Giada De Laurentiis Transcript
Kerry Diamond:
Hi, everyone. You are listening to Radio Cherry Bombe, and I'm your host, Kerry Diamond. Coming to you from Newsstand Studios at Rockefeller Center in the heart of New York City. I'm the founder and editor of Cherry Bombe Magazine. For today's episode, we are airing highlights from a conversation I had with Giada De Laurentiis at this year's South by Southwest Conference in Austin. Giada and I cover a range of subjects, including family, food, entrepreneurship, all the things she's about. We also talk about her current project, Giadzy, the online hub for all things Giada. There are recipes, her Giadzy membership program, travel recommendations, everything you need to live La Dolce Vita, as Giada would say. We had a great time in Austin and even snuck in a meal at one of my favorite spots in the city, Chef Tracy Malechek's Birdie's. Stay tuned for my chat with Giada at South by Southwest.
If you are new to the world of Cherry Bombe, be sure to sign up for our newsletter over at cherrybombe.com. Get our free weekly newsletter and be in the know about all things Cherry Bombe, from our events to our print magazine. The link is in our show notes. Now let's check in with today's guest.
How are you today? I'm going to start with that before I start firing the questions at you. How are you? And welcome to South by.
Giada De Laurentiis:
I'm great. I've done the music portion of South by Southwest, but I've never done this portion, and it is a whole new world, totally different than the world I know, and I think that's the fun part.
Kerry Diamond:
Let's start talking about you and how this whole ride began. Don't want to start by talking about someone else because you are so accomplished, but I think we do have to talk about your grandfather and the legacy that is attached to his name. So tell us about him.
Giada De Laurentiis:
My grandfather was Dino De Laurentiis, and he was a movie producer. He made over 600 movies in 60 years. He started in Italy and then he continued in the US, and that's why my family moved to the US when I was seven years old. He brought all of the immediate family. We all follow the patriarch of the family in Europe or in Italy.
And so we all moved here, and he started making movies here, and I think the thing is, because he was a movie producer, nowadays we pay attention to directors and movie producers, but back in the '70s, '80s, and '90, only actors got that big sort of presence and notoriety, and I think people didn't know about movie producers so much, which is why I think when I started on Food Network, people had no idea what my name meant or what the legacy was, which actually was better for me because I felt like I could forge my own path, because I'd spent my life living up to somebody else's legacy, and that can be difficult. So this was actually an opportunity to do something on my own. He didn't do any TV. TV was not the thing. It was actually the reverse of doing the greatness. Movies were where it was at, and anything on television was seen as sort of less than.
Kerry Diamond:
We're going to mention some of the movies. “King Kong,” “Serpico,” the original “Dune,” “Blue Velvet.” I think he made over 600 movies in 60 years.
Giada De Laurentiis:
Over 600. Yeah, over 600 movies.
Kerry Diamond:
“Conan the Barbarian.” Just an incredible legacy.
Giada De Laurentiis:
And many were acclaimed. He did a lot of, “La Strada,” things that also got Academy Awards for foreign films.
Kerry Diamond:
Truly culture-defining films.
Giada De Laurentiis:
Culture-defining, yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
But along with that came a whole series of expectations for all the family members, but a certain set of expectations for the female family members. Tell us what was expected of you.
Giada De Laurentiis:
Nothing. Not much. I think it's just an old-school way, a very traditional Italian way of thinking, women, they get married and they have kids, and you help raise kids who become something. So not really a lot, and I think you can see that in two ways. You can see it as a disadvantage or an advantage. For me, I see it as an advantage because the males in my family, there was definitely an expectation, and you definitely had to meet it, and if you didn't, that was difficult. But for females, since there was no expectation, we kind of could do whatever we wanted. I mean, not without criticism along the way, but the doors were open to whatever because they didn't expect us to do much, so anything we accomplished was like, "Oh, yay." I think that was a benefit for me, at least from the type of person that I am.
Kerry Diamond:
For your grandfather, though, I think it boiled down to marriage, motherhood, or movies.
Giada De Laurentiis:
Correct.
Kerry Diamond:
And they tried to get you into the movie industry. How did that go?
Giada De Laurentiis:
Well, they did get me into the movie industry because we had no choice, and so I took different jobs in different departments of making movies, from being a PA for my aunt who was a producer, to working craft service, to making lunches for people, to set decorator, like all of those, but I basically just was a PA for everybody, to figure out if there was a department that I liked. Many of my siblings did go into it and found, like my sister did makeup for years. Everybody found a way. I did not like it. I loved food, though.
