If you polled people about what city makes the best pizza, London would not be their first answer. Not by a long shot. But Luca Magnani wants you to rethink that. He and his partner are bringing Roman street-style pizza to the most bustling startup scene in Europe.
Pizza Rossa, founded in 2014, made a grand appearance at the WeWork Moorgate launch party, where it delivered more than 3,000 slices of pizza to the largest coworking space in London. The secret, Magnani says, is being very flexible.
“We make it happen,” says Magnani, a WeWork Moorgate member. “Even with short notice, we’re able to scale up quickly.”
The original idea came from Magnani’s business partner Corrado Accardi, an engineer who earned an MBA at the London Business School in 2013. That’s when he won the best business plan of the year award.
“I was fully on board, working at night because I was still in my corporate job,” Magnani says. “We started looking for investors, but they all wanted too much stake in the company, so we decided to go the crowdfunding route instead.”
They launched Pizza Rossa on Crowdcube, the largest UK-based crowdfunding platform. Within 17 days, they broke the European record for the most amount of money raised in the shortest amount of time by a startup.
They launched their first shop in June 2014, just half a year after they exceeded their crowdfunding goal. Hiring the right talent wasn’t too difficult. For a small-scale operation, they found the perfect chef to run the main kitchen.
“We started looking for venues and hiring people,” Magnani says. “Meanwhile, my friend was attending professional Italian pizza making courses because none of us were actually chefs. We eventually hired a well-trained Italian chef. He had owned and operated three pizza places in Sardinia before the financial crisis of 2008 hit.”
Magnani decided to jump ship from his corporate life. After seven years at Saatchi & Saatchi and 10 years at Time Warner, Magnani was ready to turn in his resignation letter.
“The corporate world was killing me,” says Magnani. “I wasn’t able to raise my head and see what’s going on in the world. If you take away your corporate life, there are financial challenges. But at the same time, you free up so much time and with the right support, you have endless opportunities to have fun.”
Nowadays, Magnani serves as a consultant for digital agencies like Xister and helps budding Italian companies expand into the U.K. His WeWork membership allows him the flexibility of bouncing between his WeWork office and the pizza shop, a 10-minute walk.
Magnani and his co-founder are currently working on a project to roll out pop-up shops in the 11 WeWork London locations, catering lunch a few times a week. The plan is to alternate between pizza and pasta, so people don’t get tired of the same thing.
But first, they had to make some alterations to the menu.
“We sell jalapeño pepperoni pizza,” Magnani says. “That’s the closest it comes to describing the spicy meat that comes from Calabria in Italy. It’s very local and high quality. People don’t know it, so we changed the name to make it understandable.”
The actual name of the spicy pork sausage is ‘nduja, he says. Since the name change, it’s become the most popular item on the menu.
“It flies off the shelf,” Magnani says. “Then we have the classics like ham and mushroom and buffalo mozzarella. We also do specials of the week with capers and other sausages. It’s a bit of educating our customers to try something new and bringing them a taste of Italy.”
Photos: Lauren Kallen