product that promised to solve this very problem. At the time, it was called the Uni Pizza Oven, spelled U-U-N-I. Today, it's still called Uni, only spelled O-O-N-I. And the product was created by a man born and raised in a place no one listening would ever associate with pizza. Uni was invented by Christian Tapaninaho, who is from Finland and lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. And he came up with this idea to solve the same problem I described a minute ago. He wanted a relatively affordable, portable home pizza oven that could reach 500 degrees Celsius, or 900 Fahrenheit.
9:09 Guy Raz? A pizza oven that could bring Naples right to your backyard, no matter where you live. So in 2012, Christian, who at the time ran a small educational consulting firm with his wife, Darina, decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign to raise the funds to build the first Uni Pizza Ovens. A lot would happen over the next decade, but today, Christian and Darina have built a massive brand, a company that sells over $200 million worth of pizza ovens a year. Now, if you're trying to figure out how to finance a multimillion-dollar idea, but you have no money, you will definitely want to hear this story. Christian, as I mentioned, grew up in Finland.
9:53 Guy Raz? He came to the UK as an art student to study photography, and that's where he met his future wife, Darina, who was also a student at the University for the Creative Arts in Kent, which is just outside London.
10:06 Speaker 02 There wasn't much to do. There was a lot of house parties. And I went to a lot of house parties that there was lots of Finnish people and Scandinavian people generally. And the first time Christian and I met was at one of these parties, like a really tiny chat in the kitchen. I've actually got a paper cut out in our house that was a gift I gave him on our first wedding anniversary, which is paper. And it's the first line that we exchanged where I said, "Oh, I like your glasses." So which Christian completely panicked and sort of blurted back, "I like your hair." And so that's cut out in paper as art in our house.
10:46 Guy Raz? Do you remember that, Christian, saying, "I like your hair"?
10:49 Speaker 01 I do remember the situation, but and I think I'm no more articulate today than I was back then.
10:58 Guy Raz? All right. So you guys meet at a party and that's it. You kind of become a couple, I guess.
11:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think we became a couple, maybe six months after that. We'd kind of see each other at at different things. And then spring 2004, we got together.
11:13 Guy Raz? That was it?
11:13 Speaker 01 Yeah.
11:15 Guy Raz? So, so the two of you basically stayed around Kent for, for a while after you graduated. And I guess there was this, like a British government initiative called Creative Partnerships. And I'm, I don't know if I've got all the details right on it, but from what I understand, it was this, this initiative to bring all kinds of creative people to schools and to, to work with teachers to kind of help them think more creatively about teaching. And, and you guys kind of got involved with this somehow.
11:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, we did. It was, it was really an excellent initiative. So you've got it right. It was, I guess the idea is that everyone's inherently creative, but often it's, it's educated out, or certainly because of the system and the pressure.
11:56 Guy Raz? Yeah.
11:57 Speaker 02 And so we were trying to empower the teachers to do things differently. And we were both creative practitioners, so working as photographers. And yeah, you might be paired with a scientist and then a couple of school classes. So it was, yeah, incredibly helpful for us and the foundations of all of our business to, to get to experience this really unique insight into school communities because teachers aren't really used to having other adults in their classroom. Unless they're being judged, you know, or assessed. So that was a super interesting insight. And then when you could work with them and you're helping them do their stuff they want to do anyway, and reinvigorate their love of teaching because it is a vocation.
12:41 Speaker 02 And it's just really sad when that fun is sort of battered out by, you know, the pressures from external.
12:50 Guy Raz? Yeah, and I guess this kind of inspired the two of you to start a business that focused on doing this kind of work. It was called Sukla, and I guess it was like an educational consultancy that you led for quite a while. So tell me some of the things that you, that it did. I mean, you would basically go to a school and do what?
13:12 Speaker 02 There was absolutely masses. It's generally to help people change how they did things. So we did a classroom project where, much like when we ran a workshop, you know, you tend to move the chairs and the tables out of the space and design the room as you'd like for that session. So we had really flexible furniture that the kids could move and put into position based on how they thought the lesson should go, or how the teacher would like the lesson to go. And basically had whiteboardable walls. So we took the budget that the school would have for renovating classrooms anyway, didn't spend any more money, but worked with them to design a really flexible space so that they could genuinely be adaptive. So those kind of things, both practical and change-based.
13:57 Guy Raz? So I imagine many of the groups you would work with are like nonprofits, right? And you would essentially, you would consult with them. But as a business, was it, was it a good business? Was it a sustainable business?
14:10 Speaker 02 Yes, and it's still going. And I think that it's very different from UNI today in the sense that the majority or almost everything was based around our time. And we did projects for NESTA, so the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts. Really big projects that were run for multiple years that were, you know, relatively lucrative from our point of view. And I remember we won them over such big organizations. And they basically said that they just loved our pitches, which had color and visual and like excitement that sort of stood out. So it was a good lesson for anyone pitching is go hard on the imagery. But yes, it did well. It really washed its face. And so we had good earnings, I think, for the stage we were at in life.
14:56 Guy Raz? All right. So basically, by, you know, from what I gather, because I think the two of you get married in 2010 and Sukla is doing well, but your time is really the challenge, right? Because people want you involved and it's hard to scale the two of you.
15:12 Speaker 01 Absolutely. Going a little bit further back on the idea of how much of our time and ourselves are maybe sort of almost not a limiting factor, but it's definitely, I mean, it's a service business. Look back to around 2008 or 2009, remember, Darina and I were in, in France for, for like a weekend. And I remember speaking with her about this, that I'd love to make a product business, something that doesn't require the same kind of daily involvement of delivering the work, but actually you could focus on building something that could be, could be scaled out.
15:49 Guy Raz? So, all right. So you've got Sukla, this business is happening at a certain point, from what I, from what I understand, what I've read, shortly after you had your first child, which was around 2011, I think.
16:02 Speaker 01 Yep.
16:03 Guy Raz? You decided that both of you decided you needed to just kind of reduce the amount of hours that you were working because you wanted to be with your child.
16:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was, it was actually, well, that's a, it's a good way of looking at it as well. Also childcare is incredibly expensive.
16:18 Guy Raz? Yeah.
16:19 Speaker 01 So, but actually really great things came out of that. We were both doing about three and a half days of working and then spent the rest of the time doing other things as well as spend time with our newborn.
16:31 Guy Raz? And, and you were living in Kent at the time?
16:34 Speaker 01 This was in London already. So we moved out of Kent quite soon in 2007 and stayed in London all of about eight years in the end.
16:44 Guy Raz? All right. So you're, you've got a baby at home. You've got this consulting business.
16:51 Guy Raz? And Christian, I gather, I mean, from what I understand, like you are a baker and, and also cook, like, would you do most of the cooking at home?
17:01 Speaker 01 No, I think we, we share cooking quite a lot, definitely. I think we're quite different types of cooks. I'd say I'm more of the type that I'll get a recipe out and I'll follow it. And maybe put in a twist here or there, but I'm, I'm pretty good with kind of going, going with what's suggested, whereas Darina is incredibly creative and being able to take a number of ingredients and just throw in something really tasty together. Um. But I would also do some baking. Uh. My mom used to run the bakery in Finland in the mid mid nineties for about five years. So baking and and cooking has always been really massive part of my uh my childhood and and growing up.
17:40 Guy Raz? Hmm.
