The Pivot That Launched Pizza Girl, Inc.

Melanie Barr: Welcome to She Built It. I'm your host, Melanie Bar. What do you do when the business you built gets tested by things you never planned for? Caroline Deore has rebuilt Pizza Girl through personal and business setbacks, national growth, and the pressure of building a brand in public. Today, we're talking about the decisions behind the rebuild, what Scaling is asking of her now, how she thinks about AI and technology, and what she would never do the same again. Caroline, thank you for being here.

Speaker 2: Oh my gosh. Hi. I'm so happy to be here. What have I what have I changed in my business? So many things. I started in supermarkets. I launched a pasta sauce under the name pizza girl, which was extremely confusing to the market place. They're like, "Wait, is it pizza sauce? Is it pasta sauce?" I had personal reasons for doing that. I also don't think you should put your personal reasons into your company.

Speaker 2: Um, there was a lot wrapped in why I wanted to start this company in the first place. So I think in doing that differently, I would have done more of the research on who am I, who is this brand, and what do the people want, not just what do I want.

Melanie Barr: It's so important as an early founder to really figure out what the market is looking for. You're right. And it's hard too because you want to do as a founder what you want to do and what you create and what you're passionate about. So that can be challenging.

Speaker 2: 100%. A lot of founders start off their companies because they have a need and they have their story and they're attached to it. It's really hard to separate yourself from your business sometimes.

Melanie Barr: Yeah. And that's usually the best businesses come out of the need.

Speaker 2: 100%. And my company has taken so many twists and turns and it's finally in a place where it's solving problems and now it's all working. How funny is that?

Melanie Barr: Yes.

Melanie Barr: You grew up in your family's pizza business. What gave you an early advantage and what did you have to unlearn to build pizza girl differently?

Speaker 2: Pizza Girl was created to do things differently than my family. That's why I think I did things incorrectly at first because it came from such a need to show everyone that I knew what I was doing.

Speaker 2: But what I gained from growing up in my family restaurant was so much. It was more the personal skills, the pizza quality skills, just knowing what a really incredible pizza is. Also hard work. I do believe that kids should do some hard work outside of school and in the service industry. I was catering movie sets with my dad. He was I had a single dad. My mom passed away when I

Melanie Barr: was five. So I was really sorry.

Speaker 2: It's okay. Thank you. Kind of forced into having to go and help and work and all the things. And I think at times that I hated it. I also now really appreciate that because it gave me a work ethic that I think a lot of people

Melanie Barr: are lacking these days. Like Yeah. Yeah. And in the service industry,

Speaker 2: you learn to deal with so many different types of people. And I see how that could translate into growing and launching a business and everything you have to juggle in that way. The first time someone was incredibly rude to me at the restaurant, it's like and you just have to learn how to handle it is always right. And that's a whole incredible growth experience for sure. And as an entrepreneur, you have to have thick skin. And I'm sure in a customer service industry that really helps to build that.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Being told no or being told someone doesn't like something. Oh, because I have severe ADD, it actually like affects me deeply to my core and I rubinate on it and think about it and I've been getting better at that as well. But it definitely affects me. My business partners laugh about it. They're like, "Oh, we got to know. Caroline's gonna have them go through.

Speaker 2: It's okay. It's their mom."

Melanie Barr: Exactly. Good. Good mindset. I like it.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Melanie Barr: So, what made you create your business?

Speaker 2: Do you love pizza? Do you think about if you have a night where you're going to watch a movie or you just want to relax? That's when I think about wanting pizza or sharing it with friends or sharing it in a gathering with a big group of people. Absolutely. I also think that there should be more access to really high quality pizza, like really delicious pizza. I don't understand why it hasn't really come into our freezers yet where it's not loaded with all kinds of preservatives where you cannot read and understand the ingredients that are about to go into your body and your family's body. And also, why does it look so weird and tastes so bad? And being able to solve that problem for every home in America is like always been a dream of mine because listen, delivery, it's not great. by the time it gets there. No matter how good the pizza is, it can be cold. The delivery driver can make it third in line in their car.

Speaker 2: They can shift and it can just spill everywhere. People can get things wrong.

A solution for home pizza

Speaker 2: And I just think that what we have developed to solve that problem. It feels so good to have families call me and reach out and be like, "Oh my gosh, like this is incredible. My kids come home from school and I have five of these Parbaked pizzas on subscription in my freezer that fit perfectly in your tabletop ovens that are super cute and can go on any counter indoors are very competitive when it comes to how they cook with like the very big and clunky pizza ovens. We were told that pizza's supposed to be difficult and intricate and you need these expensive ovens, but what about college kids? What about moms and apartments? What about people who don't have access to giant outdoor oven space? And by the way, the people that have those ovens, a lot of people have sent me videos of them throwing those out and replacing it with my cute little countertop oven.