Kerry Diamond:
Now you were definitely a De Laurentiis rebel. No one in your family had gone to college. Most of them gravitated or were pushed into the movie industry. You decided you were going to go to college and really set your own path. How was that received?
Giada De Laurentiis:
My grandfather just finished elementary school, that's all, and so I think his feeling in college was that it was a waste of time and money because he created his own empire without really very much schooling. He felt like life is the true school, that's what really teaches you. The philosophy is a little different, and it's certainly they weren't going to invest it in a girl. They were going to invest it, if anybody, in all the males in the family. So when I wanted to go to college, the idea was, "Well, we're not going to pay for it. So you're going to have to figure out how you're going to pay for it."
You know, I've always been interested in gaining knowledge, and to me, I wouldn't be able to excel, in my mind, if I didn't go to college. I needed that extra support, that extra little piece, and I don't know if it's because I'm an immigrant and English was my second language for a long time and I felt like I need a leg up. I found it really important, and so I went. I also needed to find a path as to what really interested me. So yeah, I was the first to go to college, and I think my family was just sort of not unsupportive or discouraging but not that excited.
Kerry Diamond:
I think you had told one podcast interviewer that your parents thought it was merely a way not to get a real job for four years.
Giada De Laurentiis:
Well, because I got a bachelor's degree at UCLA, then I went to culinary school, and after culinary school, I was like, "I'm going to go to hotel school." That's my next thing. And of course, my family's like, "No, you're getting a job." And you have to also understand that I moved here and I flunked first grade. So I was always a couple of years behind because of the language barrier because my parents and my family would not allow English in the house. So it took me a little longer to figure out like, "Okay, if I'm going to speak English at school..." I wasn't catching on as quickly.
Kerry Diamond:
Flunking first grade is a tough setback.
Giada De Laurentiis:
It's a tough setback, and when you are so different, especially in the '70s, having a different name and a different culture and eating different food is not cool. It is not what it is today, where we accept people and we just cherish the difference between us and our heritages. That was not the case. It was very difficult, and it made me very insecure, I will say that.
Kerry Diamond:
You glossed over culinary school, but you went to Le Cordon Bleu. You go to Paris with the intention of kind of becoming the carb queen of LA at a time when no one was eating carbs in Los Angeles.
Giada De Laurentiis:
Well, I actually went to Paris because I love sweets and I love desserts, and I knew that France had the best pastry chefs in the world and, to me, the most beautiful pastries, and that's what I wanted to be. I also realized that I lived in LA and most probably was going to live in LA, and nobody eats desserts, at that time anyway, in LA, but I really wanted to cook French food. That to me was the elevated food, not Italian. I felt like I grew up with Italian food, so to me, that didn't make me feel like a chef. It didn't make me feel elevated or knowledgeable in the sense that I wanted.
Kerry Diamond:
So you come back to Los Angeles. Hotel school in Switzerland never happens.
Giada De Laurentiis:
No.
Kerry Diamond:
You start to work in food. You work in restaurants, food styling, and then Food & Wine Magazine calls you.
Giada De Laurentiis:
Yeah, so I started working for a French chef on the line, and I did that for a little bit for a couple of years. Then I worked for Wolfgang Puck at Spago for Sherry Yard, who did all of his pastries forever. And then on the side, because those restaurant jobs, they don't pay and you have no life, I started assisting some friends who were food stylists. From there, in that timeframe, 9/11 happened.
When 9/11 happened, I got a call a couple of months later about Food & Wine doing chefs and their family food. I was asked to put some recipes together and we would do a photo shoot for a February cover or something like that. I did that, and from there, Food Network called, and that's where the trajectory just started. And I truly believe 9/11 changed the way that Americans see home cooking. It went from them going out to eat in restaurants to bringing all of that knowledge, wanting that knowledge to entertain at home, and that's when the Food Network idea just exploded.
Kerry Diamond:
The Food Network wasn't in its infancy. Bobby's show was still fairly new, Emeril's show. Rachael had only joined maybe a year before you.
Giada De Laurentiis:
Yeah, or less, yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
Ina Garten had joined a year before you did. It was also television, and you came from a very prestigious film family.
