'After nine years in business without a summer holiday, we're taking a week off this year'

I HAVE BEEN teaching in secondary schools for about 15 years. When I was starting out, I never expected that I would work in the food industry.

I was a French teacher initially and did my training over in England, which is where I met my husband and business partner Piero – who has been a baker by trade since he was 15 years old.

As soon as I met him he was making me bread and bringing home real ciabatta and baguettes like I’d never tasted before in Ireland. He couldn’t speak a word of English and I couldn’t speak any Italian, but we managed with a bit of help from the dictionary.

When we came back to Ireland, he worked in bakeries in Galway and then in Dublin. After years working for other people, he got tired of it and really wanted to start his own bread bakery.

But bread production is a highly competitive space in Ireland, and you would need a lot of money to set up something like that. So we saw a gap in the market instead to make fresh, authentic pizza bases – and since nobody else was doing that, it seemed like a good fit.

That was 10 years ago now, and once we realised it was a possibility, I made the calls to all the enterprise centres around.

We were just after getting married, and when we got back from our honeymoon we got a call back from Spade Enterprise Centre saying they had a small 25 sq m unit for us.

Piero quit his job, but I was still teaching full-time. So we had my salary, which meant we could go for it without too much risk.

The plan was to bring affordable-but-premium pizza bases to Ireland, and now that people travel more and know what authentic Italian pizza should taste like, we knew they would recognise the quality of ours.

Cliona Swan and Piero De Vallier

Starting out

One of the real, positive moments that stands out has been getting the recognition from Blas na hEireann Irish Food Awards. As a result of that award, Neven Maguire wrote about our pizza bases in his cookbook and did up a recipe using them.

We already knew we had a good product, but it’s nice to hear other people think the same.

We started out by exploring the catering industry, as well as retail. From the start, retail worked best for us, even though our packaging at the start was very basic. Through word of mouth and family and friends, we built the business from the ground up.

We started selling in the Dublin Food Co-op market in Newmarket Square, because we were living near there at the time. By chance, someone came in who worked in Fallon & Byrne and asked us why we weren’t selling them there.

Once we got in a few well-known shops, the momentum started to pick up and after around 18 months shops started to call us wanting to get our product in.

Since we were starting up when the recession was picking up pace, we weren’t expecting a whole lot. We were hopeful, but we weren’t expecting to go straight into rapid growth and expansion. We were willing to give it that slow burn.

In terms of making it to profitability, it was really through a distributor that we achieved that. We became a reliable supplier and always made our orders.

There were times when it was hard though. The start was tough, we were always worried if it would work, will we make money, will we succeed, are we crazy?

Piero didn’t pay himself for about two years and hasn’t taken a summer holiday in nine years. But this year, because it’s the 10-year anniversary for us and our business, we’re putting an end to the ‘no holiday’ rule and we’re taking a week during the summer.

Hard slog

The economic crash also had an effect on the high-end shops, which in turn affected us. Supermarkets at the time weren’t interested in local artisan foods, whereas now they’re willing to give it a try.

At the start, only one or two SuperValu stores were interested in stocking our products, but now we’re in the majority of them. Same with Dunnes Stores and Tesco.

Once we got to that stage we were pinching ourselves, but then the issue became keeping up with demand. Within about two years, we realised we couldn’t keep up with orders if we stayed in the space at Spade Enterprise Centre.

We were so lucky in the end. One day we were going for a steak in James Lawlor Butchers in Rathmines; we had never met him before, but we knew he was selling our pizzas.

We got chatting to him, and it just so happened that he was looking for someone to rent a big unit he had, so we got his lot which was about triple the size of what we were in already.

He was also able to introduce us to the distributor Europa Foods, and we were able to get them to take over the distribution side of the business.

At the time I was pregnant and we were trying to move house, so to get someone to take over sales, deliveries and payments was huge.

Until Europa Foods came on board, Piero was doing it all. He is a naturally good businessman, but he had no training or experience in business management. Luckily he knows his product inside out.

A lot of entrepreneurs who go into the food industry these days are experts in marketing or accounting, but I was a secondary school teacher and he was a baker. We didn’t know how to run a business as such, we just knew good pizza.

It was a hectic few years before we got the distributor. We were basically divvying up different aspects of the business to keep it all going.

We would do the deliveries early each morning. I would do the south Dublin deliveries at 6am before I went to teach, and he would do the city centre and north Dublin areas.

Then at night time, after work, we would look after the accounting or whatever else needed to be done.

It was a hard slog, but at the time we didn’t have kids – the business was our child. Now we have three little kids, so the business is number four.

Breakthrough moments

One of the biggest moments for the business was after about seven years when we bought our own unit in Rathcoole. It’s big and Piero has been able to fit it out exactly as he needed it.

Since settling in, we’re trying to improve ourselves in other ways. The product is perfect, but we knew our packaging wasn’t completely right and our branding wasn’t great.

That’s what I have been working on for the past few years, so I’ve taken a career break. It felt like a big decision at the time, because I’ve always wanted to be a working mum.

I was very lucky that the senior management at my school in Booterstown were kind enough to allow me this time to support Piero full-time and stay at home with our children to manage the home at the same time.

My advice to anyone launching a business is not to be afraid to start small. Do your research and make sure you have the right product and you truly believe in your product.

Hopefully there would be a niche in the market, but be prepared to make those cold calls to start with.

We do the business plan every couple of years, but then we usually end up tweaking it.

Our goals for the medium term would be to add other ‘da Piero’ products such as salami, mozzarella and other sauces as toppings. We would also like to add additional pizza base products such as flatbreads and focaccia to our range in the future.

Our products are available in pockets of the country and a lot of the cities, but at the moment we are really trying to get the pizza bases out nationwide – and, if possible, Northern Ireland, depending on what way the sterling goes.

We were really hoping to get them across to the UK this year to a few good shops around London, but we’re biding our time.

Cliona Swan is the co-founder of Pizza da Piero. This article was written in conversation with Killian Woods as part of a series on unlikely entrepreneurs.

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