LeBron James, Jay -Z, Guy Ritchie and the Beckham’s all have a Gozney pizza oven. Gordon Ramsay and Matty Matheson, amongst other leading chefs, recognise Gozney products for their superior design and amazing results. The man behind it all, Tom Gozney, despite his huge success, was humble, warm and open when we spoke to him about his unexpected route to CEO…
I was kicked out of school and became an alcoholic and drug addict.
I’m not a conventional learner: undiagnosed but probably ADHD and dyslexic. I just didn’t land in school and, as a teenager, I got involved in very heavy drinking and hard drugs. By the time I was 21, I was broken. When I tried to stop, it just got progressively worse. So I decided to get some help and ended up going into rehab in South Africa, where I spent almost a year in treatment. I’ve never drunk or used drugs again. I’m 19 years clean in February.
I first started cooking to socialise without jeopardising my sobriety.
Cooking for friends was my way to build community around my table at home. I found it almost meditative: put music on, zone out, chop vegetables and prep. I found it therapeutic, and it’s my way of sharing love with friends.
One evening we made pizzas; the rest is history.
I made dough for the four of us – my girlfriend, who is now my wife, and two friends. We rolled out our own doughballs and made pizzas for the first time. They were shocking, awful – we cooked them in the conventional oven and they were soggy and shit. The process of making them, though, was super-fun: wewere all covered in flour and laughing hysterically. That evening I told Laura I wanted to buy a pizza oven for the garden… but I looked online and they weren’t really a thing. The only ones you could buy were these Italian imports where you had to build a base and it was about £3000 for a kit. I was like, “I’m just going to research how to build one out of bricks.”
My first oven wasn’t pretty.
When the monstrosity of an oven I’d built finally worked for the first time, it cooked a pizza in a minute and I was mesmerised. It was the best I’d ever eaten. I showed my friends, who were also mesmerised when they saw this thing cook a pizza. The pizza oven just completely changed the social dynamic: people stopped bringing beers and started bringing toppings. It became the focal point of our social group. Pizza really changed my life. It was at such a foundational point in my recovery, and it was almost like intervention that this thing came along and gave me purpose.
The day the success of Gozney really landed with me was when we opened our Bournemouth offices.
We opened our offices about two years ago. Afterwards, my wife and I went to the car park and in the stairwell there were a group of guys using drugs… and I recognised a voice. He’d sponsored me in CA [Cocaine Anonymous] and looked after me for five years – he was this shining light in my life. I’d walked out of this amazing office – it was truly like a magical moment for us – and then I saw him. He had sunken eyes and was awfully unwell. I helped him get into rehab in Thailand. He got clean, but on the first day out he relapsed and died. It was unbelievably sad.
I’ve lost lots of people close to me from addiction.
It’s a bizarre set of emotions because it’s deep sadness… and also an overwhelming feeling of gratitude for my life, my wife, my kids, my business – everything. And for myself, because I’ve been vigilant in protecting my recovery.
I’ve always loved food.
I love feeding people, and the creativity of building recipes and making stuff. It’s like the perfect world for me where I can design cooking products. I love products that can move people and change the way they live their lives, even if it’s one night a week and they have a pizza ritual where they connect with their kids. That’s magic to me.
I’m focused on Gozney products and I’ll never step away from design.
We’ve got an incredible design team, but I come up with all the new product innovation. Essentially I creatively direct the teams. I have a distinct vision for what I want to build: modern products rooted in where they’ve come from. I love the fact that our pizza ovens feel modern but are rooted in the heritage of Naples in their aesthetic.
Lifting weights and building stuff relaxes me.
I’m at my happiest when I’ve got in a regular cadence to go into the gym, doing weight training. I don’t do a ton of cardio – I like walking in the forest. I find the best way to unwind is doing what I loved doing before: making stuff. I’m not really on the ground any more doing that in the business, so I enjoy getting back to the basics at home.
AI allows me to slow down my thinking.
Using programs like ChatGPT lets me extract all my ideas from my head and collect them in a structured way. It’s been a gamechanger for me to be able to distil my thoughts into documents and capture stuff that way.
There’ll be no Gozney cooking app.
We’ve had opportunities to put Wi-Fi into our ovens, and I’m just flat-out saying no. Cooking is a visceral experience – we want people to put their phones down when they’re using our products. It’s about reconnecting with nature, with food, with people.
For more info see gozney.com
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