An old dog can indeed learn new tricks.
Just ask Lazy Dog Restaurants LLC founder and CEO Chris Simms.
One of the bright spots of the pandemic’s impact on the food business has been more innovation than ever before at Simms’ Costa mesa-based restaurant chain, and its latest launch may just take the cake for the Lazy Dog team this year: the launch of a virtual food concept called Jolene’s Wings & Beer.
The brand exists only online. There’s no dine in, only digital orders that are serviced by Lazy Dog kitchens and then sent out for delivery or pick-up by customers.
The business launched Nov. 11 across all 39 Lazy Dog restaurants in California, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Nevada, Virginia and Texas, and could expand from there if all goes well.
The idea is to further build out and expand upon a growing, younger customer base at Lazy Dog, which ranks No. 11 among the largest restaurant chains based in Orange County, with $213.3 million in 2019 revenue.
“From what we’ve seen over the last few years, our younger guests are really using us for happy hour and late night,” Simms said. “We sell a ton of wings during those periods and we connect with the younger crowd with those wings and through our beer. We said if we combine those two favorites into a mini brand, we feel we can connect with that younger audience even further and that’s really where the idea of Jolene’s was born.”
Quick Prep Time
It took about eight weeks to fully build out the business, from concept to branding to operations. That includes about a week-and-a-half of beta testing at the Lazy Dog restaurant in Brea—the go-to testing ground for the chain, which bears a test kitchen—and Cupertino, which typically yields a high volume of takeout and delivery.
Interestingly, the two doors in testing saw more takeout orders than delivery, but Simms ultimately expects delivery to account for most of Jolene’s business.
The menu is simple. Customers can order eight ($8.50) or 10 wings ($10.25), bone in or out, with a selection of sides and four different house beers created in partnership with Melvin Brewing from Alpine, Wyo.—the state where Lazy Dog got its start.
Simms expects the beer selection to expand over time.
“It is amazing how quickly we can put things together,” Simms said of what shelter-in-place orders have offered the team. “We’ve always prided ourselves on innovation, but I don’t think we’ve ever rolled out this many new products or sales drivers than this year. There was something about the pandemic that gave us the freedom to really innovate and try new things. If they didn’t work, they didn’t work.”
Iterating
Plenty’s turned out to work for Lazy Dog.
The Lazy Dog Pantry kits originally included toilet paper and other hard-to-find items at the start of the pandemic.
Those efforts, as well as initiatives like bringing food to front-line workers in the first months of COVID, earned Simms a nod from the Business Journal as one of the OC 50: 50 Making a Difference honorees in May.
The company’s efforts would later evolve into meal kits for at-home use. More recently, there was a turn to nostalgia with the rollout of TV dinners.
While Jolene’s took all of about two months to conceive, Lazy Dog, by comparison, was in development for a few years. Simms was largely a team of one with the latter. Jolene’s benefits from the expertise of the Lazy Dog team—from culinary and R&D to tech and marketing. Simms’ cousin Rebecca Simms is chief creative officer and handled all the slick creative that’s been pushed out in lockstep with the product releases.
Creating a Brand
The wings concept comes at an interesting time as COVID has nudged brands that had not already invested heavily in technology to take the leap in order to enable things like online ordering, while other operators accelerated the rollout of technologies originally planned for a later time.
With the tepid attitude toward dining out and Orange County’s latest move into a more restrictive tier for restaurant operators, delivery and takeout have helped the industry stay afloat. The emergence of the ghost kitchen has only ramped during this time to accommodate online’s growth. Simms said the model was considered for Jolene’s.
“We had two options [with Jolene’s],” he said. “The first is what you’re seeing out there right now where there are other companies that have come up with wing concepts, but they’re using stock photos. They don’t really have a brand identity and you can tell it’s just a ghost kitchen. We decided that was more of a temporary strategy. What we feel about Jolene’s is that if we spent the time to really create a quality brand, with its own photography and its own story and logo, we felt it would be just more Lazy Dog and the way we do things. It’s a brand that will stand the test of time and could continue on past COVID. That’s our goal.”
Adding Hours
With the fury of releases this year, it’ll help to bring the business back to what it was doing pre-COVID, but it will not offset the losses of this year.
“Unfortunately, those losses are real,” Simms said. “There’s a lot of restaurants suffering out there across the country as restaurant dining rooms close. Some of them open back up, and then close. The sad part about it is it really hurts the hourly team members. Those groups are the ones that suffer the most because without a dining room, you just don’t have as many shifts, so while we feel good about the stability of Lazy Dog because of this innovation we still would love to get more dining rooms open so we can give more hours to our team members.”
The jury’s still out on how large the Jolene’s business could grow to, but Simms is optimistic about its potential.
“There’s a lot of people eating wings these days and a lot of people offering wings,” he said. “I believe with our innovation and house beer program being a part of Jolene’s, we can take a nice little chunk of that [market].”
What’s in a Name?
There’s a story, and a few road-trips, behind how Jolene’s got its name. No, Dolly Parton’s not involved, said Chris Simms.
“About a year-and-a-half ago, we bought an old GMC RV. Our thought was because a lot of the nostalgia that comes with the Lazy Dog brand comes from those family trips that people have gone on to national parks or to visit family. Everybody hops in the car or in an RV, especially nowadays. We said what better way to remind people of those fun times with the family than to buy our own RV. As we were trying to figure out what to call her, the name Jolene came up.”
“The original reason we bought it was we wanted to celebrate our beer club membership releases. So the goal was to have Jolene [the RV] be a part of those membership releases. So it would show up to a restaurant and we’d hand out free merch and beer samples. It’s really a celebration vehicle.”
Fast forward another year, and “we’ve got the RV,” Simms said. “It’s been out and about going to restaurants, seeing the sites, and we decided why don’t we call [this wings concept] Jolene’s after the RV?”
