Member Spotlight: Gurt Wings

You can’t talk about Bristol and fried chicken without thinking Gurt Wings these days. The effusive fried chicken connoisseurs have established themselves among street food’s foremost through a cosmic mix of dedication, hard work and a quality product. Polish that off with brilliantly jovial social media content and you get quite the dish – but they’re far from done. We spoke to Uncle Gurty himself to find out all things Gurt Wings:

In the beginning, there was Gurt Wings:

It was actually a mistake. I was working a corporate job, flying all over the world. I’d be away sort of 10-15 days at a time and I got to spend a lot of time in the States as we were importing food.

The majority of it was from America and then we’d sell it here in the UK, also to European supermarkets as well. And my love for chicken wings came from exposure, being there and eating so much fried chicken and Buffalo wings especially.

As my love grew, I started trying to make my own at home because you couldn’t really get decent buffalo wings here. There were a couple of traders doing it but for the most part they were really hard to come by. I was making chicken all the time and my wife wasn’t such a fan of the smell in the house, so I got relocated to the garage.

It became a bit of a club, where I’d have the garage open while testing out all sorts of different methods and flavours – some good, some not so much – but the neighbours and friends would come round for a beer and some food. I thought they were the perfect people to test my creations on and the feedback I received was really positive. They all encouraged me to try selling it.

Honestly I didn’t really want to but I thought I’ll give it a go. I bought a commercial fryer, a gazebo and organised myself a set up to trade, then I became aware of all the legalities surrounding catering and felt very out of my depth with it all. So I set up a meeting with Kerb in London who were fantastic – they prompted me to produce a business plan and gave me a lot of confidence that this thing could work.

It took about a year to get it off the ground, we kept the menu concise just focusing on buffalo wings, and we did tater tots which again were relatively unknown then. And we learnt a lot quickly while pushing it forward – I remember we did our first event at Moor Brewery in Bristol, it was such a beautiful sunny day, great trading conditions and we sold loads.

Just about to pack everything away, smiles on our faces and the heavens opened, literally everything got soaked. That was tough! We had to reflect and weigh it all up really, was it worth doing or is it foolish.

Also we were still just operating out of home, so had to try and clean all the equipment at home, jet washing fryers in the back garden – it’s not ideal.

Evolving the business:

Three years ago this October, we were still operating out of my garage. Around that time we got our first unit, had an office in there with just enough space to bring a truck in. We’d just brought on our first two members of staff and were still going absolutely flat out to try and grow the business – Wednesday through Sunday it was manic, just constant work.

We were lucky to have friends and family help us out along the way – back in the early days when we were doing pop-ups and markets in Bristol, a friend of mine, Chris, who’s a truck mechanic gave me a van to use, which he had all sign-written up for us too. All ready to go, and we got in it, drove it down the road and there was a card on the seat, Lisa Marie opened up the card and it just said ‘Thanks for being best man in my wedding.’

That van was incredible and allowed us to carry round a lot more. As we speak now we’ve got two food trucks, just ordered our third and we’re about to move to a unit that’s four times bigger than our current one. We now have 19 staff on our books – even just a year ago we only had four.

Looking back again, using the van from Chris we were trying to trade as much as possible, getting here there and everywhere. Then COVID hit and stopped everything and we had to think quickly, we had no money coming in, we’d pumped our life savings into the business already, converting the garage into a prep kitchen so the positive at the time of not having to pay business rates meant we weren’t entitled to any compensation from the government.

We were desperate to find a solution, decided to convert the van into a functional food truck itself – that we named Gurtrude – and managed to set up at a location on an industrial estate and use an app to tell people where we were and what’s on the menu. That worked well, we actually crashed the app due to demand!

But we also had the idea to start bottling and selling sauces around this time, made a website and started promoting it ad we had some good fortune with it as I’d given a bottle to a food influencer way before, and they used it and shouted about during lockdown and things went crazy. It was like we turned into a production line overnight! We did have some issues with the EHO not being too happy with how we were labelling them of all things and it took ages to get it right but we managed and the bottles have been a great arm to the business ever since.

Slinging at Wingfest:

So we did a few more pop-ups, then headed to Wingfest in London where we’d been before and I’d said the next time, we come back as traders. At the time, we were the only traders outside of London competing. We were getting slammed trying to cope with orders, thought we’d turn up the fryers and ended up getting shut down by fire marshals for a couple of hours as we had a fire.

It was crazy.  Somehow we managed to come third place, winning the Judge’s choice for best buffalo wings which was incredible. It told us we were on to something with this, not too long after both me and my wife packed in our full time jobs to fully commit to Gurt Wings.

Wingfest has always been a big draw for me personally and for Gurt Wings. We’ve been there so many years now. I remember after we’d struggled to win anything at London Wingfest, someone mentioned that we need to consider Asian wings to get top spot, so we went all out with our Lost in Translation Korean ketchup with a sriracha mayo drizzle over the top and we won! Going to London for Wingfest is always an experience, but having it come to Bristol has been really special. We’ve got quite a following in Bristol, people that know our story, so it was amazing to celebrate winning as much as we did at that with them.

