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Living the brand: How &pizza CEO has inspired customers to wear its logo forever

&pizza is the name of the Washington, D.C.-based pizzeria co-founded by Michael Lastoria and Steve Salis in July 2012. Since then, it's expanded to 13 locations in the D.C. area and spreading its four core values — celebrate oneness, make it personal, keep it fresh and elevate everything — as it goes.

Michael Lastoria, CEO of &pizza

December 16, 2015 by Travis Wagoner — Editor, Networld Media Group

The name of Washington D.C.'s up-and-coming fast casual pizza joint — &pizza — may look like a misprint, but there's no mistaking the success of the business co-founded by Michael Lastoria and Steve Salis in July 2012. Since then, &pizza has expanded to 13 locations in the D.C. area by delivering its four core values — "celebrate oneness, make it personal, keep it fresh and elevate everything."

Lastoria, who looks more like a rock star than a business man, calls himself a "serial entrepreneur." He started his first business, an advertising, technology and marketing services firm, as his first job out of college at age 22 in New York City. Four years later, after building the company into a success, he sold the business to a private equity firm. Three years later, he founded Jwalk, an advertising agency that provided creative services, specializing in fashion, beauty and hospitality.

"We primarily worked with founders who provided a design-first, culture-led company," Lastoria said. "Working for other companies and primarily working in the service business, I always wanted to get into product. It's funny. When you're in product, you want to get into the service side, and when you're in service, you want to get into the product. When you're servicing your customers and clients, you're putting a lot of work into helping them craft their story, helping them build their brand, helping them generate revenue via customer acquisition."

That spigot can easily be turned off, though, Lastoria noted. So, he wanted to be able to do something for himself based on his life's experiences — something that he could put into his own company.

What a pizza shop — a pizza company — could be

"That was sort of the thesis behind &pizza," Lastoria said. "Apply all that I had learned from my previous start-ups, apply all that I had learned from my prior life experiences and create a company that was very personal and a product that we could have a lot of fun with and rethink what a pizza shop — a pizza company — could be."

That's what gave birth to &pizza, where it was incubated in an art studio West Chelsea, New York City, in 2010.

"We have a unique brand architecture where if you stamp the 'ampersand' (&) on it, it suggests that we support it, and that we think it is what our vision of this particular product should be," Lastoria said. "So, we have a line of not only &pizza, we have &tea, &wine, &snacks and &soda. These are products that we make that are proprietary to our brand that live within all four walls of the pizza shop. It's really that we're curating experiences and products, and telling our guests, 'This is how we see the world and these are the products we want to buy and support.' "

Although Lastoria built the first test kitchen in NYC, he decided that New York was not the best place to launch the concept. He looked at a number of different markets, ultimately deciding on Washington, D.C, because of its reputation as an emerging city with iconic neighborhoods. The brand's first store location opened on H Street in Northeast Washington two years later.

Core values

"The idea for &pizza was to create a unique brand that was design-drive, brand-led and – most importantly – morally sound," he said. "We wanted to create a company that was built to serve and reflect the communities where we would set up shop. That's why we designed each store differently and why we do things as a company that's very right for us and follows our four core values, which we talk about day in and day out."

Those core values are "celebrate oneness, make it personal, keep it fresh and elevate everything."

The idea behind "celebrating oneness" is what touches Lastoria most.

"That's really about celebrating the individual and what makes that individual so unique — their style, their personality their swagger," he said. "And really allowing them to be themselves, and accepting people from all walks of life and celebrating that. Ultimately, allowing us to celebrate those people helps us celebrate group success, and helps us engage with our guests in a way that's, I think, very different from what you see in the fast casual marketplace as a whole."

It starts with the brand

Lastoria said &pizza is different from the competition because of that strong brand commitment. Also, the pizza itself is different in shape and size than most pizzas. Each pizza is oblong, about 18 inches long by 6½ inches wide. The ingredients and toppings also differentiate &pizza from its competitors, both regionally and nationally. There's a finishing station that contains approximately 15 different ingredients that guests can put on their pizza after it cooks.

"From the ingredients themselves, to the flavor combinations, to the shape of the pie is kind of how we think about pizza as a whole is very non-traditional," Lastoria said.

&pizza offers three different dough — traditional, ancient grain and gluten-free. Some of the unique sauces are a mushroom truffle, ricotta spread and a tomato-olive pesto. Interesting toppings include smoked corn, 39-day-aged pepperoni, pulled pork, barbecue, vegan beef crumbles, crumbled goat and feta cheese with a fig marsala, strawberry balsamic and red pepper chili oil. All pizzas cost about $9, regardless of the number of toppings.

