Pizza Unchained

The success of Domino’s, Papa John’s and the rest of Big Pizza has devastated mom-and-pop pie shops. Now Slice is helping the little guys unite, get online—and fight back.

- Amy Feldman

Ilir Sela likes to call himself “third-generation pizza”. A 38-year-old Albanian immigrant, his extended family has owned so many pizzerias he has trouble counting them all. So when he launched a business, in 2010, to offer independent pizzerias the technology to compete with the likes of Domino’s, Little Caesars, Papa John’s and Pizza Hut, the first thing he did was to sign up his brother in-law, his cousins and his friends.

Among them was Blerim Marku, the manager of Pizza Club in Edgewater, New Jersey, and a third cousin of Sela’s who grew up with him in the New York City area. At the time, Pizza Club was doing its takeout and delivery business by phone, the old-fashioned way, despite knowing that “Papa John’s and Domino’s were making a killing with ordering online,” Marku says. The problem was that small pizza shops weren’t tech-savvy enough to build custom online ordering systems, and digital aggregators like Grubhub and Seamless were far too expensive.

When Sela offered his cousin an inexpensive way to take orders digitally—a service he called MyPizza—Marku enlisted. The result: Pizza Club sales, which had been lukewarm, heated up, and Slice is now helping the shop do around $1 million a year, in line with a typical Domino’s location. “We needed it,” Marku says.

Today Pizza Club is one of more than 8,200 pizzerias in 2,200 cities and towns in every state across the country employing Sela’s pizza ordering platform, now rebranded as Slice. Backed by $20 million in financing, New York City-based Slice is growing fast. It processed about $100 million worth of deliveries last year. Forbes estimates that with expected orders of $250 million this year, Slice should produce $25 million in revenue.