17:40 Speaker 01 And um I don't know where it came from exactly, but I got into making pizzas at home and uh just learning the craft of making pizza dough and pizzas by hand. And this is now twelve years ago, and I was just thinking about it, how different of the world was back then with YouTube was really just in such an early stage.
18:00 Guy Raz? Yeah.
18:01 Speaker 01 With being able to now you can go in and you can find the instruction for every single type of pizza you can ever imagine.
18:07 Guy Raz? Yes.
18:07 Speaker 01 Uh. But it was quite a different world back then. So there was a lot of trial and error, but really fell in love with making pizza.
18:13 Guy Raz? And you'd have like a like one of those stones in your oven, like those pizza stones?
18:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, had a had a pizza stone uh finally at some point in the oven. And I I'd I'd sometimes invite people over for pizza and I'd make a few pizzas and realize that, well, the first pizza takes like six minutes, the next pizza is eight minutes, the following pizza is twelve minutes. Then it's like you're waiting for twenty minutes for the fourth pizza.
18:34 Guy Raz? Right. Every time you open the oven, the heat comes out, right?
18:37 Speaker 01 It all comes out and you put a pizza in that that cools it down. So so I wasn't really happy with the experience that I was getting with it and started looking into this, that is there a better way of cooking cooking pizza? And at the time, Jamie Oliver was cooking with his stone ovens on um on TV. And um I thought, well, one of those would be really useful, getting up to very high temperatures. And um I didn't really have the money to invest. Um. We were renting as well at the time. So it wasn't really an option to spend thousands of pounds into into an oven like that.
19:12 Guy Raz? But and I guess I should, we should pause here to explain something, which is. A home oven, for very good reasons, does not go above 500 because then there'd be just home fires all the time. People would just like burn their houses down. So it's good. It's a good thing.
19:28 Speaker 01 It is a good thing.
19:28 Guy Raz? But when you go to a pizzeria like that does these Neapolitan-style pizzas, they're cooking them in ovens that are like 700, 800 degrees Fahrenheit, 900 degrees Fahrenheit, which your home oven can't do. And just that that heat creates this chemical reaction that builds that charred, bubbly, beautiful pizza crust that you just can't, you can't do in your home oven.
19:50 Speaker 01 It is. It's exactly that. You need that incredible heat for the pizza dough to react in a way that actually makes for Neapolitan-style pizza. You just cannot do it at a lower temperature. The best way that I like to explain this to people who've never made pizza before is that it's a little bit like trying to sear a steak on a medium-warm skillet.
20:12 Guy Raz? Yeah.
20:13 Speaker 01 It just doesn't work. It just doesn't. You can't replace the temperature with more time. So it's the same thing with pizza. Temperature is very, very important.
20:22 Guy Raz? All right. So you're, you're thinking, this is annoying, but to install a pizza oven, it's thousands of dollars and it's a lot of wood and you're renting a place. You can't, you can't do that and you didn't have the money. So did you start to look around for like another option?
20:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, I started looking around. Surely someone has made something like this. Someone's already thought of the same problem. They've gone and built something and.
20:50 Guy Raz? Something cheap that you can make a hot, like a trash can oven or something?
20:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, you know, at the time, there's a, there's a guy who had this, it was called Franken Weber. He was kind of hacking a kind of kettle grill. Well, he called it the Franken Weber, so you can imagine.
21:06 Guy Raz? He would take a Weber, like a Weber grill, and try to hack and turn to a pizza oven?
21:10 Speaker 01 That's it. That's it. And.
21:12 Guy Raz? Right, okay.
21:12 Speaker 01 So I tried a, I tried a kettle grill as well myself and it wasn't really, really there. So.
21:19 Guy Raz? Because it's cooking the pizza from the bottom, right?
21:21 Speaker 01 Exactly, yeah.
21:22 Guy Raz? It's got that heat's coming from the bottom, so it's not the same.
21:23 Speaker 01 And you've got to get the both. The balance has to be right. You've got to get it up from the bottom and then also from the top.
21:29 Guy Raz? Yeah.
21:30 Speaker 01 So I started thinking that, well, I mean, if no one else has made one, I still want one.
21:35 Guy Raz? Yeah.
21:36 Speaker 01 And I started doing some sketches on my iPad. I think I spent probably about four weeks of just kind of quietly doing some sketches and things and. It was December 2011, and I remember this very distinctly, sitting down in our, in our living room in London and said to Darina that can I, can I pitch you this idea? That I've got, what about making very small pizza ovens?
22:05 Guy Raz? Wait, so Darina, what do you remember about how he told you about this idea?
22:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, I remember probably having a baby in my arms whilst making pasta whilst with a headset on, you know, running a multi-school project. I was like, oh, okay, cool. Yeah. I liked the idea from the beginning, but I was like, yeah, go for it. I think the biggest segue between our first business and this one is that genuinely, we always talked about creativity being problem solving, you know, and he was truly frustrated. It made sense to me that he wanted to get this better. It was a great challenge. I was positive, but I definitely was a bit distracted, I would say.
22:52 Guy Raz? Yeah. So, so Christian, let me understand how you, what were you sketching?
22:57 Speaker 01 So the problem with these large ovens is that they weigh hundreds and hundreds of kilograms. And with a traditional oven, you have to spend a huge amount of energy first of wood fuel logs to get that whole thermal mass to a certain temperature, so very hot. So you spend hours and hours to heat it up. So what I was sketching was really just kind of thinking about, well, how do we get rid of that thermal mass but still have a great cooking experience? And one of them was really just to bring the fire closer to the food that's cooking. So you don't have that sort of a middleman of hundreds of kilos of stone in the oven, but you bring the fire. And so it's very energy efficient in that way.
23:41 Guy Raz? I'm trying to understand how you started to figure that out because you didn't have a background in engineering or even physics or chemistry. I mean, so how did you kind of educate yourself about what to even begin to sketch? The designs, like the dome shape or how the fire would, would work? How did you even know how to do that?
24:05 Speaker 01 Part of it is that just to see it as a problem to be solved. Um, and the, I think the other side of it, despite, I mean, I didn't have education as an engineer or a product designer. Uh, but I'd always been really into science and engineering. And uh, so I'd subscribed to science magazines when I was ten or eleven and read those.
24:26 Guy Raz? Yeah.
24:26 Speaker 01 Was really into that. I was making fireworks with my uncle. So actually.
24:32 Guy Raz? Fireworks.
24:32 Speaker 01 Homemade fireworks with this.
24:34 Guy Raz? Homemade fireworks with your uncle, with an adult.
24:37 Speaker 01 Yes.
24:37 Guy Raz? An adult was supervising this.
24:40 Speaker 01 Adult was supervising and they were making fireworks that blew up and flew to the sky.
24:45 Guy Raz? Oh, my gosh.
24:46 Speaker 01 Um, this is, uh, this is Finland in the nineties, I guess.
24:49 Guy Raz? Yeah.
24:50 Speaker 02 And maybe still now.
24:51 Guy Raz? Very permissive environment.
24:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, absolutely. We'd, uh, we'd buy the ingredients from, from a drugstore and we'd mix the ingredients to make fireworks and, uh, but he had an engineering degree and, uh, so that sort of influenced me. The other parts of it that I think influenced was that I've always had, ever since I was as far back as I remember, anything that I've really got into, I've always started to kind of try and figure out if there's a problem to solve or is there a business here that could be taken forward or an opportunity that no one's, no one's found yet.
