There’s a special place in our heart for those who help people create the perfect at-home pizza. That place has Gozney’s name on it.
Gozney, the UK’s leading maker of commercial and at-home pizza ovens, makes crafting restaurant-quality pies at home deliciously easy. Whilst innovating on the technology, the company also showcases the power of pizza to provide those memorable moments of community.
‘As a brand, we try to capture the spirit of what that experience is. It’s about discovery, it’s about creating something,’ says Chatham Baker, VP of brand marketing at Gozney. ‘It’s really amazing what food does in the world, to be the focal point that people can gather around.’
Pizza is all about bringing people together, and so is Slack — which is why Gozney’s dispersed teams use Slack to bolster efficiency, scale rapidly, and maintain seamless connection across the company.
Seamless cross-continental collaboration
Staying connected in Slack channels helps Gozney’s team members ideate, plan, and execute everything from social content to in-person events, all whilst fostering camaraderie and company culture.
Brooke Gulian is the global director of events at Gozney, managing roughly 70 events per year. For her, Slack is the key to facilitating frictionless communication across diverse departments, teams and time zones. ‘Planning an event requires so many different cross-functional teams. My events definitely run smoother with Slack,’ she says. ‘If they took Slack away at Gozney, I don’t know where we’d be!’
To maximise that efficiency, Gulian organises every event into its own Slack channel, then uses Slack canvases to provide all relevant stakeholders real-time visibility into project updates. Canvases allow her to take notes in a shareable, living document, without having to leave Slack.
Slack’s VIP feature also helps Gulian organise communications. Contacts marked as VIPs automatically receive a dedicated section at the top of her sidebar for unread messages, streamlining timely responses and reducing noise.
Janey Feller, a customer service specialist at Gozney, leverages Slack to swarm with internal teams, resolving customer issues at lightning speed and keeping customer satisfaction high.
‘I had a customer send in a photo of what they thought was rust on their oven and inquire about next steps,’ Feller recalls. ‘I threw the picture in a Slack channel, and [a co-worker who works on the product] jumped in, answered my question immediately, and told me what to do about it. It was a full-circle moment through Slack that reminded me we’re in this community together, that we are all on the same team to help our customers.’
Gozney’s product teams troubleshoot on Slack, too. For product manager Jordan Jones, Slack is invaluable for instant communication with designers, engineers, and manufacturers. ‘We can have a dialogue with either just one particular engineer who’s having an issue or the whole team, and the mobile app makes communication instant,’ Jones says. ‘Engineers and designers can share photos and videos through Slack — like during a packaging test — in real time. This allows for fast, direct communication with our manufacturing team, which results in quicker feedback and issue resolution.’
Although Slack serves as a stellar productivity tool, Baker also notes that Slack’s ease of use helps foster relationships and maintain the company’s authentically creative, collaborative culture (often with the help of emoji like the beloved party parrot). ‘We use Slack so conversationally that we’re able to stay true to the fun, good-humoured nature of our brand,’ he says.
Speeding up content approvals and onboarding processes
Speed means everything for a growing company. Just ask Rox Cooper-Costello, Gozney’s senior director of social media.
‘In just one day, I managed to get nine pieces of content reviewed and approved — all through Slack. The process relied on tools like canvases for collaborative reviews, huddles for real-time discussions, and emoji reactions for quick sign-offs, streamlining workflows and saving time,’ she says. ‘Last year, we put out 4,000 pieces of content across seven platforms, over 365 days, as a very small team. That wouldn’t have been possible without Slack.’
Baker, who needs to approve content from multiple teams without becoming a bottleneck, agrees. ‘By having Slack, we can organise things intuitively,’ he says. ‘That makes it faster for me to find content, approve it, and get out of their way.’
‘I work twice as fast because I have Slack,’ Gulian says. ‘The mobile app is especially useful for staying connected and getting real-time feedback, even when I’m on the go.’
Feller finds value in working at the speed of Slack, too. Being able to intuitively search through her team’s archival knowledge in Slack, she says, helped expedite her onboarding process on her first day of work.
‘Search is one of my favourite Slack features,’ she says. ‘If someone’s already had a conversation about a specific Gozney product in Slack, I can pull up that very conversation and find out when the product will be back in stock, all from typing in just one word.’
Slack’s search feature also helps Feller troubleshoot and quickly resolve customer issues. And now, with enterprise search, teams can instantly find information across all Slack channels and integrated third-party apps in one central hub.
‘Putting out 4,000 pieces of content a year as quite a small team means everyone is always spinning a lot of plates. We need a lot of clear communication to make it happen, and Slack really helps us to do that.’
Fewer meetings means more productivity
At Gozney, you won’t hear anyone say, ‘This meeting could’ve been an email.’ That’s because the company strategically implements Slack to eliminate unnecessary meetings, cultivating a culture that prioritises natural, real-time communication instead. The result? Team members reclaim their precious time and feel comfortable sharing ideas without the added pressure of a formal meeting. ‘It helps us build community. It helps us build connection. It helps us to do our jobs effectively,’ Cooper-Costello says.
As a manager, she prioritises all members of her team feeling that they have a voice. Slack huddles help her do just that by re-creating the quick, informal discussions they would typically have in an office, giving team members breathing room to express themselves authentically.
‘Slack is just a means for having a great conversation,’ Cooper-Costello says. ‘Whether you huddle somebody or you write it down, it breaks down the barrier of having to sit in front of someone to tell them, “I really think we could do this." It’s just a more approachable way of doing it.’
‘It’s as simple as, “Hey, I just wanted to run this thing past you." It doesn’t have to be a scheduled 30-minute meeting,’ she says. Anyone can start a huddle in a channel or direct message to work in real time alongside co-workers, with video, screen sharing capabilities, and emoji reactions.
Baker also notes that Slack drives a culture where, because communication is easy, employees feel at ease and inspired. ‘Being able to harness everybody’s strengths and interests in one place and create something better from that is really where you start to unlock things that haven’t been done before,’ he says.
‘Slack becomes a natural place for our inherent creativity to flourish.’
Integrated tools keep Gozney agile
Slack’s intuitive integration capabilities give Gozney another edge. By organising workloads and centralising processes, integrations help the company stay fleet-footed for rapid growth.
‘A lot of the tools that we use are integrated into Slack. We use a management tool called Lattice. I get reminders, goal setting notes, and roundups from my one-on-ones with people who I manage on Slack,’ Cooper-Costello says. ‘After I’ve had a meeting, Lattice will ping through to Slack and say: here are the notes and the action points from your meeting. That’s really helpful.’
Slack’s integrations reduce context switching, empowering better focus and efficiency. ‘I’m someone who perpetually exists with too many tabs open on my desktop, and so being able to just reference it all in one place and not have to jump between multiple programmes helps make everything a bit more efficient,’ Cooper-Costello says, adding that it’s possible to complete entire tasks without ever leaving the Slack app.
‘When I need a programme like Wrike, I can find it in Slack. When I want to have a quick glance at what our customers are saying about us on Trustpilot, I can find it in Slack. And when I want to know if people are in a meeting, I can also find that in Slack!’
While Gozney brings people together through the power of pizza, the Slack team is thrilled to be the secret ingredient that helps the company fire up collaboration and connection — one message (and pizza) at a time.
