Espresso: Tom Gozney - The Genius Packaging Secret Behind The World's Biggest Pizza Oven Brand

0:00Steve Jobs wasn't necessarily a hugely inspiring cultural leader within the organisation. right he was known to be you know um you know quite brutal in his leadership style um but his like sort of like undetermined rigid focus to design and like how apple were portrayed as a brand was just like landed with me and was so inspiring to me and i just i feel like i've got that like granular approach to our products to our brand you know like we want to be and i'll finish on the products but like we we rooted them in this sort of ancient history and then i want to have a modern approach and the reason that i wanted to have a modern approach we've got various values that sit within our core pillars of designing products from quality and performance so they have to work like professional ovens you know they have to be beautiful and i wanted to create an architectural statement that elevated a garden that didn't detract from it you know you see mate that's so wait architectural statement that elevated a garden that those detract that didn't attract yeah it's like it's just i love the power of words but like it's just like if you put that's amazing statement like yeah that's bad and it's like when that's like my dna yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and it's just you know what like there was there was just i stumbled into fucking cooking because i was broken and i was an addict and i got into recovery and i built a pizza oven fuck knows what i would have done if it wasn't a pizza oven but i've just applied against like i guess the core dna of what i love to cooking products it could have been lawn mowers or whatever although that's not as exciting you know but you never know but you know what it was like cooking was the first thing that gave me purpose gave me community gave me a richness to my life that i didn't have and then like as my journeys progressed i think i'm intrinsically built as a brand person as a marketeer right and like using nuances of how we design them and how we think about design to connect to a consumer on a much more emotional level than providing a product that provides them a service it's not a fucking piece of hardware that produces a pizza you know the entire notion of like how Gosney was built was around like when I lit a brick oven in my garden it changed the way that we socialized and I don't want to use fucking buzzwords for the brand you know but like the core dna and the sort of poignance of why the brand exists is built built around my experience and it was the first time ever when we lit a pizza oven in my garden lit the brick oven that i built you know i was incredibly vulnerable at the time i was fucking shit scared of social isolation so i was telling my friends they could drink around me i was less than a year clean i was probably a year clean and i was like living spiritual malady feared up people are coming around and bringing how do you use design to like so again i believe a lot of brands you're scratching your own itch or solving your own problem how do you use design to then communicate that emotional connection and emotional feeling so you know i'll talk you through it like um there's this if i think about the design of the dome for example which is like our first i would say truly hero well no rockbox is probably our first truly hero product but the dome is the is the greatest expression of what I love as a designer and you know there was this there's this like undeniable level of masculinity to the product because it needed to be fucking cool so it has to be fucking cool it needs to look like it was born like apple and a 300 year old neapolitan oven baby and it was that but then you know a large part of my focus psychologically has been connecting with a female audience you know and like how we build brand and how we deliver That's another dichotomy then, isn't it?

3:48It's another dichotomy. So it's masculinity, but it's basically being approachable and design-led. And landing that point of being an architectural statement for the garden, your missus, and I don't know if this is sexist to say, but it's generally the guy cooking nine times out of 10, and the missus that wants to put the cover back over the shitty stainless steel barbecue at the end of the day to hide it. And I'm like, how the fuck do we rip up that rule sheet and change it? And so the psychology of how we design our products is they're rooted in a level of masculinity but they've got really like really considered colorways that we market the products with incredible curves and radiuses to the product to make them feel approachable and friendly even down to the docking system all of our products essentially have like a little docking system that's a different color it's all part of the same product but that was to make it feel modern progressive to make it feel like it was rooted in you know true modern engineering that makes it feel easy because one of the core values of what we wanted to try and do is take an ancient cooking method and make it easy for any person in their garden to be able to cook with it so you've got the dichotomies of like tying in with the foundations of the heritage of the product making it you know that undertone of masculinity but also making it unisex making it approachable an architectural statement but then it was also you stick it on a docking system and it makes it feel like you've got this control center so all of a sudden like the design feels intuitive it feels like you go here for your buttons to control the oven you visually communicate that we've been really thoughtful around the centralized design to make it an easier experience for the consumer and you know like sort of I would say one of the final dichotomies you know the detachment that I know people want from the modern day you know like everyone lives on TikTok and Instagram and stuck on screens and there was just this romance of burning wood which just like when you smell fire and you smell burning wood it takes you to a different place if you're in your garden it shuts the outside world out for a moment and there's just this over-renting like yeah like this overwhelming feeling of calm right and so with the dome not in these products because he's slightly smaller we had like a little kindling rack that was built in the dock at the front of it and the dichotomy of that is like to connect the sensory elements of nature to the modern design principles that we got for all the other things that I talked about and so there was this just feeling of like you know like we've sort of grown and evolved as a human race from being cavemen to building fires and that connection to nature is something that we visually wanted to communicate because I think it gives a sense of fucking oxygen for people they can breathe if they feel it's like when you go and stand by the ocean you feel like you feel like you could breathe a bit clearer right it's just a sense of freedom and i think like rooting our design in those sort of natural principles was a big elevator beautiful that's a beautiful dichotomy you create something almost two months free yeah that's what espresso sponsors unleashed are offering they are supply chain gurus and offer inventory management that talks to your econ and accounting software it's helped islands cut admin time in half get granular clarity on your margins know where your stock is don't miss availability brands like candy kittens tarquins gin minor figures and trip all use unleashed and i reckon you should too as i said two months free in the show notes click there and you're gonna get two months for free