25:25 Guy Raz? So already at the beginning, when you were just sketching, you were thinking, is there an opportunity here?
25:31 Speaker 01 Absolutely. So I was, uh, really into, at the time, listen, there's a podcast called Critical Path and through that I'd been introduced to, um, Clayton Christensen.
25:44 Guy Raz? Yeah, famous Harvard Business School professor who's no longer alive, but, but wrote The Innovator's Dilemma, right?
25:49 Speaker 01 Yes, dilemma and, and innovative solution. And I was, I was reading those books and really kind of like. The same time realizing that, oh, maybe there is a connection here that has repeated itself over years and years and years in other industries, that there are these large machines, there used to be mainframes and then there was the personal computer.
26:11 Guy Raz? Yeah.
26:12 Speaker 01 Things happened in between there as well, but what about, what if this is similar situation where we can take a traditional pizza oven and shrink it down to the size of a suitcase?
26:23 Guy Raz? Wow. And so you, so when he talked about this, you, you're thinking, this is the same kind of analogy with a pizza. Obviously, the technology is not as complex, but still like massive pizza oven, small pizza oven.
26:34 Speaker 01 I'm very fortunate that the technology required is, is not to that level.
26:40 Guy Raz? All right. So you start sketching these ideas and thinking, all right, I've got this concept. You bring this to Darina and she's supportive right away.
26:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, definitely. I was excited.
26:51 Guy Raz? You're like, go, you're like, I love it.
26:53 Speaker 02 Yeah.
26:53 Guy Raz? But when he came to you and he said, I think we can make this. And you're like, yeah, I'm excited. There's a lot of details to work out at that point. It's not, like, you'd be really excited. There's a lot of stuff that now like, that's the easy part. You made the sketch awesome.
27:06 Speaker 02 You're making it sound much neater than it was. It, it was definitely stretched out over a long time.
27:12 Speaker 01 Oh, man.
27:13 Speaker 02 And it, we did have time, as you said, like, we had a baby, we were working, compared to now, we had so much time to sort of tinker and to, to mess about with it. And, and he definitely did that.
27:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
27:26 Guy Raz? So Christian, once you had these sketches, right? And you're working on them, what's the next step?
27:33 Speaker 01 So next step was I, I tested out a few concepts in the first sort of half a year of that. And then I think one of the breakthroughs for it was in the summer of 2012, when my father-in-law, Darina's dad, Dave, mentioned wood pellets and that he'd come across these as a heating fuel.
27:55 Guy Raz? Wood pellets, which is compressed, if you use like a Traeger, people know these compressed.
28:00 Speaker 01 Exactly. But these at the time especially were much bigger in the US, weren't really known here in the US. UK. So I got a hold of some of these and started thinking about this idea that what if we take like a jet engine? But instead of injecting fuel, like liquid fuel into it, we sort of gonna let wood pellets flow into it. And so the original uni had this little fan at the back of it that blew air uh through this kind of column of wood pellets that would just gravity feed into the system and then uh you'd light them up and you'd get this intense flame that then flew over over the pizza.
28:38 Guy Raz? Who did you get to fabricate this prototype for you?
28:41 Speaker 01 So there was a, I found a small metal workshop uh down the road from us in an area called Catford in in London. And there was under these railway arches, there was this small metal workshop that predominantly just made like garden fences and things like that.
28:58 Guy Raz? Yeah.
28:59 Speaker 01 And um it's this guy there and I said, hey, uh would you be able to fabricate something like this? And it was not much more than sort of back of a napkin kind of sketches. I'd use this program called uh SketchUp.
29:13 Guy Raz? Yeah.
29:14 Speaker 01 On my on my computer to draw up lines and and they would then sort of fabricate it based on those and.
29:20 Guy Raz? He agreed? He said, yes, I'll take time away from making garden fences to do this?
29:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, no, he uh I basically just asked him how much would it be? And he was like, well, I think the first prototypes were like forty or fifty quid or something, something silly.
29:34 Guy Raz? Forty or fifty pounds, that's it. And it was just, he basically took sheets of steel and like welded them together based on your design.
29:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's it.
29:42 Guy Raz? Um, all right. So four or five days later, you go to this welder and he hands you this basically a metal box. And there's like a, there's like a a hole in the back where you can just put in the the wood pellets and light them up like to describe what it looks like.
29:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, so it was a rectangular metal box at this stage, and this is where this idea of sort of a jet engine, but it's wood fired, uh, came from. So it was um, this metal cylinder that sat horizontally at the back of the oven.
30:14 Guy Raz? Yeah.
30:14 Speaker 01 And I'd take a computer fan, sort of PC fan, that I'd power with a nine volt battery that just sat at the back of that. And then there's a, uh, like a vertical tube that then let pellets into it and you'd get this really cool, quite a long flame that flew into the oven. And then the flame would then just come in and cook the pizza from top down.
30:37 Guy Raz? All right. So from the time you brought this home, until the time you were able to cook your first pizza to experiment, how many more days was that?
30:45 Speaker 01 It was pretty quickly. I was quite quick to then try it out with um, with pizza itself. But a lot of the testing would be actually with just a thermometer in there uh, to see how hot is it getting and kind of trying to get to this. These days we do so much just pizza testing, uh, where we just
31:03 Guy Raz? Yeah.
31:03 Speaker 01 run through new products through like enormous amounts of pizza. But at that point, it was just myself doing it. So I'd have to rely on
31:11 Guy Raz? Yeah.
31:11 Speaker 01 also just kind of measured temperatures and these kind of things.
31:15 Guy Raz? All right. So you knew, and you knew how to make pizza dough because we, we know that from the story, but, but now you get this thing. You're like, okay, let's go. Here's, here, here goes nothing. Do you, do you remember the first pizzas that you made?
31:27 Speaker 01 I actually gotta say, I don't remember too much of the first ever pizzas that I was making. I was so focused on the product itself and getting it better and better at that stage and getting it to a stage that I could actually launch it.
31:41 Speaker 02 I will, I will say I remember them being fantastic, but actually looking back at the video footage now of, of 10 years ago, they're incredibly anemic and they definitely don't look fantastic. We, I think we were just so excited that it worked and it was decent.
31:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:59 Guy Raz? But with that early prototype from the welder, that was the one you were gonna go to Kickstarter with as the demo product?
32:07 Speaker 01 That's right. And that's, that's really the, the next maybe six, seven months are probably the kind of, when I even think about this period of time in the Unis history, it just gets, gets my palms sweaty because it's quite, quite risky. I had this prototype that was working. And all along this time of developing it, I knew that I wanted to launch this thing on Kickstarter.
32:30 Guy Raz? Right.
32:31 Speaker 01 I've just got to get this off the ground. And I was really keen on being, because Kickstarter was launching in the UK. So it was truly the kind of the essence of Kickstarter in the terms of like, okay, here's an idea. Let's get this group of people together to back it and see if we can take this forward.
32:52 Guy Raz? When we come back in just a moment, how Christian gets lots of early orders for the oven, but then discovers that the fence maker down the street is not going to be able to fulfill them. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.
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36:51 Guy Raz? Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2012 and Christian has just launched a Kickstarter video for his very first portable wood-fired pizza oven. And the goal for this first campaign is pretty modest. He's looking to raise about $10,000.
