Farewell, Champaign

Well, crap.  A little over 2 years into our time in Champaign, IL, it has come to an end.  We will be closing the doors on Azzip Champaign at the end of the day on Saturday, October 7th.  It isn’t a good feeling closing a store, but we have learned a ton from this experience and hope to be better going forward because of it.  Thankfully this is our first time, and hopefully our last.

We want to thank all of our customers and employees who helped us have a great run at the University of Illinois.  We were proud of the product we served for the time we were there, and thank everyone who supported us.  I apologize to all of our fans that we couldn’t make this location work in the long run.

When I’ve told people where we have locations, Champaign often was the one people immediately pointed to thinking that it was our busiest store.  Locating a pizza restaurant on a college campus sounds like a slam dunk proposition, and we really thought it was a no brainer.  Unfortunately, being on a college comes with its fair share of challenges.  A lot of these challenges we didn’t truly understand going in.  We knew it would be seasonal, but didn’t quite fully grasp just how difficult it would be to ramp up and down operations with the changes of seasons.  In the future, we look to be able to capitalize on the amazing energy and positivity that major colleges have to offer, without being directly on campus to rely on them year around.

In the end, we had trouble getting over the hump from a profitability standpoint.  There are a lot of great things ahead for Azzip and we wanted to continue to focus our time and energy on our higher performing stores to reach for greater heights.