Giada De Laurentiis:
And it was cable television, but in those days, cable television was like the lowest of the low. Who watches cable, and who watches food all day? I mean, my grandfather especially was like, "What are you doing? You're ruining our legacy. What is that?"
Kerry Diamond:
So with all of this in mind, what did you say to the Food Network?
Giada De Laurentiis:
"No." I just thought it was a scam, honestly. And-
Kerry Diamond:
How did they get you to say yes.
Giada De Laurentiis:
Persistent, they were very persistent. There was one gentleman in particular who ran all creative named Bob Tuschman, and he just hounded me day in and day out. And so he said to me, "Just put together a five-minute little reel. I mean, if you come from your background, that should be pretty darn easy." Now, it's easy to today with cell phones and we can shoot anything we want, but in those days, we didn't have the whole fat technology. So you needed a camera, you needed to know someone who could edit this stuff for you, so it was a little bit more time-consuming. So anyhow, I did it. My brother shot it for me. He worked in the movies, and he knew how to run a camera, and he had one. We did this short little video of making bechamel, which is one of my favorite pastas. I think it was like six minutes long. And we edited it, put some music on it, and that's how “Everyday Italian” was born.
Kerry Diamond:
So the show debuts. These are not my words, you have said this, you were not very good.
Giada De Laurentiis:
Awful. I was awful, yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
And you were shocked that the show wasn't canceled.
Giada De Laurentiis:
At the very beginning, I think it was dodgy, and in fact, I quit my day job, which was catering at the time. I think in those days, we just had more of an opportunity to have time to gain an audience. You know what I mean? They gave you more runway. It's much harder today. If you don't hit it out the door, then you're kind of done. But we had more time to refine it and just kind of build an audience. By season two, the audience was building.
Kerry Diamond:
When did you start to feel comfortable?
Giada De Laurentiis:
I think by the end of “Everyday Italian,” and I did that for seven years. Took a long time, a long, long time. It's hard to believe now, but it is not in my nature. I am a very shy person. I much rather be home with my family and my animals than be out and about and shooting. I really have to push myself out of my limits to actually get there. This is going to sound strange, but it's like a different person emerges. You know how we have like different shadow sides to us a little bit, now that people talk about that? That's what it is, like I am a quiet, reserved person, but then when I have to be out in public, the other side of Giada comes out.
You know, it took a long time. It took a long time, and also just talking to a camera with people that are on their phones or reading a magazine while you're talking and cooking, it can be difficult to keep that energy going and that excitement when you don't have a room full of people that are sort of paying attention to what you're doing, the way that Emeril did, or Bobby did that. A lot of chefs did it to a live audience. Sure, if you have a live audience, it's amazing, right? Because you get feedback. But when you're staring into a camera and staring into the abyss, into the abyss, you don't really know who you're talking to and it makes it difficult to get excited.
Kerry Diamond:
So along the way, you become an entrepreneur.
Giada De Laurentiis:
I never felt like I was an entrepreneur until I started trying to raise money for Giadzy. I think that's the first time I felt it. I didn't realize that along the way, both the cookbooks, the restaurants, my Target line, and all of those things that I had done, endorsements and licensing deals, were really the beginning of my entrepreneurship journey. I didn't really pay a lot of attention. I was on a treadmill, and that treadmill was going faster and faster and faster. And sometimes when you're just in it and there's so much going on, you don't take a lot of time to step back and see all that you're doing. You're just kind of getting through the day.
Kerry Diamond:
Is entrepreneur the wrong word? Were you starting to feel more like a businessperson?
Giada De Laurentiis:
Yeah. I think that I have never seen myself as a businessperson because I didn't study business. I think that I am one of those people that's of the mentality like, "Well, you're an authority in something if you've studied that something." But I think what we forget is life teaches us a lot of lessons, and a lot of them, you end up being something that you didn't think you had the ability to be. And I will say that along the way, I was building a brand. I just didn't plan to build a brand. I just planned to go on a journey and see where it took me. I've always seen that, my life as that. We are all sort of just the main characters of our own movie, and we have different chapters to us, and every chapter is different as we get older. That's all I saw it as, "Let's just see where this goes."
Kerry Diamond:
Because there was also no blueprint for what you've built.