37:11 Speaker 01 That's it, yeah, around $10,000. So the original idea there was that I'd raised just about enough money for this metal workshop down the street to be able to produce maybe, I don't know, 50 of these units to fulfill the backers on Kickstarter and then have a few more to sell.
37:31 Guy Raz? So the idea was you would have that same metal shop that made your prototype. You would just have him do like 50 of them?
37:36 Speaker 01 At the time, that was the idea, yeah.
37:39 Guy Raz? Right.
37:40 Speaker 02 It's important distinction because we weren't like, this is the business at this point. It was like, this is cool. Well, can we test the concept? Christian and I really wanted it. And we thought this will be a really nice way to test proof out there in the world. So and also we were really naive. We worked in education. We weren't used to big budgets or thinking on the kind of global scale we think today.
38:03 Guy Raz? Yeah. All right. I've seen that video. Anybody can go watch it. It's the first uni video. It's low production quality, which is fine. It should be. I mean, I hope at that point you didn't have a slick video because you didn't have any
38:16 Speaker 01 No.
38:17 Guy Raz? production budget.
38:17 Speaker 01 No.
38:18 Guy Raz? Audio is terrible. Barely, could barely hear you. There's like a weird music soundtrack in the background that's kind of there. And you're like, not sure if it's coming from the video or another part of your house. When I was watching, I was like, is that my kid playing music or is that in the video? Anyway, it's you.
38:33 Speaker 02 And there's planes. There's a plane flying overhead at one point.
38:36 Guy Raz? And You don't show the whole oven because you're like, hey, you know, I'm trying to like protect the IP, so I'm not going to show you the oven. So it's a little sketchy as you're like, who is this guy and this thing? And then you kind of make a pizza. And was there part of it? I mean, Kickstarter was still so new, but was part of it also like, maybe I'll get some media attention from this?
38:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, I was really hoping that there would be something that came on the back of that. And during the campaign, there wasn't a ton of press or anything. There actually, I don't know if there was any press at that time. But what was the big driver was that about three or four weeks after the Kickstarter campaign closed, one sort of at the time, really big sort of gear website called coolhunting.com picked it up and noticed it. And on the back of that, quite a few other different blogs, including one really big one called uncreate.com picked it up and published a post about it and sent a ton of traffic coming to the website.
39:40 Guy Raz? And you ended up raising 17,000 pounds from that first Kickstarter thing?
39:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, so the Kickstarter raised 17,000 pounds. Yeah. And this was the kind of funny part of it was that, okay, there was 92 ovens were sold through the campaign, but we sold another 200 on the back of the extra press that happened in the following month.
40:03 Guy Raz? Wow. But once you have raised the money, you gotta deliver. And people are like, where's my thing?
40:11 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:12 Guy Raz? Where's my pizza oven?
40:13 Speaker 01 Yep.
40:14 Guy Raz? And now you can go to this guy, this metal shop guy and say, all right, can you make these? And that's presumably what you do.
40:19 Speaker 01 So that was definitely the plan. However, what happened was that we kind of outgrew that metal workshop really quickly. And this was kind of clear by the end of the campaign that, okay, well, I've got to make at least 100 of these to fulfill all the backers. I think I need something else. I need an actual proper manufacturer for this. And so straight after the campaign, I basically started scrolling through the internet and finding different metal workshops all around outside of London and also reached out to a few places in Finland.
40:52 Guy Raz? Were you at all stressed out about this?
40:55 Speaker 01 Hell, yeah.
40:56 Guy Raz? You were promising this to people and you didn't actually have a manufacturer. You were thinking, I'm gonna have this metal shop dude down the block make them. And he was like, are you kidding? I can't make 100 pizza ovens. I'm making yard fences. And I'm imagining like you're starting to call numbers and you're like, hey, can you make pizza ovens? No, sorry. Can you make pizza ovens? Oh, no, sorry. First of all, I can't imagine there are many metal fabrication factories in the UK at all.
41:22 Speaker 01 No, it turns out there's not very many that want to talk to you if you've got a Kickstarter campaign.
41:28 Guy Raz? No, they're like, yeah, we'll do a million dollar order, not 7,500 pounds.
41:33 Speaker 01 It was quite a fast education there, but it was not only did I not have a manufacturer for this product, but also I had to make this thing manufacturable as well.
41:45 Guy Raz? And fast.
41:46 Speaker 01 Within a few months. So I promised the Kickstarter campaign backers at this stage that, hey, it's gonna be there for you in June. So just six months after the campaign.
41:57 Guy Raz? Wow.
41:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, the good thing was that the order had grown because of the extra press on the back of the blocks and these. So I'd actually built up an order book of, I think, around 300 units at this point. In terms of orders for a manufacturer, there's maybe 20 grand or something like that. So not a huge amount. But actually, I asked my dad as well to do a little bit of searching again in Finland. And he found a place in not far, about an hour's drive from my hometown, that was a metal fabricator and had these presses. They could fold steel in the right way and had the right contacts to do some subcontracting. And that's where I found the first manufacturer.
42:42 Guy Raz? That's actually amazing that in Britain, which is a country of like, I don't know, 60, 70 million people, you couldn't find, and in Finland, a country of like four or five million people.
42:51 Speaker 01 Five, yeah.
42:52 Guy Raz? There was a metal factory that could do this.
42:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, it was, I think Finland's a little bit more isolated. So maybe some things would be made more locally there than flown in or shipped in.
43:05 Guy Raz? Right.
43:06 Speaker 01 But there's a healthy manufacturing industry there still.
43:10 Guy Raz? Christian, when you went to Finland to this factory, I mean, you had this crude welded oven, but obviously you wanted it to look nicer. And did they have like an on-staff designer or somebody who could help you kind of smooth that out and make it look a little nicer?
43:27 Speaker 01 No, no, they didn't actually. I still continue to use SketchUp essentially to draw these CAD models and that I would then print out into sheets and they would translate it onto their machines and be able to kind of cut the pieces in the right way. But one of the defining kind of things of making this and what the spec of it would be was actually the shipping of this product to customers. So because I knew I'm shipping this from Finland at the end of the manufacturing, I had a hard limit of 10 kilograms that the product would have to go under. And this has a bit of a funny kind of reason why there's three legs on an uni. The fourth leg would have taken it over 10 kilograms.
44:10 Guy Raz? Yeah, because it's got, it's a tripod, right? It's three legs under it, yeah.
44:13 Speaker 01 It's a tripod, yeah. And I mean, it turns out that it makes a lot of sense of course for stability to do that.
44:20 Guy Raz? Yeah. All right, so you get this fabrication place in Finland to start making them. You've got the cash to do it and you've got to fulfill those orders. And by the way, these are orders presumably not just from the UK but from overseas too, from around the world?
44:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, absolutely. So there was a lot from the US. I think maybe about 40% were from the US. And because I was so desperately keen on getting this into people's hands that summer and not to have this experience of Months and months of delay in getting this into people's hands. So I actually decided to ship these by just regular parcel mail from Finland to those backers in the US. So Darina and I and my mom and dad would pick them up on a small trailer from the factory, which was like an hour away. And then take them to the local post office and just ship them one by one, basically.
45:17 Guy Raz? Oh, my God. You just stood in the post office and just slapped all the labels on?
45:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
45:22 Guy Raz? Here you go. Here's one. Here's another one. Here's another one.
