On paper, Vince Szwajkowski wasn’t the most obvious choice to join fast-growing, fast-casual chain Blaze Pizza as its latest chief marketing officer last fall.
An experienced lifestyle & entertainment marketer with no history of working with restaurant brands, Szwajkowski brought a nontraditional background to the marketing oversight of the Southern California-based chain with over 340 locations worldwide. And as a self-identified consumer with “8 million dietary restrictions” — including no dairy and no gluten — Szwajkowski isn’t the first type of target customer who comes to mind.
“Anyone who knows me scratches their head, like, ‘Why are you going to work for a pizza chain?’ But one of the first things I came to appreciate from talking to our guests was how many ways we could accommodate their dietary restrictions,” says Szwajkowski, whose personal go-to order at Blaze is a red sauce, cheese-free pizza with sausage, Kalamata olives, roasted garlic and arugula. “The fact that we make our own gluten-free dough in-house and it’s actually good, we have keto crusts, vegan proteins, plant-based cheese — I was one of those people who didn’t really have the opportunity to eat pizza before, and it’s been so personally rewarding. It’s great to be able to accommodate so many different dietary and lifestyle choices.”
Szwajkowski joined Blaze Pizza in September 2020 from a two-year tenure as CMO at ArcLight & Pacific Cinemas, the iconic SoCal movie theater chain that just filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy after extended pandemic delays made it impossible to reopen key locations. Prior to ArcLight, he spent seven years in senior roles at Hilton Hotels, most recently as VP of lifestyle brand concepts. Szwajkowski says he found a common thread of hospitality through each of those roles, including Blaze, which appealed to him in taking on the new role.
“I find the idea of human-to-human interaction through a good or service as one of the very intriguing challenges to think through as a brand or as a marketer,” he says. “I love thinking through the types of interactions that are going to give people a smile and brighten their day. There are just so many more opportunities to inspire joy through experiences than there are through digitally native experiences or product-based goods and services.”
Of course, navigating the in-person aspect of a restaurant brand’s business that was 85% in-person prior to the pandemic has been one of the trickiest tasks on Szwajkowski’s plate this past year, but one that the brand tackled head-on by adding enhanced app, delivery and loyalty-program offerings to meet the changes in dining behaviors.
Brand Innovators caught up with Szwajkowski from his home office in Beverly Hills to learn more about the digital pivots poised to shape Blaze Pizza’s long-term business, plans for future expansion and why expanding into food offerings beyond pizza is not on the menu for Blaze. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Brand Innovators: You joined Blaze as CMO in September 2020. What appealed to you about the role, and what positions was the business in when you joined?
Vince Szwajkowski: I left Arclight at the end of last summer as I saw the writing on the wall with the restrictions on movie theaters, particularly in California. And as I was thinking about what was next I wanted something that was going to be a new challenge, but still very much in this broader world of experiences and hospitality
What Blaze, what I really loved was that it was private equity backed, it had had a great growth trajectory, so the next phase of growth was going to be imminent and important. We have 340 restaurants now in 38 states, so how do we get that to 800 restaurants? How do we enter into international markets? Those things were really important and excited me about the opportunity
Did the startup nature of working for a 10-year brand appeal to you too?
Absolutely. My history has been working for more established, older brands — sometimes even broken brands. If you think about Hilton, a 100-year-old brand, there’s a lot of skeletons in those closets. So being able to come in fresh with a new brand and establish what I believe is the baseline for the future instead of trying to navigate through a past, I find that to be unbelievably positive. When I came to Blaze, there were all these gold nuggets waiting to be polished up and brought out to the world. I loved that the founder of the company is a chef who’s still involved in the day to day, and Mandy Shaw our CEO has brought so many amazing, talented folks onto the team. I love the collaborative spirit and the culture. It feels like a startup — we’re all new, we’re all coming at this with our own approaches and driving the growth forward.
What have been some of your biggest priorities since you got your start as CMO?
The first priority has been redefining the brand strategy. We’re probably four or five months into an entirely new rebrand effort. So we’re re-imagining what our brand promise is, our pillars, our values, our mission et cetera. It’s something that’s really foundational for me to be able to drive the growth forward. I think without a strong brand, a strong strategy can be really difficult to activate.
