How a 27-year-old entrepreneur built a pretzel empire

Brittany Garbutt’s Pretzel business didn’t stop growing during the pandemic. Despite public health restrictions disrupting the hospitality industry, Pretzel opened stores in Fremantle and Westfield Doncaster in 2020, before opening at Westfield Knox in March this year. Those three new additions grew the Pretzel network to a total of eight outlets, which turn over a combined $5 million in revenue a year.

In four years, Pretzel brand has grown to sell an average of 650,000 pretzels a year and employ more than 150 staff. Driving such rapid success is its 27-year-old founder, Brittany Garbutt, and her eye for branding, which has helped create a scalable business centred around a simple product.

Sweet and savoury pretzels

Pretzel sells 16 types of pretzels, including those with savoury toppings like cheese and pepperoni, as well as sweeter flavours such as coconut rough or cinnamon. Prices range from $5.00 to $7.50. And for fans of the large doughy knots, there’s merchandise for sale.

Source: supplied.

All the stores have a pink and white colour scheme, and Garbutt has designed a unique theme for each shop fitting. Pretzel at Westfield Doncaster is Tokyo themed, while the Chapel Street store is inspired by the Netflix series Bates Motel. These playful designs steeped in pop culture have helped attract the business’ target market of young adults.

Pretzel has steadily grown since Garbutt founded it in 2017. At the age of 23, she opened her first store in a shipping container in Northbridge, Perth and went on to open her second store just six months later. However, Garbutt says it was the third store that made her realise how much potential the business had. Pretzel opened in Westfield Carousel in 2018, and recorded revenue of $1.2 million in its first year.

“That was the turning point of it being a little project and then becoming a full-scale brand,” Garbutt says.

There are now eight stores in a range of shopping centres and high streets across Victoria and Western Australia. This year, Garbutt will open Pretzel at Westfield Eastland in July, ahead of Pretzel at Curtin University in December.

Garbutt first learnt to make pretzels working for a family-owned pretzel business as a teenager. After the owners retired, she couldn’t find similar pretzels anywhere and decided to bake her own. Putting her degree in branding and design to use, she conceived Pretzel, opening the first store using only savings.

“I worked 19 hours a day, around the clock in that store,” she says. “I made all the pretzels myself just to ensure the training was correct and the business was off on the right foot.”

In many ways Garbutt says “it was awful” but at the six months mark, when she signed her second contract in 2017, she managed to take a break.

“I actually left the business at the end of that year, and I started working on the business instead of in the business,” she says.

Create a youthful culture

Pretzel’s target market includes adults aged 18 to 24, which is the same age group as most of its staff. The business employs 167 people across Western Australia and Victoria and has a simple management structure.

Garbutt is the sole owner and external manager of all the stores. She also has a Victorian state manager, and then each store has a supervisor. “I basically put a lot of faith and responsibility in the hands of people who I think have always been asking for it,” she says.

The supervisors are almost all staff elected, which prevents conflict between team members and helps create a friendly atmosphere. “It’s generally quite team bred,” Garbutt says.

Duties are divided so that supervisors are responsible for overseeing daily operations, some office duties and rostering. However, Garbutt manages recruitment and admits she still checks over the rosters. “The staff are very young but I think a lot of the time they’re very driven and eager, and have new ideas,” she says. “I was 23 when I started so it’s a bit of an ethos about the company.”

Garbutt attributes Pretzel’s ability to function well across so many sites because of its team culture. Founding the business at 23 years of age and hiring a young team has led to a youthful culture where staff are encouraged to “work hard and play hard”.

“I really focused on making sure the environment was fun for them, that they got to make friends, have a good time and be keen about doing their job,” she says.

Find reliable people

While Garbutt no longer needs to be physically present in the stores, she still works long hours doing administrative tasks. Managing a large workload has taught her what she can do herself and what she should outsource. Despite being a trained graphic designer, Garbutt says she now pays a brand designer to meet the business’ marketing needs.

“Unfortunately, that was one of the parts of my job that was the first to go,” she says. Bookkeeping was also something she quickly outsourced. “For those things, I can find reliable people who I know who can help to execute, and I don’t have to run up to a computer and do it myself,” she says.

