Domino's Pizza, and its Logo

The logo shows a 'two and one' domino.

In 1961, brothers Tom and James Monaghan bought Dominick's, a pizza restaurant in the town of Ypsilanti, Michigan, from its owner Dominick DiVarti. By 1965, James had sold his half of the business to Tom (preferring to keep his job as a postman). Tom now had three restaurants, but DiVarti wouldn't allow him to call them all by his name. The name Domino's was suggested by an employee.

The three dots in the logo originally represented the three restaurants, and Monaghan intended to add one for each restaurant he opened. But the chain soon outgrew this idea; Domino's began franchising outlets in 1967, and by 1978 there were 200 of them.

The first outlet outside the USA opened in Winnipeg, Manitoba (Canada) in 1983. Domino's opened its 1,000th store in Vancouver the same year. The first stores in the UK and Japan opened in 1985. The 1,000th store outside the USA opened in 1995, the 1,500th two years later, and by 2014 there were 6,000 international locations.

In 2015, a store in Milan became the company's first outlet in Italy, the true home of pizza.

Tom Monaghan retired in 1998 and sold 93% of his company to Bain Capital, a private investment company based in Boston, Massachusetts, for around $1 billion.

For all of this information (and not for the first time) I am indebted to Wikipedia.

© Haydn Thompson 2020