Another example of &pizza's branding is its craft-soda program. In 2012, when the company was looking at what sodas it was going to carry it didn't find anything it could get behind or support — so it made its own.

"Our soda flavors are off the wall," Lastoria said. "There's our mango-and-passion fruit, there's a ginger berry lemonade, there's a fig-and-pear elixir, there's a white birch soda. Our guests have a terrific time mixing and matching the different soda flavors."

Getting involved

One of the things &pizza has always had is a philanthropic arm — partnering with local causes to help strengthen the communities around it.

"It's very important that we don't just open up our doors and ask people to come support us without first supporting the things that are important to them," Lastoria said. "Things that are important to that particular neighborhood. We spend time in the community when we open up a shop and just talk to folks — take them out to lunch, take them out to dinner buy them a cup of coffee, get to know who are the influencers, what are the core social issues, how can a pizza shop like ours and a brand like ours be helpful in continuing to support the things that are meaningful and impactful in these neighborhoods."

That's really what "&charity" does and stands for. It's a number of campaigns &pizza does to support the local neighborhood. As an urban brand, &pizza has taken a different approach to real estate.

"We have gone into neighborhoods where you can't find a restaurant chain — or any chain for that matter," Lastoria said. "You can't even find a Starbucks within a mile, and we've set up shop there and had overwhelming success by the folks that have lived in that community for a long time, just thanking us for providing the value and taking a chance on a neighborhood others haven't taken a chance on."

In turn, &pizza, based on its success, has seen a lot of other businesses follow that strategy of taking a chance on a particular neighborhood.

"It's fun. I think it's certainly different," Lastoria said. "The fact that we are company-owned and operated allows us to take risks and gambles on that. But I think we're gambling on folks who really need a business like &pizza."

A great year — a great 'tribe'

&pizza had a great year for 2015, according to Lastoria. It broke many records internally and stabilized the business for the next stage of growth. In 2016 and 2017, it expects explosive growth. Lastoria wouldn't specify to where they're growing to, but it will open at least eight restaurants next year and more than eight the following year.

"It's also important that we don't grow ahead of our people," Lastoria said. "Being company-owned-and operated, we have to develop internally our people, which we call our 'tribe members,' so that they in turn can be the ones that are opening up our future shops and leading our company as we continue to expand."

That is no small feat.

"It takes a lot of time, a lot of coaching, a lot of developing and training people on how to lead the &pizza way so that as we grow, what's near and dear to the brand, doesn't get diluted," Lastoria said.

Living the core values without knowing it

&pizza looks for employees who live by its core values without knowing it.

"We look for people who are comfortable in their own skin," Lastoria said. "People that have a heavy footprint in the community that they live in or grew up in — folks that just have service in their blood. People that are urban dwellers, people who are a bit edgy and progressive in their thinking."

Sometimes &pizza employees call themselves "a gang of rebels" — a tribe of people who come together for a purpose who work every their tails off every day to make the &pizza dream come alive

"It's definitely different than what people have seen before, which is fun for us because we don't really look to the competition or to what other people are doing as the right or the wrong way," Lastoria said. "We just follow what we think is our version of a pizza shop, our version of a brand — and so far so good."

&ink

&pizza has loyal guests and tribe members in its market. It's built a strong affinity and loyalty, and life-following of people who are tremendously supportive of everything &pizza and everything with the "&" brand.

"It's to a point where we offer to all of our tribe members if they want to get the 'ampersand' tattooed on them, we pay for it," Lastoria said. "We had 10 people in a tattoo shop getting the 'ampersand' tattooed on them. It's a really cool thing. It's a different thing."

In fact, with &pizza's loyalty app, once guests reaches "Maverick" status, &pizza pays for them to get a tattoo of their choice.

"It's a fun thing, it's an urban thing, and people are really rallying around the different way of thinking and having fun with it," Lastoria said.

Also according to Lastoria, people get a kick out of companies that are real and authentic — companies they can relate to.

"We're not as buttoned-up and polished as some other companies are, but we're uniquely us, and it's how we see the world — that's our vision, and &pizza's vision of a pizza shop," Lastoria said. "So we think about that and our ethos is we think about that stuff all the time, which is 'Is it right for us,' and that is sort of what guides our decision-making. It's not, hey, so-and-so is doing this, and so-and-so is doing that."

About Travis Wagoner

Travis Wagoner spent nearly 18 years in education as an alumni relations and communications director, coordinating numerous annual events and writing, editing and producing a quarterly, 72-plus-page magazine. Travis also was a ghostwriter for an insurance firm, writing about the Affordable Care Act. He holds a BA degree in communications/public relations from Xavier University.