45:25 Speaker 01 Yep.
45:25 Guy Raz? Here's another pizza oven.
45:26 Speaker 01 That's it.
45:27 Guy Raz? Wow.
45:27 Speaker 01 That's it.
45:28 Guy Raz? Darina's like holding a baby and slapping the labels on with the other hand.
45:31 Speaker 02 Exactly.
45:31 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
45:32 Speaker 02 Wholesome.
45:32 Guy Raz? Very wholesome.
45:33 Speaker 01 I mean, he was over one at this point, so he was working as well.
45:36 Guy Raz? He was like sitting there like slobbering on pizza crusts.
45:39 Speaker 02 He definitely was. Teeter.
45:43 Guy Raz? Yeah, you didn't need teethers. You just had pizza crusts.
45:45 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's how he was raised.
45:46 Guy Raz? Um, all right. Meantime, Darina, you are...
45:51 Speaker 02 Just paying the bills.
45:52 Guy Raz? You gotta pay the bills. So what are you doing to pay the bills?
45:54 Speaker 02 I'm working.
45:54 Guy Raz? I mean, are you, you gotta, you could do this consulting work, right?
45:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, we're working hard with Sukla. I think we're mid Nesta project, so like multi-school projects and doing fine. And during the Kickstarter campaign, though, clearly I was excited. Anyone who's ever run a crowdfunding campaign is, sees how obsessive they can be over that period.
46:16 Guy Raz? Yeah. Was anybody in your world, in the educational consulting world, like, hey, Darina, what's that pizza oven thing that Christian's doing? Like, wait, what is this?
46:26 Speaker 02 I, I think people were pretty excited. We had, like, like I say, we're part of creative partnerships and had all these like hippie, very creative friends, you know? So people were generally quite buzzing and...
46:38 Guy Raz? Yeah.
46:39 Speaker 02 I'm not saying we didn't get some pushback. So we had friends who were in our like baby groups, who were just like, what are you doing? Get a proper job. And that we, we definitely had some people challenge us as a business.
46:53 Guy Raz? Hmm. All right. So you get these first ovens out and the backers get them. And what's the feedback that you're getting? Because... You know, again, this is still 2013. There aren't that many YouTube videos on how to make pizza. So what was the feedback?
47:10 Speaker 01 I mean, it's hard to say. What was the feedback? I mean, we never had a return. But I think there's also something about that sort of life arc of a company or that sort of you start with those early adopters. And they are so much more willing to put in a little bit more effort into learning how to use a product. And well, it doesn't do this, but it actually does this thing really well. So actually, I do really like it. And so, so I think that really helped. It really helped that the campaign didn't blow up to be one of these, I don't know, million dollar campaigns, overnight successes that I think at that stage would have invited so many more people that the product just isn't ready yet.
47:53 Guy Raz? But you knew that you were going to continue this. And now you were getting just organic orders in from some media. And by 2013, you know, you're getting, orders are trickling in every other day or so.
48:08 Speaker 01 Orders are trickling in. I think we did something like in dollars, about 170,000 in the first year of operating, which is compared to what we'd been working on previously. It was really, really, really good. Of course, when you're working in a product company, the economics are completely different to working in a service company. So much of it goes into inventory. And if you're growing, more of that goes into inventory.
48:33 Guy Raz? All right. Now meantime, it's just you and, and I guess Darina is helping out too. While she's trying to earn, earn money, but also helping you out. So you're the product guy, you're the manufacturing guy, you're the customer support guy.
48:46 Speaker 01 Legal team, logistics, everything.
48:49 Guy Raz? And Darina, you're still very much involved in, in, in this other business that you guys had, this educational creative consulting business, which started to mount like events. Yeah. And conferences. And meantime, like. Just tell me how you were managing all that stuff in your personal life. You had a child, you had two kids by then, maybe?
49:13 Speaker 02 Yes, we were really busy. Looking back on it, though, it was just really fun. It was super fun. It was very fast paced. We're used to, I think, some of the, you know, running the festivals and conferences and making things happen was in our DNA from all of the Sukla work, carrying favors and being agile, I guess you would call it today, was definitely how we operated. And also because we'd sort of been freelancers before and then designed Sukla to be a bit like that, we were used to putting on different hats.
49:46 Guy Raz? So I guess by your second year in business, which was 2014, you guys are already rolling out your next oven. It was, I guess it was called the Uni 2. And you also decided to make an accessory called the Uni Stack.
50:02 Speaker 01 Yep.
50:02 Guy Raz? Which is cool. It's, you know, it's like these three, like stacking glass bowls that you can put the pizza dough into to rise.
50:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
50:11 Guy Raz? But I guess this turns out to be a pretty major stumble for you, right? Because I read that shortly after the Uni Stack came out, you sent a letter to your Kickstarter backers because there was, I guess there was some, people were not happy with certain elements of it. In the letter, which I've read, it says, you know, "We've been going through some growing pains lately. You know, I'm just starved of time. I can't keep on top of everything. Just a few of us are making this happen." And I know, like, you even said, "The feedback for the first production run hasn't been all good."
50:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
50:42 Guy Raz? What were you hearing?
50:43 Speaker 01 So probably the first really dramatic event that we had was when these first production run of these Uni Stacks arrived at our South London office. We had this-
50:56 Guy Raz? By the way, where were you manufacturing them?
50:57 Speaker 01 These were made in China. So by this stage, I'd moved manufacturing for Uni itself as well to Southeast China.
51:05 Guy Raz? Right. Because you had to, it was scaling. You couldn't, you could not do all this in that place in Finland, presumably.
51:11 Speaker 01 Couldn't do it in Finland. You couldn't get the quality and the materials and the parts in any Western country, really, unless you paid a lot. And at the same time, we were able to bring the cost down to something that was kind of more aligned with the original vision of this being affordable.
51:30 Guy Raz? Yeah.
51:31 Speaker 01 So these stacks, we had, I think, two or three or four pallets of them arrive on the back of a lorry at our office. I remember Darina was there with both our kids and we were all there. We had two part-time employees at this stage. And we'd take these pallets down off the lorry. We'd carry all these stacks inside the small office that we had. And we'd open the first one of them and they didn't fit together. They were all shapes and sizes. Some were broken already at this stage.
52:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, it was pretty horrible. I would say that like when we saw the samples that we approved, they were perfect. They were, you know, they all stacked together. They looked really nice, quality, thick glass. There was not a bubble in sight. And unfortunately, when we opened the box, it was, you might be lucky if there was kind of one or two that were any goods and so depressing. Because we've paid for all of this and they were, the whole concept was that they stacked together.
52:34 Guy Raz? Yeah.
52:35 Speaker 02 So we had quite a fun, it wasn't fun at all. We had a time kind of putting together, could we salvage some or some good enough to stack together and repackage?
52:45 Speaker 01 Yeah. Is there enough here that we can fulfill the backers? Again, like thinking these backers have put money and their trust in us.
52:52 Guy Raz? Yeah.
52:53 Speaker 01 And we'd open every single box, find the matching pairs and or matching triplets, I guess, and back them up and ship them to our customers. And if they'd have any problems, then of course we're trying to be as responsive as possible. And but they vary in the quality at that stage, just wasn't right up there.
53:13 Guy Raz? Yeah.
53:14 Speaker 01 They did not look very good.