Giada De Laurentiis:
Well, no, because when it started, there weren't any success stories, there was no path. Everybody was just flying by the seat of their pants at the same time, kind of like today, where there's the new evolution of food, only now it's on social media, and you don't need the networks, and you don't need the big box stores, and you don't need the big publishers. You just need to know what you want to do, and there are vehicles out there in social media to build a brand. That never existed when I started. You needed all of these other entities to help you create a brand. Now you create it yourself. You own it yourself, you own your own story. That's what was so fascinating, that's why I wanted to do Giadzy.
Kerry Diamond:
I was just going to say, when you started Giadzy, you didn't start it to be what it is today. You started it for a different reason.
Giada De Laurentiis:
I started Giadzy because I wanted to own the conversation. I wanted to tell the story the way I wanted to tell the story. It's not that other entities didn't tell the story the way I wanted, it's just that it felt fragmented, and it felt like they decided what the story was, or they took pieces of the story and they told it the way they wanted, in editing, in all of it, right? I wanted to edit it myself. I wanted to be the person who edited and said, "Okay, this is the way I see it in my mind, and this is the way I want the story to be told."
Kerry Diamond:
And was this more of a pet project, would you say, in the beginning or-
Giada De Laurentiis:
Oh, it was a blog, like when blogs were popular, and for me, it was a way to harness my audience and to control and have a conversation with them in a more timely manner, which digital was able to help me do. Because Food Network, when I shot my shows, we shot them, they were evergreen. We shoot them six months in advance. I was doing Christmas in June. I felt like so much changes so quickly in this world right now that I needed to be able to talk to people in a more timely manner, and so that's why I started Giadzy, and that was just a conversation about being a mom, about raising a kid, about being a working mom, a single working mom at that point, all of these things that were dynamics and part of me that I couldn't really share at a cooking show.
Kerry Diamond:
And the name, Giadzy, what's that all about?
Giada De Laurentiis:
Giadzy is my nickname. My family has called me Giadzy forever, and I just, when we were coming up with a name, I'm like, "I don't know, what are you going to call it?" And I didn't want to call it just Giada, so I thought, "Okay, I'm going to go with my nickname. It has a story, it's a little bit separate from me, but it's enough of an identifier to my brand."
Kerry Diamond:
So next comes something that a lot of entrepreneurs can relate to, burnout. You hit a wall. What happened?
Giada De Laurentiis:
Yeah. So that one, I documented in “Eat Better, Feel Better” in 2020. After my daughter and after all the travel, I was not well. And I also had gotten through a divorce, and I'd opened two restaurants, and I was just tired. I was really, really tired. So I had chronic sinus infections, a lot of them, to the point where I'd have to be in a dark room for days because it was so painful. So I tried to get to the bottom of what was happening, and there were several complications, but at the end of the day, I wrote this book, Eat Better, Feel Better, the middle of 2018 to talk about my health journey and to talk about the kind of food that we're eating.
I will be honest, I lived on sugar. I'm talking like a sugar cube dipped in coffee for breakfast to really give me a high. In between shooting my shows, because the hours were insane, I would have a bag of chocolate chips in the freezer, and I would go for it. I mean, at times when we'd be shooting, because I would do wide shots and close-ups, so the days were super long, I would just take my finger and put it in straight sugar, but it would give me that horrible up and down and up and down. And when you're young, you're like, "Ah, it's fine." People used to say to me all the time, "You really should watch what you eat. You should eat more protein, more balance." I'm like, "Don't worry about it. This is what I love."
Kerry Diamond:
You didn't even realize this was going on, right? It took an acupuncturist, I think, to kind of alert you?
Giada De Laurentiis:
Well, the chronic sinus infections, I knew what was going on because I was constantly on antibiotics. But I had an acupuncturist I'd been seeing for years, and she told me that basically the blood sugar yo-yo was what was getting me and what was causing an immune breakdown. It just attacks different things for different people, like it can be massive migraines, it can be sinus infections, it can be chronic body pain, like it can be different things. For me, that's what it was, and she really helped change the way I saw food.
Kerry Diamond:
So the book, you did, “Eat Better, Feel Better: My Recipes for Wellness and Healing, Inside and Out,” you got a little pushback because this was a bit of a change to your brand.
