Toppers was recently featured in QSR!

The Renovation Rush
By Daniel P. Smith- QSR May Issue

Operators plan on committing more of their resources to redesigns and renovations in 2010 as they try to stay relevant for consumers.

Four years ago, the winds of change moved Scott Gittrich, an experience that the Toppers Pizza CEO is appreciative for these days as his Wisconsin-based pizza chain pushes into a new decade with promise and purpose.

While working with an advertising agency, Gittrich and his Toppers leadership team noted their success with teens and twentysomethings, a revelation that sparked a multiyear plan to renovate existing restaurants and build new outlets with a more casual, youthful edge.

“Our existing stores were built like fast food places, but that wasn’t how our customers perceived us,” Gittrich says. “If we were going to realize our potential, then we needed to embrace our late-night, burn-the-candle-at-both-ends image, and that meant we needed to change our prototype store.”

A year later, Gittrich and his design firm settled on a snazzy, modern, and cost-effective store design that converted Toppers’ stores from quick service to fast casual. Today’s Toppers feature loft-like ceilings, exposed brick, earth tone­–colored walls, and lounge seating, a far cry from the checkered tile floor and laminate tables of yesteryear.

“We think the physical space reflects the way customers perceive the quality of our food,” Gittrich says. “And we didn’t want to look like fast food pizza.”

The company spent the last two years converting half of its 25 stores, with remaining locations on target for redesign by the end of 2013, a timeline acknowledging the reality of lease negotiations rather than any hesitance or lack of excitement on Gittrich’s part.

“We feel we’ve got a store design now that represents our brand and showcases our food in an exciting way,” Gittrich says. “We couldn’t be happier we made the decision to renovate. Sales are increasing at our converted stores and customers are responding favorably to the changes.”

Though costly in both time and money, renovations like Toppers’ are likely to blanket the 2010 restaurant industry landscape. Looking to capitalize on brighter economic prospects and resurrect slumping recession sales, operators are expected to turn to renovation as an avenue to spark consumer interest, refresh the brand and its individual locations, and position the company for long-term success. (Read More)

Say CHEESE Midwest – Toppers is Bubbling Out of Wisconsin

The biggest advantage of how we have grown in Wisconsin is the buzz that we have built in terms of brand awareness. By starting on college campuses we have built a loyal cult like following. Our customers are fanatical about our products. These fanatics help us create new fanatics by telling them about Toppers. When we showed up 5 years later in Milwaukee people would say I loved you while I was in college at Whitewater, Stevens Point, Madison, etc.

How we be able to sustain that fanatical following as we progress outside of Wisconsin, is the million dollar question. We need to do a great job of educating people on the awesome tasty goodness of our core products – Topperstix & House Pizzas. We intend on strategically growing one market at a time much like we did in Wisconsin. Our primary targets are major college campus markets in the Upper Midwest. By developing the brand in these influential markets first this will allow us develop a loyal following that will help carry us as we enter other major metro areas such as Minneapolis, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati. To accomplish our growth goals we need to continue to align ourselves with great single unit and area developer franchisees.

We are getting franchising interest from people all across the country. However, the majority of our leads are from people who already know the Toppers brand. Most of them are customers or friends of employees or franchisees. We get the most leads from the places where we already have open Toppers stores.

In 2010, we are going to be making an aggressive push to attracting new franchise prospects. As of today we are right on our pace of hitting 100 stores by the end of 2013. We currently have 26 stores open with another 18 under contract to open in the next 24 months. In the coming year we are planning on taking more advantage of our social media outlets as a lead generating tool.

Toppers Says: Eat it Economy! Continues Growth

Many brands are struggling in this economy. That is an unfortunate fact. For us, we have been able to sustain by simply maintaining our visions and following our core values, especially: Give Customers What They Want!

Our success at Toppers really comes down to we have great food and great people. We have two signature products: Our Topperstix are cheesy covered breadstix that people order more often than pizza! The most popular is our world famous Triple Order. Our second point of difference vs. the competition is our wide selection of unique House Pizzas. We have some of the most unique pizzas in the pizza delivery category. Our Potato Toppers, Mac N Cheese, Cool C-B-R and Hangover Helper are examples of tasty pizzas you are just not going to find anywhere else. Giving customers what they want also includes our franchisee owners as they are our other set of customers. We have continued to grow in a rough economy because we have a system that produces ROI for our franchisees. The proof: in 2008 our stores averaged over $945,000 in sales with an average EBTDITA of 14.5 percent (as disclosed in our 2009 Franchise Disclosure Document). The other delivery competitors in our category are closer to an average of $600,000 in annual sales. Our stores are doing extremely high sales out of a small footprint of 1600 square feet. Our annual sales per square foot rival the biggest restaurant companies in the world. We have continued to grow because people see the success our franchise owners are having and new people want to jump on the Toppers train.