53:18 Guy Raz? When we come back in just a moment, how Christian and Drena start learning how to grow uni gracefully until the pandemic hits. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.
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54:14 Guy Raz? Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 2015, and Uniqi is going through a lot of changes. For starters, after the disastrous rollout of those glass stacking bowls, Christian finds another manufacturer for them in China. And the brand is actually getting some traction, to the point where Dorina quits her job at their other business so she can work full-time at Uniqi. Also around this time, they decide to move their family and the business back to Dorina's hometown of Edinburgh.
54:48 Speaker 02 When we came up in 2015, we were instantly able to connect into business groups here. There's one called Scottish Edge, and then we became part of this program called Scale Up Scotland. So being over-familiar and connecting was easy for us here. But actually, because we had already shown some success, we were definitely a bigger fish in a smaller pond. We were still tiny in relative terms, but there's downsides in Scotland in the sense that there's an incredible modesty about, you know, there's not that many companies who think they can take on America. And I don't know why. I think that there definitely should be. But in terms of the support, it was lovely.
55:31 Guy Raz? I think it's a British thing, right? Because in America, you start a company, you're like, we're going to be the biggest in the world and take it over and we're going to, you know, and being ambitious is not something to be ashamed of. But I think in, particularly in Britain, it's like, keep your head down and it's just culturally different.
55:48 Speaker 02 Definitely, yeah. It was a good thing for us to move because as soon as we came up, we won a Scottish Edge award and-
55:55 Guy Raz? You got a grant, right?
55:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, it was 50 grand grant to spend exclusively on IP.
56:02 Guy Raz? Yeah, because it's, it's this very unique design and shape and, and once people start to see that it's working, then, you know, we know what's going to happen.
56:12 Speaker 02 Yeah.
56:12 Guy Raz? So what's, I mean, I'm not the first to point this out, but it is kind of amazing that this incredibly accessible pizza oven that makes Neapolitan-style pizzas at home comes from a place, I love Scotland, my wife lived there for the first six years of her life, so no, I'm not dissing Scotland, but it's cold and dark and rainy for a lot of the year.
56:35 Speaker 02 That is true.
56:35 Guy Raz? When you think of outdoor pizza, you're thinking about like, you know, the Amalfi Coast or southern Italy, not Scotland, not Edinburgh, not Finland. And yet, here it's coming out of Edinburgh.
56:46 Speaker 02 Yeah.
56:46 Guy Raz? I mean, were people in the UK buying it or were most of your customers in like warm weather climates outside of the UK?
56:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, we've definitely over-indexed in the UK, but yeah, comparatively in the US where people, they didn't need to be persuaded to cook outdoors, right? It was just about, do you know about uni? So a big sort of shift for us to try and emulate the success we had in the UK. We've always sold into the US. And on the point about Scotland, and it's always been really interesting, what we love about uni is we can tell this authentic story. You know, our message in today is about making pizza. And when it came to, how much should we talk about Scotland and, you know, people love Scottish accents? Does that matter? Or the Finnish aspect, you know, people talk a lot about Nordic design and that's really thought of highly around the world.
57:39 Speaker 02 But actually, when we interviewed most- Customers, they didn't really know about that. I remember one bit of feedback when I did a consumer interview where he was like, do you know what? If I knew you were Scottish, it would definitely put me off. Which I was laughing about. He's like, just like that, you wouldn't buy, I don't know, a rice cooker from, from somewhere that wasn't known for rice. It's like, oh, interesting. And we don't hide it. But yeah, I think it is a funny one. It's, it, it doesn't have a natural home in Scotland. Now it does.
58:09 Guy Raz? Yeah. All right. So I think in 2017, you launched another crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. I think this was your third.
58:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
58:17 Guy Raz? I mean, by this point, you probably could have gone to outside investors and started raising venture money and stuff. But really, this was, it was a privately owned company. You were not going out to, you know, all these investors and stakeholders. You were really keeping.
58:36 Speaker 01 And we, we still are. So we have a cup table. It's, it's pretty clean. So Trina and I are on, on most of it. And we have options and share schemes for some of the exec team and then few friends and family investors from the very, very early days of Unie. And earlier on, we came to a realization that actually we've always been sort of fairly fast growing. So let's just continue doing what we're doing.
59:04 Guy Raz? Yeah.
59:04 Speaker 01 We also, none of us came from that sort of startup environment or that sort of VC backed company environment. So it wasn't really a driver for us to have that as a stamp of approval on the door that, hey, this has been backed by this VC company. And they, they raised this much money. So it wasn't ever like a desire for us to have that. It was more so that we really wanted to run this company the way we want to run it and not be a. Not have this kind of clock ticking on that, hey, well, you can run this company for now, but at one point we'll have to do something that might mean an exit or an IPO or something that.
59:44 Guy Raz? Yeah.
59:44 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think that's fair. And the first Kickstarter and our subsequent crowdfunding campaigns, we learned a lot. And I think community is absolutely key to uni's success. And you know, it's incredibly fast. You know, you can cook a Neapolitan in 60 seconds. There's a real wow moment about it. These days, it's incredibly Instagrammable, but people get together over food. So by the time we were ready to do our second crowdfunding for an oven, we had this wildly engaged community. We felt confident that that was a good business model. And actually, it wasn't until another couple of years that we thought, do we blitzscale this? Is the right thing to do to truly scale?
1:00:28 Guy Raz? Yeah.
1:00:28 Speaker 02 Getting outside investment in. But because of this way, we did it. We really didn't need that. So, yeah.
1:00:36 Guy Raz? And it strikes me as a really interesting approach. I mean, you sort of kind of hinted at this, which is they're so passionate. So they're like force multipliers. You get people contributing to the Kickstarter, then they're talking about it. And then it becomes this like viral product. Like, and this is the thing, like, we've talked about virality on the show with like Teslas work that way. People go into someone else's Tesla and they're like, I want this car. It's unbelievable. And I think that's the key to the growth of Unis is like, you're making pizzas and usually you have people over and they're like, this thing is amazing. And they're like, how does this work? And you're like, yeah, you just slide it in. And then soon enough, they're making pizzas and then they go out and buy one.
1:01:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, absolutely.
1:01:17 Speaker 02 One of the coolest things, especially during the pandemic, we decided to do this mini campaign called Stars Stuck at Home. Everyone was stuck at home. It was quite a miserable time. And we reached out to people that we just thought were epic, connected to. And if they wanted an oven, we sent them one. Literally everyone from Beyonce to Dolly Parton.
1:01:38 Guy Raz? Wow.
1:01:38 Speaker 02 Bruce Willis has one. And it's incredibly name dropping. But one of my favorite times was checking the uni Instagram and seeing Jake Gyllenhaal go, "Hey, I really like your ovens. How can I get my hands on one?"
1:01:50 Guy Raz? Yeah.
1:01:50 Speaker 02 So everyone in the team volunteered to help get him an uni. And from Christian's point of view, his parents are very supportive and very lovely, but they're Finnish and they're practical and hard to impress. And they only, like, really made a show when Christian said, you know, Bruce Willis has one. They're like, "Oh, okay. This is real."
1:02:13 Guy Raz? You got a pizza oven of Bruce Willis? Okay, we're proud of you.
1:02:16 Speaker 02 It was the first time.
1:02:16 Speaker 01 Suddenly, suddenly it's real.