The second major initiative has been digital. Blaze’s brand historically was 80-85% dine-in, so we’ve been able to take what was an in-person business to 150% growth in digital due to COVID. If you think about the operations it took to actually make that happen — to the broader digital assets, the tech stack, and the digital experience — that wasn’t front and center for the brand historically. It’s been a huge amount of work, and it’s paying off. We’re about to launch a new app, and we’ve made a lot of enhancements to the back-end. We’re actively investing in a lot of underlying marketing technology to give the guests a much more personalized experience, a build-your-own pizza type model to choose from toppings and crusts and all these combinations. It’s been a big point of investment from human capital as well as financial capital to ensure we’re delivering on both the functional elements of the brand as well as the more emotional elements in the broader digital ecosystem.
You started at the company mid-pivot and mid-pandemic. What was that onboarding process like?
I would have much rather had a lot more traditional type of onboarding, but during COVID every week was something different. And of our 340 restaurants, close to a third are in California, so everyday it was “We’re open, we’re closed, you don’t do that anymore, we’re making it stricter, no in-room dining,” et cetera. A lot of mental energy was really focused on the constantly evolving state of the world, because I don’t think anyone was able to plan ahead for all the changes happening at once. I felt lucky to be coming into an industry that was still so essential for how people live, but it was definitely hard coming in without all the institutional knowledge, the understanding of what had worked and what hadn’t before.
How broadly, or narrowly, would you define Blaze’s competitive set? Is it just other pizza chains, or is it wider than that?
Even though we’re in this massive, what I believe is an $46 billion pizza category, I think we actually look at ourselves much more broadly than pizza. We really do think of ourselves in the broader fast-casual landscape. A lot of what I’m looking at is, “What’s happening with Chipotle, with Panera, with Sweetgreen?” Those are not things that you usually think of when it comes to where we’d be competing. Blaze’s business is 50% lunch, which is also not normal for pizza, so that component is a super interesting dynamic for us to be thinking about.
How did Blaze adjust its ecommerce and delivery tools to meet the new demands of the past year, and what long-term impact do you think the events of this past year will bring?
With the huge growth that we saw in digital, a lot was from our existing customer base, but we saw a huge surge in new customers during COVID because of the way we were positioning ourselves with delivery. We entered into partnerships with all the third-party delivery companies, which was a perspective I learned to embrace from the hotel business. Everyone would say, “We want every person to book a hotel room through our platform,” which is a very efficient way to have the best customer experience, but overall it’s not my decision to tell a customer how or where to order from us. It’s really about how to give folks the ultimate choice.
There are plenty of Blaze loyalists who will order from us exclusively on Uber Eats, and from a marketing perspective I want to give you my experience on my app, have you in the loyalty program. But I do think overall we’ve really found a whole new tranche of customers for the brand because of digital. With that, I think our digital business is here to stay.
Lots of the larger pizza chains have expanded their menus to include other items like salads or wings. Is that in the cards for Blaze, and why or why not?
It’s interesting, while other are expanding their menus, we’ve tried to simplify ours a little bit. And that’s actually going to continue to be a focus for the brand, because we have so much choice and level of personalization that’s inherent to our concept. Most of our restaurants have five crusts, multiple different sauces, 40 different toppings — there’s so many ways in which you can really have a different Blaze experience every time you come in, depending on your personal preference or dietary needs. We’ve tried to focus in on what we’re good at and focus on that core.
Where we’re trying to innovate is showing people new combinations of flavors, or adding in other seasonal ingredients or limited time ingredients. We’ve done two LTOs during the past year that have performed really well, and helped us experiment with a different flavor profile. We’re not increasing our dessert offering, we’re not going out there trying to say we’re gonna offer wings. Our product is so amazing and something people keep coming back for, so how can we continue to make that core even better?
What’s next on Blaze’s list of territories for international expansion?
We’re in a total of six countries, and we’re going to continue to focus on growing those. We have about 15 locations in Canada, we’re actually opening our 16th this week, and we have a presence in the Middle East as well – including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Dubai. We still see huge growth potential in Canada, we see a lot of growth potential in the Middle East. I think as we close out this year and the underlying core strategy work is completed, we’ll then put a broader international development plan in place. It depends on who you ask on the executive team, but I think the Asia Pacific region will be our next focus as we continue to grow
Andrew Hampp is an entertainment marketing consultant for Brand Innovators and the founder of consultancy 1803 LLC, based in Berkeley, California.
