Belles Hot Chicken: Trailblazing the Brand Experience to Become More Than Your Average Diner
After opening in Fitzroy, Melbourne, in 2014, Belles Hot Chicken has grown from a local favourite to a multi-venue, multi-city mainstay renowned for its crave-worthy chicken, extensive alcohol list, banging tunes and party vibes.
From curated playlists to bespoke menu design and hiring a like-minded team, it’s taken a lot for Belles Hot Chicken to perfect their unique in-venue experience.
In this episode of Raw, we sit down with Joss Jenner-Leuthart, Managing Director of Belles Hot Chicken, to discuss the importance of finessing the details and focusing on the experience when building an iconic brand.
Reimagining the traditional diner
When asked to describe Belles Hot Chicken, Joss simply says it’s a hot chicken diner. But, at the same time, it’s also so much more.
“Calling Belles anything, it’s a hot chicken diner. Hot chicken being the product. Diner being the feeling… But if I was to say to someone, Belles is a hot chicken diner. What does that really mean? That’s the more challenging question.”
While at its rudimentary core Belles is a diner, as soon as you step inside, it’s immediately apparent that there’s a whole lot more to Belles than your traditional diner joint. And Joss believes that’s the beauty of it – Belles is hard to define; it doesn’t necessarily fit into one box.
“I think Belles rides that line between diner, restaurant, bar, block party, takeaway and chicken joint.”
Making it special but keeping it simple
Joss believes it’s relatively straightforward to recreate the traditional American diner experience, as you simply replicate what already exists. However, the real challenge is taking the blueprint of a classic diner and reimagining it into something more unique that stands out from the crowd and appeals to the Australian market.
“If you take the American diner model to Australia, we’re very different from Americans. I think that means that what we try and create at Belles is a very special, very considered, very layered, but completely unassuming.”
Belles aim to offer an effortlessly simple yet unique dining experience. And Joss believes that if customers feel too much effort has been put into creating each Belles venue, they’ve failed in their mission.
“The simplicity of what we try and deliver, behind it are all these one-percenters that add up to be something really special for people, but on the surface is really simple.”
“If people walk in and they feel like, man, these guys have really tried hard to make this work, f**k that. It would be a total failure in the interpretation of a customer’s feeling.”
“So I think it’s an easy thing to do to create a diner. I think it’s a real challenge to do something and evolve it and keep it consistent and give it a way of being.”
Evolving the brand
Joss first joined Belles with a mission to evolve the brand. From the outset, he knew that the fundaments were there irrespective of where the brand was from a market positioning or a profitability perspective.
And for Joss, the main fundamental in evolving the brand was the Belles team.
“The team had been there a really long time. There was amazing tenure, and they had that thing that you can’t tangibly value, which is just an absolute care and affinity with what they do in the brand.”
One of the first things Joss looked to do when starting at Belles was to understand what the team thought and get their perspective.
“I think lots of businesses create strategy at a group level or at a shareholder or board level, and you forget that actually, the person that knows more about that business every day is actually the person that works on the floor full-time.”
By taking the time to really understand what the team thought and what had worked in the past and what hadn’t, Joss was able to get to grips with how to evolve the brand.
“What made me excited to go on the journey with Belles was actually taking on board all of the things that they learned that were great and the things that were s**t.”
“Because our failures are our best ways of building and making really great decisions going forward.”
Experience matters
Excellent food and a great customer experience are often instrumental in running a successful hospitality business. However, the longevity of a successful business always boils down to profitability. Without it, staying open or innovating to achieve growth is near impossible.
“In order for Belles to be a strong business you need to maximise your operating profit… No one can grow or do innovative stuff without profitability.”
So, Joss asked himself: how do we drive better profit to the business?
The assumption he made was: as you improve the level of customer experience, the perceived value of the whole experience increases.
“We’re not competing on price… What we wanted to do was compete on experience… We need to start giving people more.”
The finer details
On a surface level, enhancing the in-venue experience can seem challenging for a diner. You’ve got your tables, chairs, menus, and not much else to play with. However, Joss believes so many finer details can be finessed to enhance the experience.