We do understand that the economy is definitely tough as people are being extremely choosy about where to spend their dining dollars. One of the most important things we have done is not panic like many of our competitors have done. We have not jumped into the deep discounting game to try to save our market share. We have looked for new ways to create value for our customers without putting our franchisees in the position where they are forced to try to make money on high food cost promotions. An example of this is our new MyZa sized pizza. This individual size pizza is unique in the industry. It is rectangular in shape and is cut into four right triangle slices. The MyZa is $4.99 for a 1 topping or $6.99 for one of our signature House pizzas. This new product has allowed us to do two things; create trial of our House Pizzas and provide a price point that attracts the solo eater.

We are also constantly looking at how we can improve the quality of our food. We look at trends and watch how consumers’ tastes are changing. We then come up with unique flavor combinations to match those trends. We aren’t afraid to try anything on our pizza. If Captain Crunch with jalapenos tastes good on a pizza then let’s try to sell it!

I guess I wouldn’t call us “innovators” in terms of marketing. Being a small company, we don’t have the resources the big national chains have at their disposal to be innovative. Although being smaller it gives us the opportunity to our hustle the big slow plodding chains. We do and say things in our marketing the big guys could never get away with doing. I would call our approach genuine and authentic. Our marketing is simply to be real in the eyes of our fanatics. To be successful we must know who we are and we know what our customers think of us.

At Toppers we love to have fun, it is a company core value. We want our customers to have fun too. So if we come out with some B.S. campaign that is not believable our customers will see right through it and hurt the brand long term. Our goal is simple create fanatics for life by creating personal moments and making emotional connections with each and every customer.

While I’m definitely not an economist, so my opinion probably doesn’t mean a whole lot, I think we are seeing signs that consumer confidence is growing. Hey, people still have to eat, right? You can only stay home and eat meatloaf so many times each week. Ordering pizza is like having a party delivered at an economical price to feed a group of people. The per person price of having pizza delivered compared to going out to a restaurant is so much less that we feel we have an advantage.

We are predicting the first part of 2010 might still be a little rough but the second half should see some modest growth. At Toppers we are expecting to continue our run of consecutive record sales with another year of growth.

That’s Right, We’re Cool: Toppers Progresses Itself Into Social Media

Every brand seems to have an increased interest in jumping head first into Social Media, however, few actually create a plan of attack when doing so. For us, Toppers Pizza, we wanted to take a calculated approach that combined a mixture of attainable goals and fun.

Using a contest, our weekly specials (known as Toppers Tuesdays), we crossed over the 10k fan mark on our Facebook Fan Page. Not too bad for a 26-unit pizza chain.

From the get-go, Social Media was so attractive to us because it allows us to make personal connections with all of our Toppers fanatics. We get to interact with them in a fun way in their own personal space. The Toppers brand then becomes more than just a functional brand it becomes a friend, a friend for life. The big benefit of interacting with our fanatics on social networks is it is real time. We can put out a special offer and see immediate results. We can ask our fans a research question and get instant feedback.

Toppers we use social media to make all kinds of different personal connections with our fanatics. We use social media to announce new products, new store openings, conduct research, special offers social media only offers, fun interactive contests, giveaways of Toppers merchandise and most of all we use it to continue to build the culture of a fun, irreverent brand. If one of our fanatics is having a bad day we try to brighten it by giving them a special offer or simply telling them a joke.

Additionally, Social Media has provided us with a glimpse of the future. We believe that Social Media will completely change the advertising landscape. Consumers, today, are bombarded by brand messaging. They are getting more and more numb to traditional “sell me” type advertising. Today’s consumer picks brands for more than just their functional benefit (what the product/service does for them). Customers today and in the future are going to associate themselves with brands that align with their own personal beliefs and value structure. Social Media allows brands like Toppers to be a part of their daily lives in a way that traditional advertising will never be able to accomplish.

Social Media definitely is more than just another form of retail advertising; it helps educate people on our franchising opportunities. We use our Topperspizza Guy profile on Facebook as a day in the life of a Toppers franchise owner. So when a person is interested in learning about the Toppers franchise opportunity and they do a search of the web our social media sites help to educate the potential owner on the power of the Toppers brand. Social Media really helps us sell the difference of our brand compared to our closest competitors.

If you take a look around our Social Sites, you may be impressed on first glance, but this is just the beginning, as we learn more about us as a brand and most importantly, how our consumers see us.

Toppers was just recently featured in the Ann Arbor Journal!

Toppers Pizza hoping to open in Ann Arbor
By Lisa Allmendinger, A2 Journal

You might not be familiar with The Hangover Helper pizza or a Mac 'N' Cheese, Potato Topper, Cool C-B-R (Chicken-Bacon-Ranch) varieties.

There also are buffalo wings, quesadillas and grinders, plus dozens of other menu items at Toppers Pizza, now in 26 locations throughout the upper Midwest.

In the future, University of Michigan students and Ann Arbor residents might be able to taste these unusual toppings as Toppers Pizza scouts a Wolverine-friendly location, while looking for franchisees.

There are an additional 18 under contract, and Ann Arbor is one of the Michigan target cities that Toppers plans for its franchise expansion plans.

The eclectic pizza franchise plans to use Ann Arbor as a hub for expansion in Michigan, says Scott Iversen, Toppers director of franchise development.

Topping $1 million in sales per location, Iverson says these numbers are 35 to 45 percent higher than national competitors. (Read More)