Tue 27th Jan 2015 - PizzaLuxe seeks £500,000 funding on Crowdcube PizzaLuxe seeks £500,000 funding on Crowdcube: PizzaLuxe, the pizza business founded by former Epicurean Holdings owner and Harrods director of restaurants Paul Goodale and Maze executive Laura Pabon, is seeking to raise £500,000 in return for 19% of its equity through crowdfunding platform Crowdcube. The company, which has two sites, is set to turn over £958,810 in the year to March 2015, producing Ebitda of £101,264 and pre-tax profit of £51,264. Its financial plan forecasts turnover of £4,917,438 by March 2018, producing Ebitda of £614,137 and pre-tax profit of £375,137. The company plans to grow by ten sites over five years and forecasts a multiple return of 25 times on original investment. The pitch states: “The idea for PizzaLuxe was first born back in 2010 from a desire to see how good we could make our own pizza. It took Laura 8 months to find the right market to sell her much-loved pizza – we finally found the spot on a site in Brick lane. With the confidence taken from the first site, we were approached by Westfield about opening a permanent site in spring 2011. Building work started late Summer 2011 and after a few weeks of barely any sleep we finally opened our doors for trading on 6 October 2011. PizzaLuxe Westfield Stratford city is located at the chestnut Plaza, a cluster of restaurants within the lifestyle street. The restaurant was on the main route through to the 2012 Olympic Park and originally measured 824 sq. ft. gross, with a 40 cover external terrace. We felt early on that we needed to expand to meet the demands of our business, so, less than a year later we developed plans to convert the existing space to include another floor. Shortly after celebrating our one-year anniversary at Westfield we opened our second site at Trinity Kitchen Leeds, some 200 miles away from the original Westfield Store. Now, we have gone back to our roots and have completed on our third site in the heart of Shoreditch. We are due to open this flagship store in Spring 2015. We are also planning on renovating the existing site at Westfield and are due to begin works in March 2015. We believe that PizzaLuxe is ideally suited to non-traditional travel-hub and mall/retail environments. This is largely due to centralized production potential and no requirement for store mechanical extract. This combined with small footprint (circa 100-150 sq ft) and low capital intensity could provide for a significant Take & Bake and/or Heat & serve business with up to 50 openings per year over three years 2015-2017. The thin-crust, slow-proven dough combined with distinctive gourmet toppings and striking packaging are designed to deliver a product with impactful visual merchandising within the pizza category of a supermarket/food store retail range. Charlie Bigham has created a £20m business from elevating the “ordinary” of chilled prepared meals to something more considered. We believe that the same opportunity presently exists within the UK pizza category. The same product could be offered hot in environments such as airports and train stations, where low impact ovens could regenerate these pre-packed products, as was originally achieved in the Brick Lane market stall where PizzaLuxe originated back in 2010. £500,000 of investment will provide for two new openings during 2015, which will be targeted in Shoreditch (opening Spring 15) and a Central London food destination (HalfTwo2015). Subject to the introduction of debt to the business post-fundraising, further core store openings are shown in the financial projections to take the estate to 12 units in five years. The reinvestment in an extended, refurbished Westfield Stratford store with a new five-year lease will also be taken from these funds at the start of the capex cycle in H1 2015.”