By Charlie Pogacar
There’s a famous story about Amazon: The company didn’t turn a profit until it was in business for nearly a decade. That wasn’t really the point. Instead, the company focused on its “day one” philosophy, where it earned a share of the market and always put the customer first, trusting that if customers were happy, profit would follow.
You might not expect a pizza pop-up to operate the same way, but Karol Pryba is no ordinary businessman. Pryba, who grew up in Poland before relocating to England, is a pizza-making obsessive who decided to turn his hobby into a side gig. So far he’s kept his day job at a flooring company, but in 2024, he launched his pop-up business, Napolino Pizza, on the outskirts of London. When it came to setting his menu prices, unwittingly or not, he channeled his inner Jeff Bezos.
“I’m not an expert with customers, but I can put myself in the customer’s shoes very well, and I’m comfortable in trying to make customers happy,” Pryba recently told PMQ. “That part comes easy to me. So I thought, what do I want to see as a customer when I come to the market where I usually go? There’s a lot of regular [food vendors], and then there is a new pizza stand. What would be the price where I’d try out the new pizza place? So at the beginning, I made the price very low.”
Related: The Pivot: Navigating the Transition From Pop-Up to Brick-and-Mortar
Pryba put a Margherita on his menu for £7 (or about 9 American dollars). He figured that would be the right price to get a customer to check out a new food vendor, and he was right. Before long, he needed two Gozney Roccbox ovens to fulfill demand, cooking up to two dozen pizzas per hour. It’s entirely possible that Pryba was barely breaking even by selling pizza for £7, but he wasn’t worried about it in the early going. He figured that part would fall into place once he got some brand recognition under his belt.
“A few markets went by, customers were trying my pizza and loving it, and I realized I was way too cheap,” Pryba said. “So then I raised it to £8, and I realized it didn’t make a difference to people. So I raised it to £9, and I still didn’t see [a loss in sales].”
Pryba might graduate to £10 per Margherita soon—and it’s worth noting that his specialty pizzas sell for a bit more, as one would expect—but pricing is part of his journey learning the trade. For example, Pryba learned early on that one Gozney Roccbox simply wasn’t enough to manage the high-volume nature of the farmer’s market come lunch time. He found that each time a pizza cooked on the stone, it would cool the stone down ever so slightly. By purchasing and implementing a second Roccbox, he gave the stone proper lag time to return to the right temperature in order to create his delicious pizzas consistently.
Pryba also said he would not be able to pull off what he does without help from his fiancee, Sabrina, who takes orders at each market, allowing Pryba to focus on cooking the pizzas. “It would be impossible for me to stretch the pizza dough, put on all the ingredients, and also be taking orders at the same time,” Pryba said.
Pryba’s pizza-making journey began when he was a young, single man in his 20s trying to make ends meet. Pryba had recently relocated from Poland and landed a job at the flooring store and was finding thrifty ways to feed himself.
“I’ve tried making so many different things, as I’m a person who doesn’t really like to eat the same thing over and over again,” Pryba said. “So I was testing out and trying to do everything, basically. And pizza was one of those things. And then I tried it once, and I was like, oh, yeah, this is good. So I tried it again, and again, and I kept trying to get better at it each time.”
Pryba found himself drawn in by the community of pizza professionals. He loved the way people seemed to be able to take the hobby seriously while doing so in a laid-back fashion. He drew particular inspiration from Pizza Pilgrims, an English Neapolitan pizza brand, owned by two brothers, that has scaled to 24 locations since 2012.
“When I tried their pizza, I was blown away,” Pryba said. “It was the exact type of pizza I would like to be able to make at some point. They have a few branches in London, so each time I’d pass by one of them, the vibe there—you just see people in the kitchen, all these guys laughing, smiling, flipping pizzas, one after another—and I was like, this just feels like the vibe I’m going for. And at that point, I read about the company, and I was struck by the fact that they didn’t start a very long time ago. They weren’t 50 years old. And they’re not a whole lot older than me. It just made me feel like I could start this, too.”
Pryba is the first to admit he has a long way to go before he even opens one brick-and-mortar pizzeria. After focusing on establishing brand recognition last year at a single farmer’s market, this year he’s been planning a busier schedule where he’ll visit more markets around London. Even if his prices have risen a bit—and maybe they’ll need to be adjusted further—he believes that his philosophy of putting the customer first will pay long-term dividends.
“I think if you focus on customers and provide them with an experience and amazing flavors and have a good time, then everything else is just going to follow,” Pryba said. “Everything else will fall into place on its own.”