“As you start to peel back, there’s so many one percenters. We’ve got, for example, a scalloped menu. That sounds weird, but it’s a menu that’s got a scallop edge… What we wanted to do is redefine the expectation of coming into a space [like a diner].”
“If we increased the perception of what people were getting, how much could we play the dial of what the price point was?”
So, over several months, the team at Belles embarked on a journey to change the perception of the venues.
“We painted walls, we changed light fittings, we did lots of small stuff. We did the beverage list; we changed the water glasses out, we changed the service style. It was 100% table service… We’re going to look after you.”
Pricing perception
Once the finer details were in place, Joss and the team started to play with the engineering behind the sale price.
“So the classic biggest selling thing on Belles menu will always be a chicken sandwich. Back in the day, and this is only two years ago, it was only 12.50 or 13 bucks.”
“Now you buy a burger for 20 bucks or something. And so the conversation internally about that was, what do you think this [experience] is really worth?”
Imagine this. When you walk into Belles, you have someone come over to look after you, they chat about the house beer and beverage options, there’s an awesome curated playlist, the team are on hand when you need something, your water’s on the table, and it’s topped up for you, and there are other quirky elements to the brand.
“What’s all that worth if you’re eating that sandwich? And that’s how we started to play with [the price].”
Playing with menu pricing can be a fine balancing act. However, Joss believes that Belles has found the sweet spot between remaining profitable and offering a fair price to the customer.
“We can continue to invest and make the experiences better, but also ensure that at no stage, any one stakeholder, if you think of our team being one, a customer being another, or ourselves as shareholders – no one feels like anyone’s been ripped off.”
More than just good food
While Belles delicious food plays a huge role in its cult following, so do all the little brand details that make Belles Hot Chicken the powerhouse it is today. And part of that is making the Belles brand experience about more than just the food.
“I call them brand extensions, and part of the original philosophy was we’re charging more for these things that we deem part of the brand experience that you get at Belles; what happens if you package them up?”
“So I think the first one we did was Belles Hot Radio. It just sounded cool.”
With the soul of Belles inspired by Nashville in the sixties and seventies, music has always been a vital part of the experience. With this in mind, the team partnered with a DJ to curate the perfect playlist that epitomised the Belles Hot Chicken experience.
“We reached out to a whole bunch of people that we thought were cool… Can you put some music together that you’d eat with chicken? And that was the Spotify edition of it.”
The next step was to evolve away from a Spotify playlist to something even more unique. Over the course of six months, Belles teamed up with a DJ in Paris, DJ Etienne, to perfect the music experience in each venue.
“So every Belles at every moment will be listening to the exact same track at the same time. Because we’ve got a streaming service out of Paris… The evolution for that, we are pretty excited by bringing that in front of customers and also doing live sets in-venue going forward.”
Perfectly imperfect
Joss and the team at Belles aren’t striving for perfection. When it comes to Belles food and venues, Joss doesn’t want customers to feel like everything is flawless – it’s just not the brand’s vibe.
“If everything’s very refined it goes against the ethos of Belles, which is everything’s kind of ugly.”
“Like a chicken thigh is not a great-looking piece of food, you know? So you kind of celebrate the ugliness. There’s beauty in the ugliness.”
Instead, Belles has a philosophy, as Joss puts it, of never looking to attain perfection. He believes that when a venue wants to endlessly refine, you get to a point where you’ve made something too pretty and too perfect. And as a result, people may feel restricted in what they can wear and how they can act.
“It just doesn’t feel like a space that people can be themselves… Whereas for Belles, I want people to go, I can wear whatever I wanna wear… and the environment enables people to just be themselves.”
“We spend an untold amount of time and energy and passion designing our venues and putting so much thought into what will appear very simple for exactly that one reason.”
“It’s that people walk in and just feel comfortable.”
Listen to Raw Podcast
Listen to Joss’s full interview on not apologising for making delicious fried chicken.
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