Success for Sussex entrepreneurs’ pizza van business: owners of Crawley Down based company hope to inspire other young people

Harry Meer-Sipkoski, now 24, and his brother Charlie, 21, made the bold decision to buy The Pizza Post in July 2020 after the previous owners decided to dissolve it.

Aged just 22 at the time, Harry quit his job as a sales manager to go into business with the then 19-year-old Charlie.

Harry told the Middy: “It was quite scary at the beginning because it was new, untapped territory for us.”

He said they had both cooked pizzas for the company as teenagers but had no actual experience of running a business. In fact, Harry said many people advised them not to purchase it because of the risk involved.

But the duo’s version of The Pizza Post, based in Crawley Down, which started life in their parents’ garage, has proved a success. This year alone Harry reckons they have cooked more than 100,000 pizzas and attended more than 1,000 events.

“We’ve had quite a few big highlights and one of them was a prestigious event for a very well known person,” said Harry. “There were lots of celebrities there and it was a very ‘behind closed doors’ wedding.”

He said some of the celebrities the business has catered for include Leonardo di Caprio, Rihanna and Adele and the company has worked for Tesla, Amazon, Netflix and Warner Bros.

The Pizza Post now has six pizza vans and one burger van (having started with just two vehicles) and has many events like Goodwood’s Festival of Speed booked for next year.

“During the summer we had our peak staff,” said Harry. “I think we had about 45-50 staff members.”

Harry said business was slow and stressful in 2020, with Covid restrictions making many events impossible. But, certain lockdown would end, the brothers started learning about marketing strategies and made themselves known in the area.

He said: “We very much liked the hustle and the hard work. In that sense it was exciting because it was starting something from scratch and we had to come up with creative ideas.”

He added: “We were very sure that at some point is was going to boom and we were just waiting for that moment when it did.”

The pair did a few parties towards the end of 2020 before restrictions were reintroduced in January 2021. Then once society properly opened up business picked up rapidly, so they bought more vans and moved into a warehouse.

Harry said The Pizza Post is a ‘family orientated business’, which he feels is better than a standard corporate environment.

He said: “Our mum works for us, our dad works for us, our sister works for us, our cousin has worked for us and then I employed close friends of mine to work with me as well.”

Both Harry and Charlie now hope that their story inspires other young people as the UK fully comes out of the pandemic and enters into a likely recession.

He said: “I want to share this story to inspire the younger generation that they can do more and can achieve more.”

Visit thepizzapost.co.uk.