Matty Matheson is dropping a new signature Gozney oven

Matty Matheson is a star and producer on the award-winning shoe The Bear, a massive YouTube personality, best-selling cookbook author, restaurateur, entrepreneur, and more. No one will ever confuse him with the ShamWow guy, but that’s exactly what Matheson is going for in a new brand campaign from outdoor oven brand Gozney.

The extremely fitted blue shirt is all part of an infomercial vibe concocted by Matheson and the Gozney creative team. “I found that shirt on eBay,” says Matheson. “Because I just felt like I needed to wear a stupid shirt, like the ShamWow guy or something.”

It’s also part of the brand’s first paid media advertising push for a new campaign called “Cook Different.” And perhaps the crown jewel of it all is a signature Matty Matheson edition of Gozney’s new Tread portable outdoor oven that drops June 18.

Since 2021, Gozney has grown from $25 million in revenue to nearly $100 million last year—despite the outdoor pizza oven market exploding over COVID-19 and since contracting. Gozney has strategically used design and content to differentiate itself, and build a healthy brand identity. Key to the brand’s success is the relationships it has built with chefs and personalities like Matheson. With “Cook Different,” Gozney is out to prove it. 

Meeting Matty

Tom Gozney founded his company in 2010 as the Stone Bake Oven Company, producing custom-built commercial pizza ovens for the U.K. market. But in 2016, with the launch of the Roccbox oven, Gozney shifted its focus to everyday people.

He knew that if he could convince chefs of the portable outdoor oven’s value, then the home kitchen heroes would follow. So he began building relationships with influential U.K. chefs. One of them was Lee Tiernan, owner of Black Axe Mangal. Tiernan was trying out Gozney’s Roccbox oven, and was among a few who spread the world to Matheson in Canada. 

“Several my friends in England that are chefs were like, ‘yo, there’s this fucking oven that’s sick, you should check it out,’” says Matheson. “I got one. We used it. It’s sick. I loved it. And then Tom brought me over to England and we just hit it off.”

Gozney was a fan of Matheson’s based on his work with Vice, so was keen to get him an oven. Soon after, Matheson was posting clips of himself using it, not even as a paid ambassador. “It was so brand elevating for us at the time,” says Gozney. “Matty was a subcultural figurehead through Munchies and Vice and all of that stuff.”

Since then, Matheson has been involved in other Gozney content, but also a sounding board behind the scenes on new and potential ambassadors. Gozney says that it’s one of the company’s longest relationships and a standard-bearer for what they aim for overall. 

“I didn’t want to build an outdoor cooking brand. I wanted to build something culturally relevant,” says Gozney. “And I was always fundamentally focused on, who are the people that we’re going to interact with? Even if someone has 10 times the followers, but they’re not culturally right for the brand, we just won’t fuck with them. And Matty is just the epitome of what we’re looking for.” 

They’ve been working together for so long that when the idea for a signature oven came up, Gozney says there was really only one choice. “Matty’s obviously got an incredible way about him from a brand perspective, and we wanted to lean into collaborations,” says Gozney. “And it just felt like the right move for us to start with these Matty campaigns. He’s been the leading, most passionate brand partner and friend for so many years, it just felt fitting. It would feel like I was cheating on him if I did it with anyone else.”

Enter the Tread

This is only the company’s third signature product. Both Tom Gozney and Brad Leone have had limited signature Roccbox designs. The Tread is a new oven, designed for being as portable as possible. It weighs in at less than 30 pounds, fits 12-inch pizzas and cast iron pans, can hit 950 degrees Fahrenheit in 15 minutes, and features a stand with adjustable legs, a built-in level, and a roof rack cutting board. The growth trajectory of the company, combined with a new product, presented an opportunity for the brand to lean a bit more into its relationship with Matheson.

The limited edition Matty x Tread oven is bright orange, featuring illustrations by Matty’s longtime artist, Christopher Wilson, engraved onto its stainless steel exterior. It looks a bit like a Stars Wars droid that just happens to cook pizza. In a good way. There’s also a capsule collection of customized placement peels and other merch.

“This was just one of those perfect opportunities to kind of just put a little bit of my character into this perfect thing they’ve developed,” says Matheson. “I’m not some pizza master. It makes amazing pizzas, but I’m a meat and potatoes kind of guy, so I think it’s a perfect outdoor oven. The blaze orange is so iconic.”

Retaining heat

The videos were shot on a sound stage in Salt Lake City and Matheson says the process was pretty loose. “It’s this thing where they came with a really good idea, and we just started riffing back and forth,” he says. “It was all just really collaborative. Their team knows me, they understand my wheelhouse, and they wanted to do something fun. So we had a basic outline and then we just had fun with it.”

Jonathan Kantor, Gozney’s chief revenue and marketing officersays he was aiming for something like a cross between HexClad and Liquid Death. The former effectively leverages its partnership with Gordon Ramsay, while the latter creates hilarious content that plays with our cultural relationship with brands and advertising. “The concept of ‘Cook Different’ is about elevating Matty’s presence within Gozney, along with our background with professional chefs and commercial ovens, and doing a brand campaign that’s more about captivating eyeballs and telling a story versus more direct response, transactional marketing.”

Gozney is investing in more traditional paid media for this campaign than ever before, specifically on connected TV, and will have a shared billboard in Times Square. 

At the same time, it continues to invest in longer form content, like its ongoing YouTube series Pizza with Frank, starring Frank Pinello. Pinello is the founder of Brooklyn pizzeria Best Pizza, and is about to start his second full season of the Gozney-backed show. 

“It’s completely entertainment storytelling,” says Kantor. “These episodes get 500,000 to a million views a piece, and there’s not a single paid media dollar behind them. So we’re thinking about who shows up in content, who shows up on our own channels, and how we can tell stories around it.”

In a world flooded with collabs, Matheson says the longevity and real connection between them is what makes this collaboration different, and he hopes it shows in the content and the product. 

“We’ve been both doing this thing since the beginning,” says Matheson. “With other brands, it’s a job, it’s how we pay the bills. It’s how I’m able to continue my YouTube and continue a lot of things. Sometimes a brand just wants you for this one thing. No problem. But this is very different. 

“Gozney has been holding on to a lot of the people that have been there since the beginning, and I think that really shows the importance of true alignment, that is really special and really organic. We have a genuine, good relationship. Some brands are like that. Some aren’t,” says Matheson.