Giada De Laurentiis:
I got pushback from my publisher, yeah, because it's a little bit more restrictive, it's a little more restrictive, and it's funny because next year, I have a follow-up to that one. But that is what I felt I needed to reset my body. I was never resetting. And I think what I've learned over time is I can do long stretches and I can work really hard for a certain amount of time, but then I need to recharge. It's like turning off your computer or your phone. You just need a cleanse, and that's really what this book was. It was a much cleaner diet and even three days of a cleanse to really help detox my system.
Now, that worked for me. I always preface it by saying everybody's different. We're all sensitive on different levels. By the time you get to my age, you know how sensitive or not you are and what affects you and what doesn't. So I knew I'm ultra-sensitive, so I have to be very careful, and so I go on long stretches and I eat whatever I want and then I batten down the hatches, clean it up for a little bit, and then I go back out again, and that to me is what works best. So “Eat Better, Feel Better” was that little short sort of cleanse period, the foods I ate, the recipes I wrote, how I did it, and people loved it.
Kerry Diamond:
So that's what you learned personally. What did you learn from that experience professionally?
Giada De Laurentiis:
I think that for me, I hit a wall of doing the same old and that every book I've done is a different chapter of my life and an evolution of who I am, and this is where I was. So if they didn't want to go on that journey with me and they didn't want to explore that side of me, then I just would publish it with someone else. It doesn't matter. I have to be secure where I am at the moment, and I believe that if you're authentic to where you are and you share truly where you are, even if it's completely different than what your brand is, that people will listen because I think that happens to everybody. We are not static in time. We are ever-changing beings. I think that's where the authenticity is. After “Everyday Italian,” it's one of my best-selling books.
Kerry Diamond:
Tell us about your decision-making process. Do you have people you rely on, or do you really go with your gut?
Giada De Laurentiis:
I have a team that I rely on. I have a core team for different parts of my businesses, but I do rely on my gut a lot. And is it always right? No. But I've followed my gut this far. So far so good. I mean, there's definitely pitfalls along the way and mistakes, but mistakes make us better. But yeah, for the most part, I follow my gut, and I honestly always think to myself, "What would my grandfather say? Even though he's been gone for a very long time now, what would he say? Am I going to disappoint him?"
Kerry Diamond:
What would he say about all of this?
Giada De Laurentiis:
Well, I'll tell you that before he died, he told me on a few occasions that he was traveling or in a meeting and someone said, "Are you related to Giada?" And he would look at them and be like, "No, she's related to me." So that's how he felt about it. That's the best we could get out of him. I think he was surprised, I'll be honest. I think my whole family is shocked but proud at the same time, yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
Let's go to Giadzy 2.0 because that has been a big focus of yours and your teams right now. When did you decide that you wanted to take Giadzy from pet project to something more serious?
Giada De Laurentiis:
There's one girl here, Lindsey, that she's over there. It was me and Lindsey. She actually pushed me to do it because I've also found in my life that I need people around me to push me, like yes, I want to do things, but part of me gets lazy and I'm like, "Ah, too many things to do. Maybe I should just enjoy my life." But there's people around me that I obviously surround myself with who push me to do the stuff I-
Kerry Diamond:
I have to jump in. I've never heard anyone call you lazy.
Giada De Laurentiis:
But there is a side. There's a side of me that just wants to be home, doesn't want to go out in the world, doesn't want to do any of it, that just wants to be a hermit. It's a true side. I acknowledge that I have that side, so what I do is I get people around me, I surround myself with people that just keep nudging. And sometimes I push back, and you can ask my team. There's many a times I push back, but then they push a little harder and then I'll do it. It's a good thing. It's what works for me.
Kerry Diamond:
So Lindsey presents this idea for Giadzy 2.0?
Giada De Laurentiis:
Lindsey just says, "I think we could make this work, that we could turn this into an actual business." Because when I started Giadzy, it was a blog and we did not monetize, something that most people with blogs did. I refused to do that. I thought, "I want to grow my audience. I want to grow a connection, and I don't want all of these ads popping up. It looks so messy, it does not look like a elevated experience, and that's what I want. So I'm not going to monetize it. I'll just put money into it, and we'll keep it small, and curate it and curate it, and create an audience, and keep it special, but I'm not going to put all those ads all over it and gussy it up."
Kerry Diamond:
There was no e-commerce?
Giada De Laurentiis:
Nothing.
Kerry Diamond:
No advertising?
Giada De Laurentiis:
Just content.
Kerry Diamond:
You were self-funding it?