Melanie Barr: Oh, I love it. Tell us about your countertop oven. We needed a solution to

Speaker 2: make these pizzas quickly and delicious wherever we went through our catering department. And pizza's really hard to cater. As you've seen at a lot of different catering events, they have like a giant dome of an oven and it's like someone's there and he's tossing the dough and it's great, but you're not serving you can't serve hundreds, let alone thousands. You're doing small events. Your line is miles long because of the turnover time. Out of tragedy, we discovered through the fires, when the fires happened in LA, I started donating thousands of pizzas with the help of the community. And we ended up figuring out how to perfectly cook and vacuum seal the pizzas to be able to deliver more.

Speaker 2: And then we just gave them our ovens.

Speaker 2: And we were getting calls, "This is the best thing I've ever had." And I'm like, "Why have I never thought of this before?" I thought the model was supermarkets and then I thought the model was brick and mortars. And then all of a sudden this model creeped up out of nowhere. Being able to offer a turnkey pizza solution for event spaces, hotels, office spaces, anything like that. Glamping camping sites, wineries, all these people are reaching out to us now because they're finding out about our pizza program where we give you everything. We give you our tabletop counter ovens. We give you pizza paddles, cutters, everything you need.

Speaker 2: And then you just order these pizzas on subscription. You take it out of your freezer. You put it right on our oven.

Speaker 2: We give you the cute pink branded Pizza Girl boxes and then you're in collaboration with Pizza Girl. And oh my god, the problems we are solving for these event spaces. It was like wo it took me seven years to get here to get to this place where now we don't get a no.

Melanie Barr: I love that you kept going through the starts and stops to figure out because as an entrepreneur you have to do that. You have to keep pivoting and thinking, okay, that didn't work. what can I do now? And it came from a problem, like you said, with the fires. And I love that you have the oven because it makes it more of a process and more fun. And as AI comes into our lives and things are becoming [sighs and gasps] more communitydriven, that's a fun thing that you can do as a family and get people off their phones or off technology at least for a minute.

Speaker 2: We're getting everyone from like guys going on surf trips and taking an oven and plugging it in and having their pizzas and being and like sending us videos. I mean, it's wild. I never even thought I walked over to the hotel next door to my brick and mortar on Sunset and I said, "Tell me about your food problems." And they were like, "It takes 45 minutes to get the person at the pool fries. It's a nightmare. Also, all the overhead, all of the staffing costs, all of the dough proofing if you do want to have pizza and the really expensive pizza ovens. And it's nearly impossible for them to make a profit. And now I'm offering basically everything from the delivery to the labor to zero food waste to paper goods savings. You name it, it's all within the price of the pizza.

Speaker 2: So they never have to all these hidden costs. And we started with one hotel. Now we're in 30 venues all over LA. And it's growing very quickly.

Melanie Barr: Love it. So fun.

Speaker 2: Need to see in the fall. So stay tuned for all the homes in America to be able to literally have a pizza whenever they

Melanie Barr: I know. I'm thinking I can't wait to have one.

Speaker 2: I'm sending you one.

Melanie Barr: That's so nice. As Pizza Girl grows nationally. What are the biggest pressures right now and how are you solving that?

Speaker 2: Obviously always with growth comes capital needs and we have a really great team now of investors. Sure. I think a lot of people are like, "Oh, it's amazing to do these things with zero investors and own 100% of your company." But I kind of think 100% of not a lot is not as great as a lower percentage of something really huge. We are growing really fast. So now we need our own trucking and our own facilities to make these pizzas. And trying to keep up with the growth is new for me because it's been a slow uphill battle up until just about last year.

Speaker 2: And it's fun when things take off and with the way business is done today. And you're right with the investments you can move quicker.

Melanie Barr: Correct. Yeah. A lot quicker. And

Speaker 2: sometimes you can't you cannot scale without it. It's really hard unless you had money from somewhere and were able to keep it within you. I just didn't. I'm really grateful to all my uh investors who believe in Pizza Girl.

Melanie Barr: Yeah. And I love that we're having this conversation because it can be really hard when you don't have it.

