Dave’s Hot Chicken
Pasadena, Calif.
It’s unlikely a location of Dave’s Hot Chicken will ever be mistaken for anything else.
The brand puts murals on the exterior of the restaurants “as much as possible,” says Tiffany Vassos, senior vice president of design and construction. “Our locations with more exterior design tend to do more sales-wise. Because we’re a little more disruptive, people know we’re there and it has a ton of energy and spruces up the area we’re in.”
A vibrant experience at Dave’s is reflected through bold graffiti both inside and out.
If Vassos can, she likes to add colored light bulbs on the exterior, especially to outline the roof. With those bulbs, she says, “you can get a lot from very little.”
The exteriors, Vassos says, “are almost a billboard and rope people in with something visually stimulating.”
The murals continue inside. “It’s very important to create that vibrant experience,” Vassos says. “We don’t put ourselves in a box but red is very important; and we do a lot with galaxy themes.”
Dave’s works with Los Angeles-based street artists and flies them to new locations to hand and spray paint them. Dave’s is also looking at new materials that can be used for the murals such as a vinyl that can be heat applied because some landlords prefer them not to paint the walls.
Vassos also likes to have a lot of duel halo lit signage and red rope lights in the restaurants “to give us the glow.” And she loves big windows so even if there’s only minimal exterior design “the experience within our spaces will protrude out of the location and give you the glow from far away.”
Inside, “we go pretty crazy,” Vassos says, and the brand might reflect the local location in the mural and an image of Dave, the chicken. For example, in a Denver store, Dave (a mannequin dressed as a snowboarder) sits in a real chairlift hanging from the ceiling. Dave’s always different; there’s a Loch Ness Monster Dave, an astronaut Dave, sporty Dave and movie star Dave.
Dave’s Hot Chicken aims to have the locations all be “siblings, but not identical twins,” Vassos says, which encourages people to check them all out.