Giada De Laurentiis:
Self-funding, the whole time. So 2020 happens, we're all stuck in our homes. A friend of mine had a warehouse with awesome Italian products and all imported. Most of these companies' warehouses ship to restaurants around the country, but nobody would take his goods, and they spoil after a while. They only have a certain shelf life. So we chatted, and I said, "Let me help you move product." We built the most rudimentary little website e-commerce and we started creating kits, recipes, and content around these products, and it just started.
Kerry Diamond:
You're on Shopify?
Giada De Laurentiis:
Yeah, yeah. But we weren't on Shopify at the time. We were on something else, WooCommerce. That's what we did because we couldn't afford to build something that would work with Shopify at the time. I didn't know what it would do. Anyway, it really blew up. Then I thought, "Yeah, but it blew up because everybody's at home. Let's see what happens when the world opens up again. And if it continues to grow, then I'll consider it." And it continued to grow. At that point, we got a nice friend of mine who's over there, Ellie, who helped us put together a business plan, because I had no idea, neither did Lindsey. "What do we do?" I was like, "What is a KPI? What are these sheets that I have to put together?" And so she helped us kind of create the model, figure out what the path would be, and then we started knocking on doors to get some funding.
Kerry Diamond:
Because you'd had products before and you'd done collabs before. Did you know how to read a P&L?
Giada De Laurentiis:
I knew how to read a restaurant P&L because I'd been doing that for a long time, but everything else, I was incredibly inexperienced, and I felt insecure about it because I felt that I didn't know what the hell I was talking about. I didn't know what a cap table, I didn't know anything. So half the time, I was just Googling stuff and watching YouTube videos to try to figure out how do you pitch VCs, what do you talk about. And they would talk about things in these meetings, and I just think to myself, "Okay, mental note, Google and see if there's anybody on YouTube who does these tutorials."
Kerry Diamond:
So Google University was your MBA, basically?
Giada De Laurentiis:
Pretty much.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. So you decide you have to raise money for this project?
Giada De Laurentiis:
We decide that we have to raise money because I think I realized, okay, not only raise money because I needed it to build the site, but also because I needed the knowledge. I didn't have the knowledge. I wanted investors and partners who were going to help me, guide me through the strategy, because I didn't know the strategy and I didn't think I could do it by myself.
Kerry Diamond:
Had you ever had to raise money before?
Giada De Laurentiis:
Never.
Kerry Diamond:
Did you think it would be easy or did you think it would be hard?
Giada De Laurentiis:
I think I thought a little bit of both. I realized pretty quickly that consumer goods are not necessarily what a lot of VCs want to invest in. They want to invest in FinTech and they want to invest in startups like an Uber or something of that nature that are going to change the world, so it was a lot harder than I thought. And there were moments in time where it's mostly men I was talking to, and a lot of them just wanted to get on the phone and have a chat, but I could tell like they're not interested.
Kerry Diamond:
How many meetings and calls do you think you had to raise money?
Giada De Laurentiis:
I think like 20, 25.
Kerry Diamond:
Was it humbling?
Giada De Laurentiis:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Very humbling. And I realized, "Okay, this is going to be a lot harder than I thought." And it opened up a door to a world I never even imagined existed. I mean, you know it exists, but unless you're in it, it's a completely different way of thinking. I mean, there's so many founders that I've met that are just brilliant, like really, really people who are going to change the world or on the path of changing the world, and I'm like, "But my business isn't going to change the world, so maybe I should just give up." That's a lot of times how I feel, yeah, "Is this really life-changing for people?" As I watch the trajectory of what's happening in the world, I start to see a real shift in how people consume and how much the direct-to-consumer business has grown, and I realize that trusted brands that can go direct-to-consumer can really see some success. And I will say that a lot of brands that you guys all know are moving a lot into hospitality, entertainment, special connection, so things like Coach, you know, Coach bags, opening cafes, opening hotels.
Kerry Diamond:
Ralph Lauren's a great example.
Giada De Laurentiis:
Ralph Lauren restaurants.
Kerry Diamond:
With Ralph Coffee and the restaurants.
Giada De Laurentiis:
Correct. LVMH, who just started a production company, and Louis Vuitton, who owns hotels now in different areas. Fendi is building all these residencies with all of their home goods and stuff, restoration hardware, hotels, restaurants.
Kerry Diamond:
So wait, does this mean your hotel dream is finally coming true?
