XL cover story

The wrap artistry of Freebirds

From the 'Monster' burrito to Lady Liberty to the foil origami, Freebirds embodies an earthy attitude

By Shermakaye Bass
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Thursday, March 30, 2006

Stroll into the Freebirds World Burrito on South Congress Avenue, and the thing that jumps out at you, besides the flying guitars and the Easy Rider-style chopper with Lady Liberty astride, is the aluminum foil.

Lots of it.

Hand-sculpted foil creatures cling to walls, windowsills and electrical-outlet poles, leftovers from the quintessential Freebirds customer — a recycler, no doubt, who has used his burrito wrapper to express his inner Rodin.

"I just like to make stuff with it," shrugs a twentysomething-year-old customer at Austin's newest location, one of four in town. She wedges her foil spider into a crag in the store's brick interior and hurries off to her bookstore job. At a four-top nearby, a group of college guys from Minnesota click pictures of their aluminum creations with cell phone cameras.

"We heard we had to come to Freebirds in Austin," one tourist tells employee Dustin Pharis, 21, before shouldering his daypack and preparing to mosey. "What else should we see?"

Pharis recommends Barton Springs.

Most everyone cottons to the store's improv artwork, including students from the nearby Texas School for the Deaf, which regularly sends art classes to check out the latest tinfoil concoctions, Pharis says.

But there's more to these little sculptures than customer expression. They populate each of the College Station-based company's 14 locations, and whether they're aluminum aliens, Longhorn horns, sombreros or bicycles or peace signs, the foil figures embody Freebirds' organic philosophy.

Anti-commercial capitalism

"In general I think advertising sucks, and in a lot of ways commercialism sucks," says California transplant Pierre Dube, 46, founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Freebirds World Burrito, a chain but a stalwart nonfranchise.

So he's carved a different path for his company, a business model that many in the "fast-casual" restaurant business have described as ahead of the curve.

It is a "go-through-the-cafeteria-line sit-down dining kind of place," said Richie Jackson, executive VP/CEO of the Texas Restaurant Association. "There's others that have similar models — Baja Fresh comes to mind, even Chipotle has a similar one. So it's not totally unique to the marketplace. And yet Freebirds tends to have this mystique to it that maybe some of its competitors don't, because it has that sort of Austin appeal."

The 15-year-old company — not from Austin — relies on a few simple key elements: Get the customer involved, open new locations slowly and in ever-expanding concentric geographic circles, and cultivate a creative employee and client culture.

And, oh yes, use the words "free" or "freedom" or "Freebirds" with a backward "F" in just about every promotion or slogan you develop.

Clearly it works.

At the South Congress Avenue location, where business suits mingle with green hair and tattoos at the build-your-own-burrito assembly line, regulars come in daily "at about the same time and for the same things" every day, says Pharis. "There's a lot of interaction between the people that come in and the people who work here," he observes.

Threadgill's owner Eddie Wilson admires the way Freebirds has developed intensely loyal customers.

"Just seeing those kids lined up every day with their belly buttons showing and eating burritos with both hands and their bodies changing shape right before your eyes — and they still come out of there with change in their pockets," Wilson says, "it's kind of like running down the food gauntlet, actually the opposite of going to Starbucks and yet sort of the same: You point and grunt, they scoop and plop and then they roll it and hand it to you. What the hell could be more fun than that? One of the things that's most impressive is they came out of College Station, where 110 out of every 100 restaurants fail. (Figure I'll shoot 'em a little Aggie math.)"

Those committed customers have made sure the company thrives. Last year, Freebirds, which operates 14 stores around Texas and two more opening within the next 60 days, made out like gangbusters.

"On average as a company, consolidated at the store level, we exceeded 18 percent income for last year," says president and chief operating officer Alan Hixon. In 2005, the Freebirds Hancock Center location alone zoomed over $1.8 million in sales; the average sales per location is $1.4 million.

"That's cranking some volume," Jackson said. "For the kind of operation they're in and for the market they're in, and for the kind of in-line strip-center, that is a very, very respectable volume. If their net profit before taxes is 18 percent, that's a very profitable operation. The average before tax profit in this industry is somewhere in the 3 to 5 percent range. So those are wonderful numbers."

And only in the past four years has the privately held company chosen to finance the cost of a new location, Hixon says, adding, "That's only because we wanted to open more stores faster."

Prior to about 2002, all new locations were funded straight out of the company's flow.

"We've been very deliberate in our growth. We've been careful not to grow too fast, and we've stayed regional — there are locations in College Station, Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston and now Lubbock. That's one of the reasons we don't franchise," Hixon explains, so the company can control the quality and continue nurturing that quirky "Freebirds culture."

Employees and the clients call the loyal customers who make up the culture "Freebirds fanatics."

An example: On any given day, Austin's Hancock Center location rings up about $5,000 in sales, and at lunchtime generates a line that snakes out the door, punctuated with encouraging signs saying things like, "15 Minute wait from this point." By the time customers progress through the burrito assembly line, with its 30-plus ingredients, and reach the cashier, they can play the Freebirds dice game — a plastic dome encasing two special dice, à la the board game Trouble or Sorry.

If the customer gets two backwards F's when he pops down the plastic dome, the next meal is on the house.

