A lease instead of a house, and a party store with a pizza oven.

Jet’s Pizza began in 1978 in Sterling Heights, Michigan, in Metro Detroit. FOX 2 Detroit, reporting on the chain’s 40th anniversary in August 2018, says brothers Eugene and John Jetts opened their first store together that year under the name Jetts Party Shoppe and Pizzeria. English Wikipedia adds that the original location was a vacant party store converted into a restaurant.

The company tells the founding as a change of plan. Its “Our Story” page says Eugene Jetts was on his way to buy his first home in 1978 when, in the company’s words, his passion for pizza took over: he did sign a lease that day, but for the space in Sterling Heights rather than for a house. His brother John joined him as partner. The company ends the same page by noting that it is glad he did not buy the house.

The recipe is credited to the family. FOX 2 Detroit says the brothers’ Detroit-style, deep-dish pizza was made with Mama Jetts’ secret family recipe, and Wikipedia says the original recipe came from the Jetts brothers’ mother and has not changed since 1978. The company names the same two constants on its own pages — the “Mama Jetts” sauce recipe and mozzarella from Grande — and says dough is made fresh in every store each day. Wikipedia notes that when the store first opened, the square pizzas it served were a novelty in the area.

The anniversary itself was marked as a piece of branding. FOX 2 Detroit reported that for one Sunday afternoon in August 2018, Jet’s rolled the price of a large one-topping pizza back to its 1978 level for customers who used the code “1978” — the founding year turned into a promotion.

A new name, a conveyor oven and two families.

The brand as customers now know it dates from 1985. The company says that year Jetts Party Shoppe “ditched its original name, dropped a ‘t’ and became Jet’s Pizza”. The change turned the family surname into a shorter, possessive name. A second store followed in 1986, the company says, built around a conveyor oven.

The ownership widened within the family. The company says the brothers’ cousins Jim and Jeff Galloway joined the ownership in 1987; Wikipedia says the Jetts brothers formed Jet’s America, Inc. with Jim Galloway Jr. and Jeff Galloway in 1992. Franchising began later: the company dates its first franchised store to 1998, while Wikipedia gives 1990 for the first franchise location. The trading company is Jet’s America, Inc., doing business as Jet’s Pizza, and the company describes the business as family-owned, led today by John Jetts and Jim and Jeff Galloway together with the next generation of the Jetts and Galloway families.

In the 2020s Jet’s used ordering technology as part of how customers met the brand. Chain Store Age reported on 28 March 2021 that Jet’s had partnered with the Michigan artificial-intelligence start-up Ordr AI so that customers could place an entire order by text message to the same local number they would otherwise call. The publication said the system confirmed each order and its timing by reply, let customers save a card behind a PIN for later orders, and could answer basic questions about store hours and the menu. On 15 August 2022 the same publication reported that Jet’s was integrating its menus with the OrderAI system of the restaurant-technology company HungerRush, so that phone-in customers could order through an AI phone bot rather than a person; Wikipedia says franchisees could choose whether to adopt it.

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.

A square pizza, a trademarked corner and a shortened surname.

The product shape is the brand’s clearest piece of design. Jet’s is known for its square, deep-dish, Detroit-style pizza, Wikipedia says, and the company has trademarked an eight-corner pizza. The company’s own site files its blog under the name “Corner Crunch”, and its menu pages present Detroit-style pizza alongside hand-tossed round, thin-crust and New York-style pizzas, salads, breads and desserts.

The name does similar work in a single word. By dropping a letter from the family surname in 1985, the brothers kept the family name on the sign in a shorter form. The company still repeats the story — the “t” that was dropped, the party shoppe that became a pizzeria — on its own about pages, and it keeps the founding year in view: “1978” was the discount code for the 2018 anniversary promotion.

Family runs through the identity as well. The company’s pages name Mama Jetts for the sauce, describe the business as family-owned, and set out the line of ownership from the two brothers to their Galloway cousins and the families’ next generation. Its own story says Eugene Jetts was about to buy a house when he signed a lease for the party store instead. FOX 2 Detroit’s 2018 report credited the Detroit-style recipe with putting the chain on the map.

For a design guide, Jet’s Pizza shows how a family surname, shortened by one letter, and a square pan with a trademarked corner can carry a regional pizzeria from a converted party store to a franchise system. Compare it with Hungry Howie’s, another Metro Detroit pizza chain founded in the 1970s, and Marco’s Pizza, which opened in Ohio the same year. For this guide we use pan red, steel black and mozzarella cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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