Giada De Laurentiis:
Not yet, but I would like to do that, in Italy especially, yes, because it is like a showroom, right? But this is where the world is going. These brands are expanding into so many different areas, and hospitality has never been hotter. And so I realized food, hospitality, and entertainment, people want experiences. They don't just want to book a room in a Hilton. They actually want to experience. So they book a room in the Hilton, but then they get the experience of South by Southwest. Like it's that kind of partnership, it's those kind of collabs that connects people and gives people purpose, and I think that's what they're looking for.
Kerry Diamond:
So earlier in this chat, I asked you when you started to feel like an entrepreneur, and you said not until you started raising money for Giadzy. Do you feel like an entrepreneur today?
Giada De Laurentiis:
Oh, yeah. Now I feel like an entrepreneur, yeah, and it's a totally different feeling, it really is.
Kerry Diamond:
Let's talk about the next steps for Giadzy. Membership, why is membership so important?
Giada De Laurentiis:
So with Giadzy, the goal has always been a 360 experience for us. Right now, we're media and we're commerce, e-commerce. How do you bring those worlds together and really create an experience that feels synergistic, that feels connected? And so with the membership, what I really wanted to do was give people exclusivity. I've always loved exclusivity, and I will say that giving them the ability to have curated information, like travel guides and eventually trips to Italy that are curated by me on the ground, boots on the ground, like when I go to Italy and when I eat with my family, and things that you can experience you otherwise couldn't experience the Giada way in Italy. So that and exclusive recipes and livestream cooking classes with me, a way to connect with my audience that's different, that feels more intimate, that feels more special. You know, sometimes that's hard to do on a platform.
Kerry Diamond:
What else do you have in mind for the future of Giadzy?
Giada De Laurentiis:
You know, we started our own pasta line. So for me, ingredients are everything, and I think that for a long time, because I've been in the Italian food sector, it's been a lot of, "God, isn't pasta so bad for you?" And I think the bottom line isn't the category of the pasta, it's the type of pasta, it's the ingredients and the type of food that we're buying. It's that type of packaged foods.
So for me, sourcing ingredients was so important, and I found that in order to give people what I was eating as a child, which was all imported from Italy, I needed to create some of my own products. Not all, because I can't make some of those products better than they're made by some of these family producers, but some of them I can, with really elevated packaging, because I find that a lot of the products that are sourced really well, packaging is overlooked, right? Because it's expensive and people throw it away. But to me, when you're selling online, what you see is the first thing that attracts you, right? Before you ever taste anything, even when you walk into a restaurant, what you see, what your senses see through your eyes first, that's what gets you hooked. That's the connection.
So that's the building of the connection throughout and the trust. I wanted it to look as elevated as I feel when I eat the food and how elevated the ingredient is that you're going to actually ingest. Sourcing the wheat, the water comes from the mountains in Abruzzo. The way that the manufacturer makes the pasta, the bronze dyes aren't pressed as hard, they're not plastic, so you get a better texture and a healthier product in the end. It is not mass-produced. Then the next thing is tomatoes, and the next thing will be sauces, and we have a special olive oil, all of these things that I think create a wellness in your life.
Kerry Diamond:
I think at this point we're supposed to take some audience questions.
Audience:
How did you go about selecting the team to lead around you and grow a brand and outsource areas that were not your strength?
Kerry Diamond:
Hiring.
Giada De Laurentiis:
Yeah, hiring, it's an interesting beast. I think that I rely a lot on other people's references. When we hired Carol, who's my COO, I found her through Ellie. So I think that the deal is is that I like to get references through other people, and other people vet, and people I trust. And so I have a core amount of people that I trust, and we go through a vetting process, but hiring, it's tricky, it's really, really, really tricky, because also, this is sort of a little bit of the wild west. The path isn't right in front of you, and so you're forging the path as you go, so you kind of have to just go with your gut. At the end of the day, we sort of find the ideal person, then I interview them, and I follow my gut. Sometimes it's right, sometimes it's not.
Kerry Diamond:
Is it same as the process you used in television? Because you've hired hundreds over the years.
