What's in a name?
Pay
€2.50 plus per product.
Find
Website Link. We're willing to bet not every visitor will be expecting a site selling pies.
Access Step free to takeaway counter. No seating.
In Short
Hopes. A Spanish pie shop? Really?
Reality. Six months at best, we fear.
First Impressions. Expensively decorated take away set up.
USP? Well you're not likely to forget the name, are you?
The offer in three words. Murcian-style pie packages.
Rating for dating. A good place to ask yourself; Willy or won't he?
Change one thing? A branding disaster of, frankly, enormous proportions. Missus.
Revisitability. Zero.
What's the story?
Quiet at the back. Welcome to Willy Factory. A - the? - textbook case in how not to start up a new project. We went. We spent. Deeeeeep breath, and in we go -
First, get yourself an undoubtedly expensive location on a street corner which, while undoubtedly having very high footfall, is on a street that's nothing like as exclusive as it once was.
Second, in an increasingly anglophone city, give yourself possibly the least self-aware branding imaginable. I dread to think what would happen if you Google Imaged the name at work. Safe search, please be on. British smutty mindedness aside, ignore bilingual sensibilities and ask why - how - anyone would associate a wooden bear face (yes, it's a bear...why?) called Willy (errr, why?) with puff pastry pies. I supposed we should be grateful Willy's a bear. Willy's not, thankfully, bare.
Bears? Pies?
I'm still not seeing it and I spent 25 minutes on a bus on the A6 today giving myself a headache trying. It's bear-faced cheek, probably. No? Pass the diazepam, someone. Anyhow, While I try to get some of whatever the marketing agency has been smoking, you can have the low-down on the food. Emphasis is on the low.
So, third. Yep, we're only up to third. It feels like so many more. It's not cheap. A 7 cm diameter pastry parcel - calling it a pie is pushing it so far, you're way over the cliff edge - will cost you between €2.50 and €3.50 a go. Portuguese tartas de crema half the size are often less than 70 cents in supermarkets, so what have these things, inspired by Murcian tradition, got that's worth another €2 of your money?
Bearly anything.
We tried Willy Clasico and Willy del Prado from the dozen plus options on offer, reheated at home following the instructions - see below. This needs about 15 minutes, as you have to use an oven. The packaging makes clear you should not put your Willy in a microwave. Advice which saved me from falling off the kitchen work top, if nothing else.
Apparently based around the traditional ingredients, Clasico, for €2.50, tasted mostly of greasy pastry, boiled egg and some nondescript meatiness that was supposed to be morcilla. Costing €1 more, Del Prado was sweeter and a touch beefier, but again, the grease and crunch won out over any distinctive filling flavourings. In the end, you're paying about €3 each for fairly bland, XL-size canapés.
Pricing, products, branding and home prep practicalities are asking too much in a market full of artisan snack sellers with more familiar products. If posh hot dogs can't always sell, what chance this? Food trucking at Mercados Motores, Productores and Lost & Found would have been a way of honing the product, testing the market and, probably, keeping someone off the credit blacklist. Perhaps they did. Perhaps it was a runaway success. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps not.
We feel for the staff. They're hoping for the best and the chance of a secure living. We wish them well, but it feels like there's little chance of this concept catching on.
As a business concept, we fear it's pie in the sky.
Pay
€2.50 plus per product.
Find
Website Link. We're willing to bet not every visitor will be expecting a site selling pies.
Access Step free to takeaway counter. No seating.
In Short
Hopes. A Spanish pie shop? Really?
Reality. Six months at best, we fear.
First Impressions. Expensively decorated take away set up.
USP? Well you're not likely to forget the name, are you?
The offer in three words. Murcian-style pie packages.
Rating for dating. A good place to ask yourself; Willy or won't he?
Change one thing? A branding disaster of, frankly, enormous proportions. Missus.
Revisitability. Zero.
What's the story?
Quiet at the back. Welcome to Willy Factory. A - the? - textbook case in how not to start up a new project. We went. We spent. Deeeeeep breath, and in we go -
First, get yourself an undoubtedly expensive location on a street corner which, while undoubtedly having very high footfall, is on a street that's nothing like as exclusive as it once was.
Second, in an increasingly anglophone city, give yourself possibly the least self-aware branding imaginable. I dread to think what would happen if you Google Imaged the name at work. Safe search, please be on. British smutty mindedness aside, ignore bilingual sensibilities and ask why - how - anyone would associate a wooden bear face (yes, it's a bear...why?) called Willy (errr, why?) with puff pastry pies. I supposed we should be grateful Willy's a bear. Willy's not, thankfully, bare.
Bears? Pies?
I'm still not seeing it and I spent 25 minutes on a bus on the A6 today giving myself a headache trying. It's bear-faced cheek, probably. No? Pass the diazepam, someone. Anyhow, While I try to get some of whatever the marketing agency has been smoking, you can have the low-down on the food. Emphasis is on the low.
So, third. Yep, we're only up to third. It feels like so many more. It's not cheap. A 7 cm diameter pastry parcel - calling it a pie is pushing it so far, you're way over the cliff edge - will cost you between €2.50 and €3.50 a go. Portuguese tartas de crema half the size are often less than 70 cents in supermarkets, so what have these things, inspired by Murcian tradition, got that's worth another €2 of your money?
Bearly anything.
We tried Willy Clasico and Willy del Prado from the dozen plus options on offer, reheated at home following the instructions - see below. This needs about 15 minutes, as you have to use an oven. The packaging makes clear you should not put your Willy in a microwave. Advice which saved me from falling off the kitchen work top, if nothing else.
Apparently based around the traditional ingredients, Clasico, for €2.50, tasted mostly of greasy pastry, boiled egg and some nondescript meatiness that was supposed to be morcilla. Costing €1 more, Del Prado was sweeter and a touch beefier, but again, the grease and crunch won out over any distinctive filling flavourings. In the end, you're paying about €3 each for fairly bland, XL-size canapés.
Pricing, products, branding and home prep practicalities are asking too much in a market full of artisan snack sellers with more familiar products. If posh hot dogs can't always sell, what chance this? Food trucking at Mercados Motores, Productores and Lost & Found would have been a way of honing the product, testing the market and, probably, keeping someone off the credit blacklist. Perhaps they did. Perhaps it was a runaway success. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps not.
We feel for the staff. They're hoping for the best and the chance of a secure living. We wish them well, but it feels like there's little chance of this concept catching on.
As a business concept, we fear it's pie in the sky.
