Meet Shawn Lalehzarian, founder of The Red Chickz.
Shawn founded his LA-based Nashville hot chicken concept in 2018. Before that, he spent 20 years in hospitality and helped to operate or launch more than 80 restaurants in the U.S. and Canada.
After three years of growth, The Red Chickz recently announced its plans to franchise. The brand’s success has been driven — at least in part — by the splash it’s made on social media. The Red Chickz is nothing of short of a TikTok sensation, with almost 900,000 followers and 17.6 million likes (and counting!).
Shawn recently sat down with Kickfin to talk about the concept, their franchising push, and of course, their rapid rise to TikTok stardom. Plus: he shared his top tips for other restaurant teams looking to achieve social media success.
First things first: How did The Red Chickz get its start?
We did a lot of market research. Nashville hot chicken was already popular, but there wasn’t a hot chicken concept in downtown LA back in 2017/2018. We felt it was the right move at the right time, but we wanted to do it authentically.
So my team and I flew to Nashville for two weeks. We asked everyone — from our Uber drivers to our hotel bellmen to the people we went out with — if they knew anyone who knew how to make hot chicken. A few folks introduced us to family members with their own homemade recipes, so we got to see different versions of it.
It turned out that one of our Uber drivers had a cousin who actually owned a hot chicken restaurant, and we spent the whole day there. Back of house, front of house. They taught us everything from scratch.
We brought what we learned back to LA, added our own touch to make it really unique, and opened in December 2018. We’ve got one location downtown and another under construction in Culver City.
What are your franchising goals?
We always knew we’d expand the concept, but franchising wasn’t originally part of the conversation. We envisioned opening 10-20 locations ourselves, so everything we did from the start, we did it in a way that would be scalable and easy to replicate.
But there was a particular review that sparked this idea to franchise. This guy compared our concept to a large fast-food chain (which will remain nameless here) — and I’m sure he didn’t mean it in the nicest way. That part made me laugh, but then it got me thinking: what if we really did become a giant in the industry?
And now, here we are. Our goal is to go nationwide. We’re starting now with four states: California, Nevada, Arizona and Texas. Then we’ll continue to expand our territory.
Now, for what everyone’s dying to know: Tell us about your rise to social media stardom.
The Red Chickz started out on Instagram like everyone else, and we also joined TikTok. It was relatively early for that platform — in 2018/2019, TikTok wasn’t nearly as popular as it is today.
It took us 6-8 months to get to about 15,000 TikTok followers. Then once we hit 17,000, it just went crazy. If I’m not mistaken, we’re still gaining about 10,000-15,000 followers a week. Our Instagram does well too, but TikTok has completely taken off.
How did you decide that social media would be a key channel for the brand?
I’ve been in the restaurant business for a long time, and I’ve learned a lot about marketing. We knew with the kind of expansion we had in mind, old-school marketing wouldn’t give us the growth we were looking for.
We needed to get in front of people, and we believed that digital marketing — specifically, social media — was the key to getting our product out there fast. You don’t have to wait for print, you don’t have to wait for approvals. It’s immediate.
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♬ original sound - TheRedChickz
Why do you think you’ve gotten so…TikTok famous?
From the beginning, we had a dedicated social media team. Throughout the years, I’ve learned that in this industry, if you want something done right, you have to invest in people who have the talent for it. I can’t do everything by myself, or even with two or three people. You need the talent and the team to take it to the next level.
Our success also has everything to do with quality of content. Anyone can grab a phone and shoot a video, but it takes a lot more thought to build content people will actually engage with. What you’re shooting, the angle you choose, the length of the post — it all matters.
How do you decide what you’ll post, and what’s the process for getting content out the door?
If you look at our account, our content is pretty much all about what we do and what we serve. Our team is really talented as far as how they capture it and put it together. We’re at the stage right now where pretty much everything we put out is a hit. The amount of love we get from TikTok is really amazing.
With that being said, there’s strategy behind everything we do. We’ve got weekly or biweekly meetings with our marketing and social media teams where we decide what we’re going to be putting out there. While I’m not producing the content myself, I’m absolutely a part of it. I brainstorm, I bring crazy ideas to the table.
I don’t approve every piece of content that goes out — I want my team to stay creative and use their talent — but I do think it’s important to have everyone involved, so we’re working together to deliver a consistent message to the world.
How do you deal with negative comments?
I check our social accounts and review sites on a daily basis, and fortunately, we don’t get a ton of negative comments. But we do get some. With almost 900,000 followers, the expectation is that not everyone will like everything you post, and that’s fine.
When you get thousands of comments every day — good or bad — it’s impossible to respond to everyone. But it’s interesting: As we’ve spent time monitoring comments, we’ve found that our fans are very vocal, and they’ll take it upon themselves to respond to negative commenters. We don’t even really need to get involved. Our fans will say how good the food is, they’ll start a conversation.
Of course, if there’s ever a major issue — if someone DMs us or brings something concerning to our attention — we’d respond and take care of it, no questions asked. But on a day-to-day basis, we’ve found we can just leave it to our fans. They’ll share their thoughts and feelings, and it will actually feel more authentic coming from them.
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♬ Red Light Green Light - DaBaby
Do you think your TikTok fame has directly contributed to the success of the business?
Definitely. Every day, we get people coming in the restaurant and telling us that it’s their first time, that they saw us on TikTok and just had to try it out. We’ll get a family who says their kids dragged them in after following us on social media.
It’s mostly locals, but about once a week, we’ll get someone in who tells us they drove from Phoenix, or Vegas, or San Jose — they’ve got no business in LA, they just wanted to try the food after seeing it on TikTok.
The Red Chickz has established a strong, cohesive brand. How does good branding play into social media performance?
I’ve come to the conclusion that with any concept or restaurant you create, it’s like you’re creating a human. You need to figure out who this person is. Describe your brand as you would a friend: What do they wear? What’s their personality? Where do they hang out? What car do they drive?
That can inform 90% of what you need to build out everything else: how you design the store, the menu, the logo; how you market it; where you take it.
For The Red Chickz, the brand is loud and exciting and fun — but there’s some sophistication to it, too. That all plays out across all of our channels and keeps it really consistent.
As you move to a franchise model, how do you see that impacting your social strategy?
Franchisees won’t be creating social accounts for their locations because we want to keep everything uniform.
But with that being said, we definitely want our franchisees to be involved and to contribute content. We’ll have guidelines they’ll follow as they produce it, and then they’ll pass everything along to our social media team. We’ll distribute everything through our single corporate page.
That way, all of our franchisees and locations are well represented, but we’re ensuring our standards are maintained and the overall brand isn’t changed or diluted.
What advice would you give to other restaurant teams that want to “go viral”?
Always be thinking ahead. Things change so fast. What’s the next trend? What’s the next big idea? How crazy can we get?
But above all, The Red Chickz has a very creative team that knows exactly what they’re doing, and we trust them. That’s what I’d tell anyone else: Find someone who has the talent for it and let them do their magic.
Interested in learning more about franchising with The Red Chickz? Email franchise@theredchickz.com.
