By Charlie Pogacar
When Emil Chiaberi bought Burattino Brick Oven Pizza, the pizzeria was struggling. It was, in Chiaberi’s own words, in a terrible location. The original shop, which is located in San Pedro, California—about 25 miles south of downtown Los Angeles—enjoyed almost zero organic foot traffic and wasn’t near any other businesses.
So how did Burattino go from less than $200,000 in annual sales to $1.5 million in about 18 months? It’s at least partially explained by Chiaberi’s radical approach to social media, where he methodically grew the restaurant’s following to 1.1 million followers on Instagram, 800,000-plus on Facebook and over 600,000 on TikTok. That’s not to say it was easy work: Chiaberi became completely absorbed by the journey, to the point where his own wife described him as “an Instagram-obsessed teenager.”
“I analyzed everything—every frame of every video, every caption, every word,” Chiaberi said. “If that sounds obsessive, it was. But it was also undeniably rewarding.”
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Direct Response Sales
Even in an industry full of colorful entrepreneurs, Emil Chiaberi stands out. Prior to ever even considering buying a pizzeria, Chiaberi founded a women’s supplement company, Amberen, and built it into a wildly successful business via direct response marketing on TV and the radio.
“One thing I didn’t know at the time,” Chiaberi said, “was that direct response has a 98% failure rate.”
In a short time frame, Chiaberi went from spending about $500 on direct response advertising per month to about $1 million dollars every month. He wrote his own radio commercials, seeking to forge an emotional connection with the middle-aged women he was targeting.
“Nobody sits at home and listens to the radio,” Chiaberi said. “So you’re targeting people who are distracted, and you have about 30 seconds to make your pitch. So you get 15 seconds to make an introduction and then 15 seconds for the call to action. Within that time frame you have to create a desire for the product and convert the person [into a buyer].”
These lessons in advertising would eventually help Chiaberi in his quest to reinvigorate a struggling pizzeria.
Good Pies, Warm Soda
Chiaberi sold Amberen for a nice payday. With more downtime, he became a customer at nearby Burattino and noticed how much the shop was struggling to forge an identity in a location that Pizza Hut had abandoned years before. “I always tell people, even Pizza Hut couldn’t make it work there,” Chiaberi said.
The one thing the pizzeria had going for it was that it served very good thin-crust pizza with a great deal of crunch. And there was a lot of low-hanging fruit that Chiaberi thought could be addressed in order to take it from a failing business to breaking even. One thing Chiaberi couldn’t stand was that the shop didn’t even have a fridge for its beverages—the former manager was content selling customers warm soda with their pizza. Even before Chiaberi bought the pizzeria, he was running across the street to buy ice for the shop so that he—and everyone else—could enjoy a cold beverage.
When Chiaberi heard through the grapevine that the pizzeria was up for sale, he thought, “What the hell?” and bought it mostly on a lark. He gave the former manager a small share in the business and let him run it with a few small tweaks. In his own words, Chiaberi largely used the place as a “personal social club” to hang out with friends. Nearly a year went by before Chiaberi, at the urging of his wife, began to take the business seriously.
“She said, ‘You know, this may be fun for you, but I’m doing the financials for this, and we’re paying taxes for it,'” Chiaberi recalled. “And she said, ‘Why don’t you try to do something with it? Because this isn’t working—we’re barely breaking even.’”
It’s All in the Crunch
As Chiaberi started looking into how to grow the business, he downloaded Instagram for the first time. He’d never been on the platform in his life. Surprisingly, he wasn’t too interested in what other pizzerias were doing on the social media platform—instead, he relied on his own marketing instincts.
“What I did was bring my direct response mindset to social media,” Chiaberi said. “In [direct response marketing] there’s a joke: There are 10 rules for success. The first nine are test. The tenth is analyze. That became my approach to social media.”
As Chiaberi began to analyze the posts that performed the best, he drilled down into two main selling points. One was that “it’s all in the crunch.” Any video he posted that displayed the crunchiness of the thin-crust pizza seemed to achieve maximum engagement.
The second thing was that people really, really like pepperoni pizza. Even today, the vast majority of Burattino’s posts feature a crunchy pepperoni pizza.
“In the early going, I thought you needed to blow people’s minds,” Chiaberi said. “I was creating these insane recipes with quail eggs and stuff like that. Looking back now, that was ridiculous because nobody cares if you’re putting quail eggs on pizza.”
120 Pepperoni
As Chiaberi’s marketing became more focused, he found little ways to differentiate the way Burattino was doing things—even if they were largely the same as everywhere else. The former manager (who no longer works at Burattino) made a pepperoni pizza that everyone seemed to like. Chiaberi asked the former manager to tell him what was unique about the pepperoni pizza beyond its enviable crunchiness. He learned that each pizza used between 125 and 130 pieces of pepperoni—and that was enough to send Chiaberi’s marketing brain into overdrive.
“I was like, why don’t we use 120 pieces on each pizza since ‘120 pepperoni’ rolls off the tongue,” Chiaberi said. “And then I moved to trademark that, and I have since trademarked both ‘120 Pepperoni’ and ‘Crunch, Baby, Crunch.’”
These core principles helped the legend of Burattino’s take off on social media. Chiaberi said Burattino’s regularly gets customers who travel from all over the country to try his Instagrammable pies.
Strategic Franchising
The fervor for Burattino’s pizza has led to growth beyond the San Pedro shop’s sales figures. Before Chiaberi opened locations in Carson and Huntington Beach, California, he worked with a friend to open up a shop in Toronto—some 2,500 miles away from Southern California. Even this move was conceived under Chiaberi’s “test-then-analyze” philosophy.
“To test how far we could take [the reputation of the brand], we opened a location in Toronto,” Chiaberi said. “Same result as the other locations—we had lines out the door from day one. It quickly became one of the most popular pizza spots in the city.”
Chiaberi said demand to franchise a Burattino’s location is now through the roof. But he’s nothing if not meticulous, and he does not want to franchise the brand with just anybody. For now, he’s committed to “growing carefully and strategically with a tight, dedicated group.” He’s also eyeing an entry into the frozen pizza market and has certain ideas about where the product would be the most successful.
But whatever the future of Burattino’s is, one thing is for sure: Its growth strategy will be a reflection of Chiaberi and his business mind and the way he uses social media. And if that’s the case, the sky is the limit.
“At the end of the day, social media isn’t just about posting content,” Chiaberi said. “It’s about testing, analyzing and truly understanding your audience. Most businesses miss that. They copy what works for others and hope for the best. But real success comes from building something unique—something that has its own soul. That’s what we did at Burattino. And we did it with an iPhone.”