Giada De Laurentiis:
It is a little bit more detailed than that, yeah, because in television, they would do a show and be done, right? So I could hire a whole other crew. With Giadzy, these people are, we're a real core team. Mostly it's all women, and it's very intimate. I see it as a growth. I see it as we're all in this together building something for the future. We're building an experience for people, we're building the Italian culture, we're educating people in a different way, hopefully through, yes, teaching them about Italy, teaching them about food, empowering them, and also, it's a wellness journey and it's a tech business, so people who are sort of experts in all of those areas. But I lean a lot on people who have a lot of experience in the sector, and then I'm the last person they talk to, and that is just a gut check.
Kerry Diamond:
Next question.
Audience:
Would you consider opening a restaurant in Austin?
Giada De Laurentiis:
I just opened a restaurant in Scottsdale last week. You know-
Kerry Diamond:
Wait, you got to give a shout-out to Luna.
Giada De Laurentiis:
Yeah, Luna in Scottsdale, yeah. Luna and Pronto. I opened two in this new hotel. That was a five-year journey, because we wanted to open it before COVID, and then COVID shut us down, and we had to build a whole hotel. It was a whole thing. But five years later, we're finally in Scottsdale. I don't know. I think if I do one, it might be Dallas.
Kerry Diamond:
You just opened a can of worms. Why Dallas?
Giada De Laurentiis:
No, I know, I know. But I don't know. I think that for me, it's one step at a time. I have to get Scottsdale. It's like a baby, right? You got to kind of just help it along, and once it starts to run on its own, I can start to think about where else I could go.
Audience:
Are there other food creators on TikTok or other platforms that you would love to work with or are inspired by?
Giada De Laurentiis:
Oh, that's a great question. I think there's a lot of people that inspire me. I just did a collab with Owen Han, and he's a big TikToker, and he does those ASMR videos, which I find to be phenomenal. They're very digestible, they're very quick, a quick fix. I did that with him, and watching him shoot it was phenomenal. The setup that they have is much more elevated than I ever thought it would be. Tons of cameras and lights in, but they do it all in one little corner of a kitchen. And they're so young. I mean, this kid's like 22, 21, like they're out of college and they're creating these brands all by themselves. He shoots it all by himself, he edits it all himself, like it's just the empowerment is phenomenal. So I think I'm very much influenced and inspired by many of these creators. We've got Pasta Queen out there, who does a ton of Italian content. There's a lot of them that I watch inspired.
Kerry Diamond:
You do have an in-house Gen Z TikTok consultant, your daughter, Jade.
Giada De Laurentiis:
Well, Jade got me on TikTok in the first place. I always ask her for trends. It's funny, she doesn't post on TikTok, but she loves consuming it. It's the oddest thing. And they only post stories. She doesn't like posting on her grid. It's a whole sort of way that they think and that she's taught me to think about how you work on these social platforms. But yes, Jade is usually the one that brings all of the TikTok ideas, the new trends. "Mom, let's try this, let's do that." She's very good at that. And I think I only got on social media when I did in the early days because of her. I think if I hadn't had a child of that age, I don't even know that I would probably be doing this because my social following would be down in the dumps. So it's really, a lot of it has to do with her.
Audience:
What was the best part about judging “Chopped?”
Giada De Laurentiis:
I will say this, I do not love judging people. It is really, really hard work. We try to be positive, positive feedback, but really, when people cook, it's up to the person judging whether they like it or not. It's so individualistic, so it's really hard to say. Let's say I don't like peas or it's too garlicky. Well, that's just your opinion. So I find that it's difficult to do, and I will tell you that I did a lot on Food Network Star and I really didn't like it. But what I did like was watching people work in the process, not so much the end result as the process, the journey of what they do, how they react, and how they handle stress, and it's a social experiment that is fascinating when you're watching it live, unedited. I think that was the most fun part.
Kerry Diamond:
Kind of like entrepreneurship.
Giada De Laurentiis:
That's right. Nice, Kerry. Great job.
Kerry Diamond:
All right. Giada, you're the Bombe. Thank you.
Giada De Laurentiis:
Thank you, you guys. Good job.
Kerry Diamond:
That's it for today's show. I would love for you to subscribe to Radio Cherry Bombe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and leave a rating and a review. Our theme song is by the band Tralala. Joseph Hazan is the studio engineer for Newsstand Studios at Rockefeller Center. Our producers are Catherine Baker and Elizabeth Vogt. Our associate producer is Jenna Sadhu, and our content operations manager is Londyn Crenshaw. Thanks for listening, everybody. You are the Bombe.