Taking kids under 10 out to a nice casual dining restaurant is an experience most parents dread. No matter how well-behaved a child may be, the setting is typically unnatural for kids, and the child’s instincts to play are generally and uniformly suppressed, resulting in an uncomfortable experience for all. This sad reality makes what should otherwise be a relaxing and enjoyable outing for the entire family, into more of a grueling production for everyone involved. And if you want to take the kid(s) out someplace for one of their birthday parties, there are a limited number of options which, while geared more towards the enjoyment of children than the typical restaurant, do not offer anything more exciting than what most kids can experience via their Xbox or PlayStation. Ticket redemption games aren’t really that entertaining for most kids, and parents these days don’t want to suck down a mixture of bad pizza and high fructose corn syrup-laden sodas.
In every way – the combination of a menu consisting of high-quality organic food, with a venue layout featuring a distinct casual dining area for adults and a huge customized play area for kids, realized by the restaurant model Giggles N’ Hugs has been successfully executing in LA for a few years now – speaks directly to the underserved family-friendly dining market of today. Parents can relax while the kids get some clean, healthy exercise at Giggles N’ Hugs, enjoying the themed Gymboree-like play area, with elements such as kid-sized castles, giant climbers and swings, numerous types of tactile interactive toys, and ball pits. GIGL has seen tremendous reception with its initial three locations in upscale shopping centers around LA, as numerous A-list celebrities have taken their kids to eat and play at the restaurants.
Giggles N’ Hugs even employs helpful, trained staff to cater to the kid play area, enabling the restaurant to also offer busy parents a child drop-off service, so they can enjoy shopping, unencumbered. This overall approach towards making the locations a child-centric experience is further facilitated by periodically scheduled entertainment of various kinds, ranging from arts and crafts, to karaoke sing-a-longs, to face painting, and even live acts like puppet shows or music, brought to patrons by professional child entertainers. A unique and highly synergistic business model such as this has quickly won immense interest from mall operators around the country, who want to offer their patrons the amenities that come with having a Giggles N’ Hugs in their mall. And GIGL even recently announced that shopping center juggernaut Westfield (OTC: WFGPY), with whom GIGL currently has two locations, is now seeking to expand on the existing partnership.
This is huge news, considering the global shopping center footprint Westfield is known for, including such iconic locations as the Westfield London or the Westfield San Francisco Centre. It is an announcement that augurs well for GIGL’s plans to expand from three to twelve company-owned locations by the end of 2017, and which also spells out success for ongoing talks with other large mall owners across the country, as well as interested franchise operators in North America, and around the world. In fact, the company has already received considerable interest from several potential international franchisees, spanning key growth markets in Latin America, as well as Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Parents getting to eat top shelf organic dishes and not having to feed their kids garbage, while also being able to relax in their own dining area, casually sipping on a glass of wine or beer, while the kids safely burn off some of that abundant energy they always seem to have – is likely a universal language all its own. The blue sky potential for this highly unique execution of a restaurant concept is one of the real major plot points in the Giggles N’ Hugs story. But investors need look no further than recent Q2 filings for the hardcore facts, like steadily increasing sales volume, and growing receptivity to the company’s most lucrative core offering, themed birthday parties. Private party rentals were up handsomely in Q2 (ended June 28), with year-over-year gains of 3.4 percent, even as the Giggles N’ Hugs location in the Glendale Galleria tracked such performance with a 5.5 percent jump in overall net sales.
Net sales across the operation were up 0.8 percent for the year, owing in large part to the sustained drive for operational excellence from former California Pizza Kitchen operations and finance executives, Philip Gay (Chief Business Development Officer) and John Kaufmann (Interim-President). The entire bench of senior leadership at GIGL has serious chops in fact, with multiple decades of experience in the industry under their collective belts, allowing the company to brilliantly navigate what is all-too-often a perilous sector for many young companies.
To learn more, check out Giggles N’ Hugs website www.gigglesnhugs.com
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