There’s people that came to the More Brewery event that are still customers to this day which just means so much to us. It can be exhausting though to compete at and we definitely need a break when it’s all over. I’ve lost friends over it in the past, key staff members too. Last year, our queue pretty much all day was three hours long and we put out around 13,500 wings, which is nothing short of mental.

Wingfest has been huge for Gurt Wings, Rich has done massive things for us and it’s really helped to establish us outside of Bristol.

Making a splash on social media:

The business got to a point where we had enough people on the team for me to take a step back and work on the business more than in it, which was great but I was still working a lot. I remember I’d get home late and sit down with Lisa Marie but just spend all the time sharing all the content people had posted about the truck that day. We realised then something needed to be done, so we set about bringing a social media manager on board. We went through a couple actually, who just weren’t right for it or us.

I already knew Jack Eats Everything, a food blogger from Bristol, we arranged a discussion about it. He asked to monitor the account for a month to see how we operate in that sense and if he can do it. So that went well, he took over the reigns which gave me more time on my hands, which gets filled with him and the team getting me to act like an idiot in order to grow our following.

Initially, we had a meeting about it and I insisted people don’t want to see me on there. They want to see the food. Jack was adamant they did want to see me so we made a deal – to do a post with me in, if it gains more traction than usual content then we go that direction. Of course we did it and the thing went absolutely crazy.

From then on in, he’s had me dressing up as Santa – and I hate Christmas – he’s had me rolling on the floor, skateboarding, pouring water all over me – pretty much just anything to embarrass me that people seem to like watching.

Our social content has done so well to the extent that people now recognise me more for these foolish videos than for Gurt Wings – recently I was at a services on the M5, walked inside an a woman immediately called me the ‘guy off Tik Tok’ and started laughing. It’s a strange feeling but it is good, I love people and chatting to people but I don’t want to be a celebrity or anything like that. It’s like at Wingfest this year, the amount of people that asked me to sign things – I don’t even have an autograph!

I didn’t have to lift a finger cooking wise, I was spending more time engaging with customers, which is what needs to happen these days. If I was to start cooking, I’d have to stop and speak to every single person that come by the stand.

Creating an enjoyable workplace for staff:

Learning off the back of previous mistakes factors in a lot, because doing 70-80 hour weeks when it’s my business is one thing. But I can’t go believing that everyone else is in it for the for the same reasons and they’re not. They’ve got their own lives and you have to respect that. I was focused on driving the business to be the best that could be, believing that the people that I was working with were in the same boat.

I mean they were, but it was driving them into the ground and I was coming up with all these crazy ideas. The next things we’re doing, we’re taking on this, we’re doing this and they’re just looking at me in disbelief, like I’m an absolute madman – we’re already stretched as it is.

So we’ve focused a lot on that. I’ve been in toxic environments before and they’re not great at all so when we take people on, we explain in great detail we don’t want a toxic environment, we want it to be a happy place. We’re all here to work, but we want it to make it as enjoyable as possible and have a laugh.

I think it is important to reward hard work – few months back we’d had an incredible month so we had a private party at a local burger restaurant, fed everyone and gave them a free bar. Recently we also had the Gurt Wings warehouse party which is always a good laugh.

You can’t overestimate the value of just talking to staff, speaking to them and finding out if there are problems, what are they and how we can rectify them as quickly as possible. It’s like Wingfest this year – by far the best we’ve done in terms of the operation, my Ops manage just nailed it. We put out an incredible number of wings, every staff member got a break, they were all enjoying interacting with customers, had their music on and just made the whole thing fun.

Perhaps most importantly it feels like a collective, rather than it just being me. When we’ve won something, we’ve all won something. Everyone feels like it’s their win and it really does boost morale.

If you create a good work environment, people will work harder, they enjoy coming to work. They take pride in what they do. The guys, when we get good reviews on Google or good reviews on any social media we ask them to screenshot it and send it to the group chat. We all offer congratulations then. Just the same if we get bad reports, it goes to the group chat. We then have a meeting the next day about where we failed, where we went wrong, how we can learn from it. Nobody’s getting shouted at.

We are always keen to get feedback from customers so we can make sure everything is being done to standard. We’re at the stage now where people know what to expect from us. We don’t want people to sugarcoat anything – if it wasn’t good, let us know. Then we can find out why and rectify any potential issues. I think it’s about respecting the customer and they do value that. We always want to be known for our level of quality.

Future plans:

We’ve got some very big plans. You’ve spoken to us at the right time. We’ve been considering loads of different, crazy ideas about what we’re doing next. The next thing is to move out of this warehouse unit we’re in. We’re getting a big 4000 square foot unit which will be able to house three straight four trucks. We’ve got our third truck on order, which is currently being built. We are looking at opening in some other locations, but I can’t say too much about that at the moment.

But you’ll be seeing a lot more of Gurt Wings across much wider areas shortly. And then our main focus for the next two years is to have a flagship restaurant. I’ve long been against this personally, because of how tough it is for a fixed site, with business rates and the lack of governmental support. But, we think the time is right and we have faith in our loyal Bristol following to make a restaurant work. We need to find the right location and make sure it’s really right for us of course.

We’re also looking at introducing a bigger range of sauces and bigger sizes of sauce bottles. Also some more merchandise – there’s so much going on, it’s an exciting time and I’m going to be packed the next few months!

You can find out more about Gurt Wings here and follow their journey here.