How Yard Sale gets 7 pizza shops for the price of 1

Yard Sale closed out their first decade with £13m turnover last year.

All while taking ‘the hard way’. They aren’t on apps like Uber Eats and Deliveroo.

For most food delivery businesses, those platforms are your distribution.

So how did Yard Sale get all this awareness and traction?

Here are 3 ways I liked:

N.B. not necessarily the most important/chronological. Yes, I read the comments 😅.

Satellite stores (use other people's rent)

Yard sale optimises for delivery-first (24-minute average wait, 80% single drops).

They don’t blow loads of cash on expensive rents in the city centre or with loads of tables (20 covers tops).

One of the ways they’re able to achieve satellite distribution is through local pubs and bars.

I should know. I helped manage a pub that did a lot of Yard Sale trade.

It’s a no-brainer for independent pubs without a proper kitchen, of which there are many in London.

Yard Sale arrived with a hands-free solution for us:

• They handle all the orders, payments, and handovers

• Plenty of trendy-looking, laminated (important) menus

• Cute beer mats that looked like pizza

And most importantly, we’d get kickback on every pizza we could shift.

So we had a food revenue source without building a kitchen (and losing all that drinking space), hiring new staff, managing food storage…

And we’d fixed the one reason most people wander out of pubs (they get hungry).

They currently have 173 distribution partners.

Here’s how the network looks for just one branch of Yard Sale:

The amount of foot traffic through these pub doors in an evening:

This is how you get 7 stores' worth of orders while only paying rent for one.

And these are often new people you’re introducing to your brand.

You’re acquiring them at a profit, with an LTV that could be in the hundreds (if they become a loyal customer or recommend you to a friend).

But this only works if you’re good—like Yard Sale.

Can you say the same in your product category right now?

Because you get so much free distribution when you’re actually solving somebody's genuine problem.

Find that sliver in your niche, implement an outreach strategy, and get your free distribution.

Partnerships galore

Beyond organic real-world word of mouth, there are meticulously engineered, premeditated word of mouth—or ‘partnerships’.

The name of the game is to get new, young and trendy people aware of the brand.

And Yard Sales’ model leaned on distribution from partners too numerous to mention, all with their target customer.

We’ve seen collabs with dozens of other challenger food/drinks brands:

Crucially, they’re going way deeper than a throwaway “share-for-share” style shoutout.

• They invest the time to create custom boxes and posters

• They design limited-run crossover pizzas that are likely to resonate with the partner audience.

By actually providing their partners with something high-value and worth showing off, they get way more buy-in from brands who want to promote the partnerships.

Recently, there’s been a shift towards partnering with London’s foody influencers too. Which seems to be going very well.

Sluttychef has 41k Instagram followers who rely on her recommendations and (most importantly) identify with and trust her. The collab produced a pizza with a story that feels authentically tied to her brand, not just a shoehorned promo.

Now it’s time for my obligatory “do you know how much you’d have to pay in ads for this kind of distribution” point (I will NEVER stop making this point).

It’s an awesome strategy to rinse and repeat. Borrowing other brands' audiences and benefiting from an intro from a trusted party.

These 6-figure, tastemaking accounts get plenty of inbound inquiries to promote to their audience.

So you have to give them something in this trade.

But it doesn’t need to be money. In the case of Yard Sale, they can offer a lot with minimal outlay:

• Venue space (they do have spaces, with around 20 covers maximum. Like I said, delivery-focused

• Bringing partner brands into the ‘real world’

• Exposure (because Yard Sale don’t use 3rd party apps, they have total control of their customer data for marketing. So they can shout out partners to their email list, along with socials).

That’s what they did for my favourite example of these influencer partnerships, with an in-store activation for the notorious Real Housewives of Clapton.

For Yard Sale, it’s such a great way to reach a hyper-localised audience of hipsters who self-identify as willing to pay for ‘affordable luxuries’.

And it still felt reasonably authentic, with both brands leaning into RHOC’s trademark, self-aware memery.

And of course, Yard Sale handled the catering… duh.

Which is really just a product intro to (checks notes) trendy locals who would attend a pizza event.

In other words, exactly their market.

Don’t be vanilla

Variety helps things feel small (in a good way)

Yard Sale is walking this line as an independent that wants to scale.

You want more coverage in the city to grow your business, but your USP is being something different to the generic Dominos and Pizza Huts of the world.

They get in front of this by keeping their branding fairly loosey-goosey:

As most businesses grow, they standardise everything, so they have a repeatable, proven formula they can roll out.

But every Yard Sale location managed to still feel different, with its own personality. No soulless joints here.

This means that people don’t feel like they’re paying a premium for a generic experience. It still feels ike a neighbourhood pizza spot, with the associated cache of an independent.

Target cult followings

Another example of their counterintuitive thinking is their second most popular side—a Marmite garlic bread.

Marmite is literally the most divisive ingredient you could hope to offer customers.

But for the low-lift of splashing some Marmite on the garlic bread you’re already selling, you’ve created an experience that hyper-resonates with an underserved chunk of people. One which they (crucially) can’t get anywhere else.

It doesn’t even matter if we suppose most people can’t stand Marmite.

In the same way that a Guinness-purist drags his friends to the “only place that does it properly”, a group of hungry friends will order Yard Sale just to pacify the Marmite aficionado.

Links and resources

• Just last week, Yard sale got investment from Piper, who’ve previously backed big boys Flat Iron, Be At One and Las Iguanas. The aim is to expand to 40 stores in the next 5 years.

• Awesome Q&A with Co-Owners Nick Buckland and Johnnie Tate charting the early days/mission.

• If you’re interested in the pizza biz, check

  • Fireaway (started by a 16-year-old ‘dropout’ and now worth over 18 million quid)

  • Pizza Pilgrims (founded 2012, 22 stores, now expanding to Scotland and Wales with record profit last year)