Release restaurant reservations weekly like a sneaker drop, and say it's full early

Zuhair Lakhani… When I kind of had the idea of like, you know, designing my own line, that was kind of lined up for me. So that honestly, I can't take all the credit for the TJ Maxx stuff, but, you know, like the actual designing was on me. I actually had no clue of like any like Internet marketing or how any of this is run. I've only seen sneaker bots doing their marketing, and how retail launches or like Yeezy launches would do it. Like hypebeast stuff.

Zuhair LakhaniThat's kind of what I replicated as soon as my dad started this restaurant. We started this waitlist, right, which I saw like, you know, from Supreme and from all these sneaker bots. And this is actually like a genius idea for any restaurant. The reason being is because you get to control the reservations. So, in a normal restaurant when you have like a 100 people getting seated, you take whatever reservations, and you might only fill like 88 spots, or you take a reservation for seven, you put on on a table for eight.

Zuhair LakhaniWhat this allowed us to do was like, you know, take a reservation for eight and then adjust accordingly from like a seven-seater table and like add one more chair. This was my first time doing like actual social media marketing. What this did was like drive so much hype that the restaurant was sold out for 2 months. It's 6,000 people on this waitlist, and then also got this like article written about us just cuz nobody could get in.

Joseph ChoiThat's interesting. And it seems like the other element with this is that you pulled a tactic from one industry, and you put it into another where with sneaker bots and retail botting, there's the concept of like hype marketing and, you know, drops and with streetwear and stuff like that. But restaurants don't really have that concept as much, so you just kind of pulled the tactic, and then there's almost just like a tactic arbitrage.

Zuhair LakhaniSpeaking of drops, like you're saying, we used to drop our reservations every Wednesday at 4:00 p.m. I put this post on the Facebook group. Obviously, like random 50-year-olds are like super confused at what's going on, but like everyone at this point is looking for a reservation. And we weren't even booked what the first time I did the drop. Like 20 people signed up. We have space for a 100. I just said it was done. It like it's better to look like you're full and get people to hit you up, rather than look like, you know, you still have reservations, you know, a day in. That waitlist went on for 2 months.

Zuhair LakhaniWe did a lot of different stuff. We did TikToks and whatever. Google Ads did great, Facebook, same thing. This is all organic.