1:02:18 Guy Raz? That's it. Bruce Willis, apparently a great pizza olo. I did not know.
1:02:22 Speaker 02 Well, I think, I hope he is.
1:02:24 Guy Raz? Yeah, I hope he is.
1:02:26 Guy Raz? I think it was in 2018 that you changed the name from uni, U U N I, to uni O O N I.
1:02:32 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:02:33 Guy Raz? And I should mention, uni means oven in Finnish.
1:02:35 Speaker 02 It does.
1:02:36 Guy Raz? It literally means oven, because my first one I had was a U U N I pizza oven. I remember, I was like, "Wait, did I get the right one?" But you guys had a brand and you had recognition and attention and you were growing, but why did you change the name?
1:02:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, we wouldn't recommend it, changing your name if you don't feel the need. Basically, there was a few good reasons, but one of the key things is that U U N I, we knew to pronounce it uni, but not everyone did. And our e-commerce was growing and we wanted people to be able to search for it easily. And when you search for U U N I, often it would auto correct to uni, like university, or U N I.
1:03:15 Guy Raz? Oh, yeah.
1:03:15 Speaker 02 And so, yeah, there was that and people didn't know how to say it. So we knew for a while we wanted to do it. And I think it was Greg, who's our COO, who, when he started, suggested like, "Why not change it to be sort of the phonetic way you would say it in English? Just turn those U's into O's." And that's what we did. And it was relatively easy transition. Obviously, it took a bit of time.
1:03:42 Guy Raz? I wonder, as more and more people, now you're like 2019, you're selling to people beyond just like pizza fanatics. You're selling to people who are really trying to experiment. And that means that a lot of them are going to suck at it at first. Most people, me too. Everybody is going to burn their pizza. It's going to get stuck to the pizza peel. And some people are writing like bad reviews of the product, saying this sucks. I burned my pizza. But like, yeah, you're going to burn your pizza because it's going to cook in 90 seconds. Part of what you had to do was to educate people around how to make pizzas, right?
1:04:15 Speaker 02 Yeah. It was a brand new category we created. So people hadn't, they didn't have pizza ovens. There might be a few kind of exclusive people that would have, you know, high end, $5,000 or plus installation in their back garden. But even then, they're very different because they take hours to heat up. They're beautiful installations, but they're not, you know, uni heats up in 10 minutes and you can cook your pizza in 90 seconds. And that was brand new. And uni can cook lots of other things as well. You know, we can put cast iron in and do amazing roast vegetables, salmon or steaks. So we talked a lot about that. So in the first few years, we actually called it an uni outdoor oven. We almost shied away from, even though it was invented for pizza,
1:04:58 Speaker 02 from leaning too heavily into that because we were worried that people would be so scared about it. And then we noticed our retailers calling it a pizza. We're like, oh, come on. Why are you doing that? And then we quickly learned that what are we doing? Obviously, let's be confident and own that. And we learned that actually, the vast majority of our consumers, they already made pizza at home. They didn't need to be told how to do it. In fact, what they loved was the more geeky recipes. So sourdough and, you know, 36-hour proof and the salt levels and hydration. And that was such an eye-opening thing for us because by sort of designing our marketing content for actually a bit more technical and owning pizza, it helps us really focus.
1:05:44 Guy Raz? I wonder when you, I mean, you're going into 2020. Presumably, you know, you're on this trajectory. You're growing. You now have got an office in Austin. So you are, you know, confident. But then COVID hits, right? And I have to imagine that initially you were expecting, like everyone else, a significant slowdown.
1:06:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was quite an incredible time. I remember I was in the US on a sales tour in March of 2020. And I remember this one event that I was in in the morning. People would shake hands and greet you just normally. And the afternoon, no one would touch you. And, oh yeah, I remember coming back from the US and going on the plane. And this was like the day before they stopped all flights between US and Europe. And thinking that I have no idea what the world's going to be like when I land. Some of the first effects of this was our, some of our retailers were cancelling orders.
1:06:50 Speaker 01 And we were panicking because we'd have all this, all this inventory arriving. And at the same time, all our retailers are cancelling orders left, right and center. But the one kind of spark of hope right in the middle of it was that our direct to consumer sales through our website, which is starting to go up and up and up and up. They were just trickling up, up the way. We'd suddenly we'd be like, we're in March and we've just had the best day ever on our website in the UK.
1:07:20 Guy Raz? Wow. And this was totally unexpected.
1:07:23 Speaker 01 Totally unexpected. This was just at the beginning of lockdown. And I think at that point, people are just like, okay, what's next? What do I do when I'm not allowed to leave my home? And it turns out that a lot of people, especially in the US, UK, Europe, turned into pizza makers.
1:07:44 Guy Raz? I read that your growth was like 300% in 2020.
1:07:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, we went from 13 and a half million in 2019 to 55 in 2020.
1:07:56 Guy Raz? That's nuts. I mean, and that was purely because all of a sudden people were at home and they started to cook at home. How did you deal with the demand? I mean, you've got shipping delays, you've got manufacturing delays and massive demand.
1:08:12 Speaker 02 I mean, I think partly we just thought that the first spike was going to be a spike and that was it, but it just kept coming. There was lots of reasons that we were able to jump on it, though we had invested heavily in our digital marketing team. So in lots of ways, we were kind of ready to share the news about uni as well as so much of it being about word of mouth. In terms of how we handled it, our operations team really did take a beating. People were kind of complaining a lot and the only thing they were complaining about is they wanted an uni and they wanted it faster. So, and yeah, you know what happened in global logistics during the pandemic?
1:08:54 Guy Raz? Yeah.
1:08:54 Speaker 02 We had a huge order on board the Ever Given on the Suez Canal. That was another challenge.
1:09:01 Guy Raz? You were on that boat?
1:09:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, not us personally, but a lot of unis.
1:09:05 Guy Raz? Your unis were on that boat that got trapped in the Suez Canal. Oh, my God.
1:09:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, we had 14 containers, 14 40-foot containers stuck on the ship.
1:09:16 Speaker 02 So the people had waited so long already and then had pre-ordered them and there was all sorts of challenges around that because we wanted them to have this oven sooner. Yes, it was, it was a lot.
1:09:28 Guy Raz? And, and I mean, how did you deal with the, just like, because you mentioned that before the pandemic, you had staffed up around digital marketing, which is a smart thing to do because you were expecting, you know, steady growth. But you certainly didn't staff up in other areas because no one anticipated COVID and what would have happened. But I think you ended 2019 with about 50 employees.
1:09:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, in 2020, we were about 45, March 2020, and then we're about 350 now.
1:09:57 Guy Raz? Wow.
1:09:58 Speaker 02 So, yeah, epic, epic growth. And what was amazing about it is we weren't hammering people to work hard because people are really empowered to work here. And I think a part of that was we learned early on, all of our Sutcliffe experience from, you know, all that time being in schools and seeing these little microcosm societies, you'd see some teachers that were incredibly empowered and others that were like depressed and broken and a lot had to do with the leadership and how much they trusted their team and the culture they designed. And so when we actively set Uni up, we were like, okay, let's make this a brilliant place to work and let's genuinely build it with our team.
1:10:38 Guy Raz? All right. I read that you said that the pandemic accelerated your growth by like three or four years in one year.
1:10:44 Speaker 01 At least.