Speaker 2: It is so hard. I started with zero. I didn't know what I was doing. I remember I Googled how to trademark something. I really did not know anything. And I I learned through one mistake after another. And I have to tell you, some of my mistakes were so costly and so devastating that I should have in some people's minds quit. And I just believe that if you never quit, you will eventually make it. People don't realize these things take 10 years, 15 years. It's not an overnight success story. For some people, sure, but for the most part, buckle up because

Melanie Barr: I just got the chills thinking about that because I know thought in the beginning was definitely not not the reality. Yeah. And that's why I love this podcast because I talked to so many women. I mean, I talked to a woman one time who sold her car and now she has warehouses full of product and I love stories like this and like yours.

Speaker 2: Oh yeah. I've had um major major downfalls. But then I also ended up on Gordon Ramsay's Food Stars and I got to share my company with the world. So you never know what's going to happen. Each day is a big surprise.

Melanie Barr: Yeah. And you were the final three on Gordon Ramsay's Food Stars. And what did

Speaker 2: that experience teach you about how to lead under pressure?

Speaker 2: In real life, you will never have the kind of pressure that you have on TV, outside pressures that the consumer doesn't see when they're watching it, like the producers and people being like, "Well, you know, this is also a show, so if you don't act a certain way or do a certain thing, you're probably going to get kicked off." So, for me, it was like, "Okay, just go. You need this.

Speaker 2: Let's do it." Because honestly, only the people who made it to the finale actually saw an uptick. Like literally everybody else kind of wasted their time is how they felt, which is a nightmare because that was a long, grueling, tough process. But it taught me that we can do anything. You know, I wasn't even able to see my daughter. I missed her birthday. It was horrible. And the producers, I was crying. I was like, I'm going to leave. And the producers said that they would send her big beautiful thing of balloons. They sent her a balloon with the wrong age on it. So, not only was I the mother that was absent, but I don't even know my daughter's age, and I honestly had a meltdown.

Speaker 2: Um, it really made up for it since. And to be honest, we needed that launchpad. This company is what keeps my daughter

Speaker 2: he understands, but it was just you really have to make really tough decisions. You also have to learn to work well with others and also learn when to be cutthroat. And that is what that experience taught me.

Melanie Barr: And thank you for sharing that story because we do have to make those sacrifices and it is really hard especially if you're have a family and taking care of smaller children and I just started looking. It's interesting because I my kids just got really into high protein healthy. I was waiting. I have twins. They're about to be 13 and I was waiting for the moment when they came home and said, "I only want to eat healthy." So, I just was thinking about getting a bread maker because I, you know, you see all those things with how many ingredients do pizza is the same.

Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. And our pizza is the best. We only use double zero Italian caputo flour and like only the best ingredients. That's also why we had to stop my sauce division in the supermarkets because the margin, it's just impossible. If you look the biggest sauce companies in the world, Rayos and Carbone and all them, they're not organic for a reason. It sucks that it's impossible really, you know what I mean, to be clean and healthy. And my values, I stick to them. So what I tell my customers, I stand by, which in turn caused me to have to close down a division of the company that was my I stood in supermarkets with my child. The way my dad had to bring me to catering gigs, giving out samples. I wrapped a bus and traveled across the country in a pizza girl van giving out samples in supermarkets literally across the country and I had to close that division. So how incredibly sad that was for me but also it was what was best for the company.

Melanie Barr: Yeah, those are hard really hard decisions to make. You could always bring it back in the future and I will maybe in a different in a different way. And how fun will it be to tell the story about how you did it in the early days and you became more successful with another product and then decided to go back to launching your your pizza sauce?

Speaker 2: Exactly. I'm super excited and it will happen.

Melanie Barr: How are you using AI and technology and where do you see the biggest opportunity for a consumer brand like yours? You

Speaker 2: know, there's so much conversation going on about AI and I feel like I use it. It helps me get planning done, organizing done, but I don't think it is going to take over everything. Media hoopla is kind of making us all think like be scared.

Speaker 2: Everybody has to use it. If you don't use it, you're you're out. Definitely not in the food industry for one. I think it's great for doing things faster. It's great for research. It's great to throw ideas around and get some additional ideas for names for launches and things like that, but I don't use it for everything like some people because I also don't trust it. It is just kind of picking up the majority of what's going on on the internet and like it gives you like a well-rounded majority answer. So, it's not human and I'm really attached to human feelings and interactions and all the things. So, I'm not totally dependent on it and I don't really want to be, but I like it for how I mean how fast my daughter's in in the music industry. I put together a treatment for her music video in 10 minutes, which would have taken and I sat there and I was like that would have taken like an entire few days to type that out. 10 minutes, entire few days. Like that's that's where it's really helpful.

