Sean Feeney

Yeah, Missy and I are not cool.

I remember the first day we were walking around Williamsburg to look at this space and we were certainly out of water.

I was wearing Gucci loafers and a trader vest and she certainly was not looking that cool either.

And I remember thinking like, how are we going to make it here?

Manhattan, we'll kill it.

But I don't know, are we going to fit in?

But then when we did open, it was not about what we looked like.

It was about who we were and how we treated others and understanding people aligned well with how we were trying to do it.

And I started obsessing about that brand and understanding that every single night,

At Lilia, eight years later, we have 5,000 people on our wait list.

And Missy, our second restaurant, five years old, is 2,500 people a night on our wait list.

And not to say that to boast, but to try to understand why.

As we think about expansion, after Missy was opened in 2018, what's next?

We believed that in order to feed more people, instead of opening another restaurant that takes two years to do, start to finish, maybe we could take a year to create our own company that would feed the people who were putting their names on the wait list that maybe couldn't get into our restaurants, but would be able to get our products and bring it home.

And the way we launched that was through basically a drop, just how Kith and Supreme do these sneaker drops.

We thought we had the community that would want that.

And we started that early in 2020, where on Friday nights on Instagram, we would put the flavor of the sauce and the shape of the pasta on Instagram, two o'clock the next day, pick it up.

We would make 100 and 250 people would line up.

And it was just, oh my gosh, like the same thing that happened with our restaurants is now happening with this little brand.

And although I want to always feed every single human, I have realized the preciousness and almost like obsession around not filling the demand.