Hardware Podcasts

Ooni Pizza Ovens: Darina Garland and Kristian Tapaninaho

How I Built This · 7 Nov 2022 · 1h 09m

What this episode covers

Kristian Tapaninaho and Darina Garland, co-founders of Ooni, explain how they created a portable wood-fired pizza oven to solve the problem of home ovens not reaching high enough temperatures for authentic Neapolitan crust. They launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2012, raising £17,000, and faced early manufacturing challenges by finding a metal fabricator in Finland to produce the first units. The company scaled from a garage operation to a £200 million annual business, leveraging direct-to-consumer sales, community-driven marketing, and strategic pivots like renaming the brand from Uuni to Ooni to improve searchability and pronunciation.

Most relevant to

founders before launch, early-stage companies and companies scaling up

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Sukla, Coolhunting, Great.com, Scottish Edge, Scale Up Scotland
Products
Ooni, Uuni, UniStack
Also
AVPN

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