Hatching the bird

As the company's slogan broadcasts, "It's Not Normal."

Agreed. It's not normal for fast food to be so fresh and the atmosphere so engaging. It's not normal for the people working at a fast-casual restaurant to act so (naturally) happy. And it's definitely not normal for a place to be as calculatedly quirky as Freebirds (the aluminum foil sculpture gardens, backwards letters in the company logo, the Statue of Liberty motif and "Tell Libby" feedback stations) and still come off as sincere.

But perhaps most surprising about the Fresh-Mex burrito chain, known also for social-profit programs like the "Freebikes" programs (free bikes are given to elementary school kids who submit winning essay and photo contests each year) is that it's based in College Station, that bastion of things hip and cool.

Not Austin.

And yet it's not uncommon for people to assume Freebirds, which employs some 450 people, is Austin born and bred. With its artsy approach (each location reflects some iconic element of the city — i.e. San Antonio's flying accordions) and its live-and-let-live vibe, Freebirds seems like a natural component of our city's "Keep Austin Weird" campaign. Something akin to Book People, or Whole Foods in its early days.

But the whole funky kit and caboodle is based in College Station, because, as Dube says, after researching major college towns across the United States and factoring in real estate costs and availability, Aggieland made the most sense for a headquarters.

Actually, the first Freebirds hatched in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1987, and from there, the owners opened a store in College Station based on reams of marketing research. It was almost 20 years ago when two roommates at the University of California, Santa Barbara — Dube and Mark Orfalea — found themselves lamenting the lack of decent dining options near their campus. Business and accounting majors in their early to mid-20s, they decided to open a burrito shop targeting college students, specializing in healthy ingredients such as black beans, Spanish rice, sautéed fresh veggies and lean grilled chicken and beef.

They named it Freebirds, because they championed all kinds of notions of freedom, not just for themselves but as part of a restaurant-business model. Plus, Orfalea's late father had been fond of riding motorcycles (thus the Easy Rider motif). The problem was, Dube wanted to grow the concept; "I wanted to roll with it!" he says. And Orfalea wasn't sure what he wanted to do next. Eventually, Dube bought the rights to all things "Freebirds" — except for the Santa Barbara location — and began to build on the cult following he'd developed at the original A&M store in the Northgate area next to campus. Already the store had earned a free-and-easy reputation with its customer-graffiti wall and laissez-faire groove. Conservative College Station had nurtured few places like it.

When the little company hit a rough patch in 1991 and Dube feared his bird might not fly, he took it straight to the customers with his now-famous "Save the Bird, Eat a Monster" campaign. Customers rallied behind Dube and his Aggie Freebirds, buying T-shirts and stickers with the slogan, and eating plenty of "Monster" burritos. The California dreamer opened a couple more stores — one on Texas Avenue in College Station and the Hancock Center location in Austin — and for the first time, his 'bird took flight.

By 2000, it was soaring to unexpected financial heights. In 1998, Dube had hired Austin-based Hixon, a restaurant-investment consultant, as his CEO and operations guy. The two agreed to try to open a new location every year, based on some fundamental principles — the foundation of the "Freebirds culture," as they'd come to call it. And for the next five years, they did just that — opening at least one location a year.

Social capital burrito

"Our values are excellence, integrity, fun, giving back — or social profit — and innovation. Those are our core values, but you can always add respect and teamwork," says Dube, a hyperactive overgrown kid-genius with a Zen-like affability.

"I think we've been very authentic in our effort to provide great food, and we like to create some magic in the dining experience. There's a point of taking care of every customer. It's definitely been about being customer-centric," Dube says, citing the influence of Len Berry's book "The Soul of Service."

On a broader scale, Dube's approach to business, or at least the fast-casual business, is rather eccentric — more a philosophy than a strictly-by-the-numbers model.

"I like to call it 'orbiting the giant hairball.' The giant hairball might be the big corporations — and that can get so oppressive and unhealthy. Look at our culture. It gets so competitive. People are trying to compete and do well, and this culture forces them to compromise their health. They're in a hurry to eat and run. But you can eat pretty darn healthy at Freebirds," he says enthusiastically. "I feel I genuinely am serving a good product. I'm not just having fun or trying to make a dime."

Then Dube goes off an a brainy tangent, as he is wont to do, on what's happening in American society and how these happenings and shifts affect everyday people. But as always, Dube's tangent ultimately circles back to his point.

"One of our themes is freedom, freedom of choice — from the art, to the food, to the way we treat our co-workers. If you'll notice, just about all the things you see in our stores are about freedom and free thinking, creativity."

Enter the Statue of Liberty sculptures that erupt from the walls of many Freebirds locations. Ditto the Easy Rider choppers, the foil creatures, the build-your-own assembly line where you get your "1/2 Bird" or your "Monster" burrito.

For Freebirds fanatics and dreamer businessmen like Pierre Dube, "freedom" may have started as a word for nothing left to lose. But with the company soaring to nearly 20 percent income annually, freedom has become synonymous with big gains.

So what's the big deal? Nice, freethinking grassroots-y people making a lot of money while staying true to their basically anti-commercialism premises?

As they say over in College Station, it's just not normal.