Melanie Barr: Yeah, it's so nice for things like that.

Melanie Barr: You are though in the perfect industry because food you think about the things AI can't replace or it will take a while to catch up in some ways is food, it's travel and it's in person.

Speaker 2: Yep.

Melanie Barr: And you you cover pizza girl covers all of those three things. So it's it's a perfect Yeah. Perfect. [laughter]

Speaker 2: My dad to compliment to compliment the AI world.

Melanie Barr: Totally. My dad always used to say everybody's got to eat. and he's right about that.

Melanie Barr: Pizza Girl now spans food, lifestyle, and media. How do you decide what belongs under the brand and what is a distraction?

Speaker 2: That has been one of my biggest lessons. I am so easily distracted because of my severe ADD, ADHD. My business partners make jokes like, "Oh, the butterfly just went this way and now Caroline's over there trying to build a whole new division of the company."

Speaker 2: having them be aware of it and everybody's a team kind of focusing on it. The truth is is profitability margin and what is actually getting the easy yeses. What is not something that we have to push up a mountain when we're trying to convince somebody that this is the thing. There's no convincing. We all realized this was it with the parbaked pizzas in our ovens perfectly and the way it all happened was so organic. Knowing that for me that there is a future where there are brick and mortars everywhere sauces in the whole collection in supermarkets because I love to think and dream big. But right now the problem that I'm solving this is what we have to stay focused. I can see it in the numbers. the numbers and the feedback and the reorder. You know, we have a 100% reorder from every venue that we've launched in. So, we're doing something great.

Melanie Barr: That's so great. And as a founder, you see the big picture and you see where you want to go. And it's hard sometimes to go down to those really small moments that those and those steps that an entrepreneur has to do to get to those big moments. And with ADHD and our technology and if you're a mom and a parent, it's a lot. So, I was smiling earlier because I have people in my life that say, "Okay, focus. We're going to focus on just this one thing because often there's a lot we can do, but you're right. To your point, it's is it best for the business and do we want to do it now and should we be doing it now?"

Speaker 2: My business partner Aaron, he always says you can do the fun stuff all day long. You can do the marketing, you can do the this, you can do that, come up with different social media stuff, but is it driving a sale? like is it keeping the company afloat? Is it going to actually turn a profit? How many things can go into marketing rather than does this directly correlate to a sale for the company? And once you have that sorted and it's heavy, then you can go back into marketing and doing more of like let's try this, let's try a new label, let's try that. It's just what I used to focus on is not what we're focusing on now and it's creating a much healthier company. But it's also finding those team members that are good at the things that either you don't want to do or that you might not be the strongest in.

Speaker 2: I have those team members and I'm very

Melanie Barr: during this busy time and your growth of pizza girl. What is bringing you the

Speaker 2: most joy in your personal life? In my personal life, my babies. I within a 2-year time span went from being a single mom to being a mom of four. And that's because I have two stepdaughters now that are equally mine and I have a new baby that's 8 months old. And it's wild the fact that I have four girls. I came from four. I was one of four girls. My mom passed away when she was 36 or 37. So once I was like, "Oh my god, am I completing what she didn't get to complete?" So it was kind of this weird thing. And honestly, I used to be so dazzled by all these different things.

Speaker 2: And my main happiness is truly my kids.

Speaker 2: That's what keeps me going. Pizza Girl is another one of my kids and it's for my kids. This fun thing we all get to kind of do together. I always say like these are the pizza girls now because then I'm going to be pizza grandma.

Melanie Barr: That's so fun. I know. I know. I think about my daughter too which she built it as a little and she has a twin brother. There's a little bit of of girls empowerment in our house. Totally. But it's so fun that you get to do the pizza girl together.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It's so fun. And they come with me to demos. They come with me to different hotels. They come with me to catering events. all the time and they're back there with their little pizza girl hats on, helping, serving, all the things. And it's exciting. It's inspiring them. Like my daughter Ruby, she really wants to do her own skincare brand. My daughter Isabella, she's writing her own treatments for her music videos. Like they're all very career oriented, but also really experiencing family dinner time, phones away. You can have it all.

Speaker 2: You actually can. Maybe not all at the same time in the same day, but you can experience and give your kids both, I think. And it's so fun that we live in a world today where we can take our family along with us on the journey of growing and launching and building a business.

Speaker 2: And I really wanted to build my life to a place where I was able to take my kids' places and do things and not have to work for somebody else. So,

Melanie Barr: thank you for joining us today, Carolina, for telling us all about Pizza Girl. And please tell us how and where we can find you.