A Sulmona-born founder, a family sauce and a shop outside Toledo.

Marco’s Pizza began in 1978 in Oregon, Ohio, a town just east of Toledo, where Pasquale “Pat” Giammarco opened his own pizzeria. English Wikipedia dates the opening to 18 February 1978 and places the shop on Starr Avenue. Ohio Business Magazine, in a profile published in January 2020, tells how the location was chosen: Giammarco had come to Toledo to rent a tuxedo for a friend’s wedding in nearby Monroe, Michigan, and settled on the area during that trip. Through the summer before the doors opened, the magazine says, he kept hearing the same question from locals: “Why are you putting a pizzeria here?”

The founder’s story is the spine of the brand. Giammarco was born in Sulmona, in the Abruzzo region of central Italy, and moved to the United States with his family as a child, the company says. He grew up in Dearborn, Michigan, working in his family’s pizzeria, and the 2020 profile says it was there that he and his father developed the sauce recipe he later took to Ohio. Wikipedia repeats the same account of father and son working out the sauce together.

Giammarco’s own explanation of the early years is modest. Speaking to Ohio Business Magazine, he recalled that customers drove a long way to reach the shop, and that he opened further locations in the places he knew those customers were coming from. “I didn’t have any marketing-type skills, but I had an idea,” he said. “As long as I knew there were people there, they would eat Marco’s Pizza.”

The company still tells its history through that biography. Its “About Marco’s” page opens with the line that the brand has been “a Slice of the Community” since 1978 — a phrase it marks as a trademark — and then moves to Giammarco’s childhood in Sulmona under the heading “Cut Slices, Not Corners”. The same page describes the pizza with the registered coinage Ah!thentic, a word that folds an exclamation of pleasure into “authentic” and puts the Italian-heritage message into a single piece of typography.

A consultant, a purchase and a co-CEO succession.

For more than two decades Marco’s remained a regional chain around Toledo. The turn came in 2002. Nation’s Restaurant News, profiling him in October 2017, says Jack Butorac — a restaurant executive whose earlier employers included Hormel Foods, Fuddruckers and Chi-Chi’s — was then working as a consultant, analysing Ohio-based Marco’s for a client who was looking at investing in foodservice brands. He toured Marco’s locations in different Ohio cities and eventually met Giammarco. The 2020 Ohio Business Magazine profile, quoting Butorac’s company biography, says what he found on that drive was “different exteriors and inconsistent branding,” while the pizza itself was the same at each stop.

Butorac went on to work as a consultant with Giammarco and then bought the business. Nation’s Restaurant News dates the purchase to 2004; the 2020 profile says he acquired the franchise rights and the brand two years after his first look, with the aim of making Marco’s a national chain, and that Giammarco stayed on as a shareholder and franchisee. Wikipedia says Butorac took over leadership in January 2004 and that nationwide expansion began in 2005. The franchisor trades as Marco’s Franchising, LLC and is based in Toledo.

Butorac has led the company since 2004. In October 2017 Nation’s Restaurant News named him its Operator of the Year at the MUFSO conference in Dallas. “It’s not me, it’s the whole team,” he said afterwards. The magazine’s profile also mentions a deal under which Marco’s rented dedicated space inside Family Video stores; Wikipedia says that partnership ended when Family Video closed its stores in 2021.

A second executive has since moved into the top job alongside him. Tony Libardi, formerly Burger King’s vice president of U.S. operations, joined Marco’s Franchising in June 2014 as executive vice president of operations, according to Ohio Business Magazine, which says he set about standardising and automating the chain’s operating systems and procedures and introduced a cloud-based e-learning platform for employees. In January 2021 the trade magazine Foodservice Equipment & Supplies reported that Libardi had been promoted to president and co-CEO and would share chief-executive duties with Butorac as part of a long-term succession plan. Earlier, Wikipedia records, the chain and its then president, Bryon Stephens, were featured on the CBS programme Undercover Boss in an episode broadcast on 29 January 2016.

Design and documentation.

A pizza or pasta chain meets its customers in a handful of physical places before anyone opens a menu: the sign above the door, the box or bag that leaves the shop, the counter where an order is placed and the board that lists what can be ordered. Each of those surfaces carries the name and the colours, and each has to work at a different distance, from a fascia read across a car park to a box lid read at a kitchen table.

Some restaurant formats put the kitchen in view, with an assembly line or an oven behind the counter, so the preparation area becomes part of the interior design and the menu board doubles as an ordering guide. Other formats keep the kitchen out of sight and lean on the dining room, the drive-through lane or the delivery packaging instead.

Each guide in this group looks at the brand rather than the food: who started it and where, who has owned it since, and how its name, logo, signage and restaurant interiors are documented in dated, independent sources, with anything the company says about itself marked as its own account.

From inconsistent shopfronts to a single national message.

The design story of Marco’s begins with a problem rather than a logo. The phrase Butorac’s biography uses about his 2002 tour — “different exteriors and inconsistent branding” — describes a chain whose stores had grown up one at a time under a founder who, by his own account, had no marketing background.

The message the company chose was heritage. Libardi told Ohio Business Magazine in 2020 that Butorac set Marco’s apart from Domino’s, Papa John’s and Pizza Hut by stressing its Italian heritage — craftsmanship and attention to every detail — and by talking about how the founder had worked over the dough recipe, the sauce recipe and the cheese blend. The company’s own pages carry the same theme — the founder’s name, his hometown of Sulmona and his father’s sauce — and its wordplay leans on the language of authenticity: Ah!thentic on the menu, “Cut Slices, Not Corners” on the about page, “a Slice of the Community” as the line that ties the chain back to the Toledo area.

Advertising followed the same path from local to national. The 2020 profile says that in 2017, shortly after Libardi became chief operating officer, the company began working with a new advertising agency on a national strategy to replace its localised, print-heavy marketing, and Libardi said that by 2019 the brand was on television in all 50 states. The same article describes a new store prototype with a smaller footprint, designed so that a franchisee could own the building and pay only for a ground lease.

For a design guide, Marco’s Pizza shows how a franchisor can build an identity out of a founder’s biography: an immigrant’s name, a hometown in Abruzzo and a father-and-son recipe, carried into trademarked wordplay and a national campaign after years of uneven local signage. Compare it with Domino’s, another American pizza chain with a long-established identity, and Jet’s Pizza, a family business from Sterling Heights founded the same year. For this guide we use tomato red, basil green and crust cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Marco’s Pizza’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.