Pretzel has a range of systems in place to help streamline administrative processes. Staff use apps to simplify rostering, organise timeslips and manage invoices. For example, regular employees are required to digitally record their hours worked on a timesheet app, so Garbutt doesn’t have to spend hours sorting through paper forms. “We also use a system called Dext, so every time our staff members get a receipt, they take a photo of it and it uploads automatically to our accounting software,” she says.

In spite of Garbutt’s efforts to reduce her workload, she says she still works more than a standard 38-hour week. “I pretty much work 24/7 and I think any business owner would know it’s kind of what you sign up for,” she says.

Although, she admits her team would be more than capable of taking on additional responsibility if she made greater effort to reduce her hours. “It’s just that I am so involved in it and it’s difficult for me to step back personally,” she says. “But you do have to learn to run on a high-octane type of environment and not be upset by things.”

Develop a property strategy

Pretzel has a deliberate property strategy that includes opening small, compact shops located on busy high streets or in large shopping centres. “I love busy high streets,” Garbutt says. “I really see the value in a high street, but they can be quite temperamental.” Garbutt has found that high streets, while great for late night trading because of their active nightlife, are often quiet during the day. To lessen the impact of such varying trade, Garbutt pairs her stores together. “For instance, Northbridge and Whitford, they’re a pair,” she says. “They’re quite close, so we share staff members.”

By creating pairs of stores, Garbutt can ensure that at any given hour one of the two stores will be busy. “So, we’ll pump out a couple of thousands of dollars an hour worth of pretzels at Northbridge at 2am when Whitford is closed. But Whitford will be killing it on a Saturday when Northbridge is a bit quieter,” she explains.

Garbutt is also strategic with her choice of shopping centres, saying she avoids opening stores inside old-fashioned malls. “We only go into a Westfield or one of those kinds of shopping centres if there’s some really great development, branding or design,” she says. “You won’t generally find us popped up in a kiosk location in an old centre but you will definitely find us in a sparkling new, well designed, complex.”

One key disadvantage of shopping centres, Garbut says, is that they impose more restrictions on building guidelines. For example, Garbutt would like to put each shop in a shipping container but that’s not always feasible. “Containers are my ideal situation,” she says. “But sometimes it’s just not possible, particularly in shopping centres because they’re sight lined and you can block the sight side of another company.” To get around those limitations, she always represents the shipping container in her stores’ designs. “Generally, they’re still just a shipping container sitting inside a fit out,” she adds.

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Garbutt designs all the stores herself and then hires a drafting company to “help with the nuts and bolts of it”. And she takes pride in making each store unique through its theme, which has generated a lot of interest from some customers. “We have a really large number of people who will travel to multiple Pretzels regardless of their location just to see the different fit outs,” she says. “It’s really important to me that my business isn’t the same over, and over again.”

Asked how she comes up with original themes, Garbutt says “it literally just depends on what the heck I’m up to”. She explains that she designed the Tokyo-themed shop in Doncaster during coronavirus while she was missing the opportunity to travel to Japan. “I go every single year but I didn’t get to go because of coronavirus. So, I made myself a Tokyo themed store,” she says.

Open in places you know

Opening additional stores and increasing revenue has allowed Pretzel to become more ambitious with its growth strategy. “The more Pretzels we get the more mistakes I can make,” Garbutt says.

While Garbutt has a financial advisor who can help her plan the details of opening new stores, she says it’s still something she likes to do herself. “I have my accountants, but I find that I do work better when I’m the one making the decisions.”

Ultimately, Garbutt says it’s important for business owners to be capable of doing the research and planning themselves before entering into significant financial agreements. “If I’m not comfortable with it and can’t do the math or research myself then I probably shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” she explains.

The most crucial lesson that opening eight stores has taught her, Garbutt says, is to first get to know the area. It’s an imperative she recommends any expanding business consider. “I’m very lucky that some of the sweeping suggestions I made to myself about Victoria were right. But I should have spent more time in Victoria staying in the places I wanted to put my stores,” she says.

For example, Garbutt says she found significant cultural differences between staff in Melbourne compared to Perth, which took her some time to get used to. “If you’re at that stage where you have a few stores and you want to get to the seven or eight range, it’s important to know every single one of your stores,” she says.

“Know what you’re getting yourself into.”