1:10:45 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:10:45 Guy Raz? The other thing that began to happen is because you created a category and people were like, I can make awesome pizza at home, a lot of other people who were like, this is a good idea. I'm going to make a pizza oven too. And now there are probably 30 or 40 competitive brands. I mean, even some of these older Italian, you know, pizza makers are making portable pizza ovens now. You've got, I mean, just going on Amazon now, you see brands that, you know, are clearly, let's, I'm just going to be charitable, inspired by the design of Uni.
1:11:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:11:22 Guy Raz? And, you know, you could look at it multiple ways. You could say, hey, I'm flattered. You know, you guys have done the tripod bottom. I like that. Or I'm inspired by your dome shape. Or you can say, wait a minute here, this looks really similar to what we've done. So tell me about how you kind of approach competitors in the space.
1:11:41 Speaker 01 So first of all, we start by focusing on what's really important for us, which is our customers themselves. And we have our sights on in the far into the future of really continuing to develop this category and making it really awesome for our customers. There's, of course, on top of that, when we do feel like our IP is violated, we do do take course of action on those cases.
1:12:06 Guy Raz? Yeah.
1:12:07 Speaker 02 And there's not actually any key brands that we're concerned about. You know, there there are definitely a lot of copycats, which isn't great. And we're choosing our battles, but we definitely can't be like misdirected to the wrong thing.
1:12:20 Guy Raz? Yeah.
1:12:21 Speaker 02 Yeah, we've only got, even though we're a small team, we're still such a tiny amount of resource, right? And we may as well positively build.
1:12:28 Guy Raz? Yeah. One of the coolest things is, I think last year, maybe, the, basically the Virachi Pizza Association of Napoli. This is like the, it's like champagne, can only be made in champagne. And this organization can only designate true Neapolitan pizzas to be like,
1:12:47 Speaker 02 Right.
1:12:48 Guy Raz? you know, double O flour and San Marzano tomatoes and buffalo milk mozzarella and like basil. And that's a,
1:12:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:12:55 Guy Raz? that is okay. And then they approved your ovens.
1:12:58 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:12:59 Guy Raz? Like they gave it the stamp of approval.
1:13:01 Speaker 01 It was awesome. I mean, we'd, we'd started this by wanting to make an oven inspired by Neapolitan style pizza, getting to those high temperatures and cooking pizza there. Now this body that certifies all these restaurants and pizza olos and ingredients and professional ovens gave us
1:13:21 Guy Raz? Yeah.
1:13:21 Speaker 01 that seal of approval. It was just the most amazing thing.
1:13:26 Guy Raz? And I should mention, because there are restaurants all around the world that have this seal, this AVPN seal, and it's cool. Like, you know that the pizza in there is going to be pretty great. I think, I mean, it's been reported that your revenues are now over 200 million pounds a year. I mean, it's, it's pretty remarkable, given that you start as a Kickstarter.
1:13:45 Speaker 01 It's completely mind blowing.
1:13:47 Guy Raz? Crazy, right? Like a Kickstarter to where you are today? Well, I don't know. How often do you just reflect on just that Christian you saw a gap? But that could have really been a niche market. It could have been like just nerds who were really into like their pizza ovens.
1:14:01 Speaker 01 It really could have been just as niche, but I know really early stages before I had that product ready and knew that how to make this thing work. There was this strong sense that, look, I think we might be on to something here. I think this could be something a little bit bigger than just, hey, let's make a couple of hundred ovens every year and nice living out of it. I think there was this sense that, hey, this could become something really, really substantial and something really, really meaningful.
1:14:29 Guy Raz? Yeah.
1:14:30 Speaker 01 And there's a thing about the outsiders coming into an established field that I think they can look at a problem with new eyes, I guess. And the fact that I'm not Italian, I'm not, I've at that stage, actually had never visited Italy, but just had this love for pizza and wanted to make better tools for it. I think it's helped in terms of just looking at the problem with fresh pair of eyes. And I think you you often see this in a lot of startup stories is that there's an immigrant coming into a new country and can combine those two cultures and into something new.
1:15:09 Guy Raz? Yeah. When you think about this journey, how much of your success do you attribute to the work you put in? And how much do you think has to do with just getting lucky? Christian, first to you.
1:15:21 Speaker 01 I mean, it's so much of it is luck. It's a lack of timing, coming up with an idea in the first place and luck of both Trina and I being the people who had this idea. There's a, there's a lot of hard work that's gone into it, but I mean, you can't deny the fact that, I mean, we have been incredibly lucky with with the original invention, lucky with the team that we've managed to build around ourselves. So, yeah, we do, we do really feel really, really fortunate.
1:15:51 Speaker 02 Yeah. We didn't have to give up city jobs to make this happen, which I think is a very important thing when you look at kind of entrepreneurs generally. We were used to, whilst we did fine, like we had a really nice life on very little money before. So it wasn't that risk really. So we were able to, you know, plow it all into the business for so long. And I think that has helped us as well, that modesty, I guess.
1:16:17 Guy Raz? Yeah. You know, the thing is, I was gonna ask you if you get sick of pizza, but no one gets sick of pizza. You can't.
1:16:24 Speaker 01 No. I mean, I'm at the office here four days a week and I eat pizza here at least two or three times a week.
1:16:31 Guy Raz? I look forward to the day when the Italians come after Haggis.
1:16:35 Speaker 02 We have had a Haggis pizza, Haggis neeps and tatty pizza syrup.
1:16:39 Guy Raz? I don't know about that. Ooh, shit, stomach pizza. But who knows?
1:16:43 Speaker 01 I think one thing that connects UK and Finland is that I think Italian ex- Prime Minister Berlusconi has been equally as disparaging of the cuisine of these two countries.
1:16:56 Speaker 02 But there's a pizza company in Finland called Coty Pizza that famously won the Pizza World Championship with their-- and it was a reindeer pizza and Berlusconi, they were so excited that they could sort of chat to Berlusconi and say, "We bet you at your own game." So.
1:17:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, no, they named the pizza Berlusconi to as a little one-up on the Italians.
1:17:19 Speaker 02 Ah, so they did.
1:17:21 Guy Raz? That's Darina Garland and Christian Tapaninaho, co-founders of UNI.
1:17:26 Speaker 02 Also, the great thing is there's so many other types. There's, you know, New York and Roman pizza and Detroit and, you know, they're very different.
1:17:35 Guy Raz? That's true. Detroit pizzas are pretty great. All that cheese and pepperoni, it's so good. I always think of M&M when I eat Detroit pizzas. I don't know why. Maybe because he's from Detroit.
1:17:45 Speaker 02 That's really random.
1:17:46 Speaker 01 Oh, my God. That association's never gonna go away now.
1:17:51 Guy Raz? Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. If you enjoyed it, please help us spread the word. Tell someone about How I Built This or post about it on social media. And thanks. If you want to contact the team, our email address is [email protected] . If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at How I Built This and mine is at Guy Raz. And on Instagram, we're at How I Built This and I'm at Guy dot Raz. This episode was produced by Chris Messini with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant. Our audio engineer was Gilli Moon. Our production staff also includes-- J.C. Howard, Casey Herman, Liz Metzger, Kerry Thompson, Alex Chung, Josh Lash,
1:18:35 Guy Raz? Sam Paulson, Catherine Seifer, Elaine Coats, John Isabella, and Carla Estevez. Our intern is Susanna Brown. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.
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