Andy Taylor’s résumé contains a plot twist at precisely the point most executive biographies become predictable. He studied economics and mathematics at the University of York, began in business planning at Deloitte, moved into strategy and finance, and then left the conference room for the sea. For roughly two and a half years, he worked as a PADI Open Water Scuba Instructor, first with Greenforce and then Blue Marlin Indonesia.
It is an arresting interval between spreadsheets and shops. It also makes a certain operational sense. A dive is a service delivered by people, under time pressure, in an environment unimpressed by a confident presentation. Equipment has to work. Instructions must be understood. The customer has to trust the person leading the experience. Calm is not decorative.
When Taylor returned to consumer business, he kept choosing companies where the promise is easy to describe and awkward to reproduce. A fresh sandwich. A delivered lunch. A very large cookie. A personalized facial. None can be scaled by slogan alone. Each depends on small actions performed correctly by a lot of people, over and over, while rent, labor, logistics and customer expectation make their usual mischief.
The first operating schoolA sandwich has a memory
Taylor joined Pret A Manger in 2008 as vice president of finance and strategy and became chief operating officer the following year. During his operations tenure, Pret’s American footprint grew from 11 to 33 shops in New York and reached Washington, Boston and Chicago. The numbers matter, but the format mattered more: a compact menu, food prepared through the day, brisk service and a recognizable room. Pret was a machine designed to feel hospitable.
This is the persistent tension in Taylor’s career. Standardization can protect quality, but it can also flatten charm. A customer wants the same sandwich to be good tomorrow, yet does not want to feel as though lunch has been issued by a committee. Finance can count the locations. Operations must preserve the reason anyone walks into them.
After Pret came three years as chief executive of Hale and Hearty, the New York soup-and-sandwich chain. Then, in 2017, Taylor entered a more theatrical experiment. Ando, backed by chef David Chang, had been conceived as a delivery-first restaurant with technology at its center. The premise suited the moment. New Yorkers were becoming comfortable summoning cars and dinner with a thumb. The practical question was whether a restaurant could disappear from the street and still become familiar.
“If you’ve got a big fat corner on Lexington Avenue, a lot of pairs of eyes see it every day, and people just know who X brand is.”Andy Taylor, on the disadvantage of a delivery-only restaurant
Ando found that the missing storefront was only one difficulty. Delivery was expensive. Some dishes arrived diminished by the journey. Specials multiplied while the core menu needed attention. Under Taylor, the company narrowed the menu, refocused on the food and added a 12-seat shop near Union Square. The tiny dining room was less a retreat from technology than an admission that physics still gets a vote. An app can make ordering delightful. It cannot keep every fried dish crisp.
Uber Eats acquired Ando in early 2018, taking on its team and technology while the restaurant operation closed. The episode left a compact lesson: digital convenience is powerful when it supports the product. It becomes expensive scenery when the product cannot survive the trip.
The beloved-brand problemHow many bakeries can a queue become?
Levain Bakery presented Taylor with the opposite problem. Nobody had to be persuaded that the product existed. For years, customers had queued for six-ounce cookies at a small collection of New York shops. Levain had affection, lore and a blue door. What it did not yet have was a broad national footprint.
Taylor became chief executive in March 2018. Over the next five years, Levain grew from three New York locations to 13 shops across several markets. It expanded e-commerce, redesigned shipping packaging and put frozen cookies into grocery freezers. Each channel created reach and a fresh opportunity to disappoint. The box had to protect the cookie. The grocery product had to remind people of the bakery rather than merely borrow its name. A new shop had to join a neighborhood instead of landing in it like an attractive spaceship.
His language at the time was notably cautious. “The intention at the beginning was never to blow the growth out,” he said as Levain prepared to open in Georgetown. The remark sounds almost eccentric coming from the executive hired to expand. It is also the point. Growth can be rapid on paper and clumsy on the pavement. Taylor’s public test for the packaged-cookie line was whether it invited people into the brand rather than diluted it.
More doors, different assignments
Selected reported location counts. Each bar is contextual, not a like-for-like performance comparison.
The pandemic sharpened the e-commerce test. Online demand jumped, and packaging became both a customer-facing object and a warehouse problem. Taylor described the need for a system that could protect the product, represent the brand and move efficiently at greater volume. The cookie was still the star. Cardboard, storage and fulfillment had to learn supporting roles.
A new category, a familiar jobThe room still does the work
In June 2023, after a 12-month search, Heyday appointed Taylor chief executive. He succeeded co-founder Adam Ross, who remained on the board alongside co-founder Michael Pollak. On the surface, cookies to skincare looks like a hard swerve. Operationally, the resemblance is plain. Both businesses have physical locations, appointment or traffic patterns, frontline teams, products sold beyond the core service, and brands built through sensory experience. Both can be harmed by expansion that outruns training.
Heyday began in New York in 2015 with a deliberately narrow offer: personalized facials, curated products and guidance from licensed estheticians. It has since grown through company-owned and franchised studios. The company now reports 35 locations across the United States and more than one million facials delivered. Taylor arrived with a mandate to guide the next stage of retail and franchise development.
The business model is built around return visits rather than rare celebrations. Membership matters because it gives a personal service a rhythm. Taylor says it improves visit frequency, steadies revenue and makes labor planning more predictable. His point is not merely financial. A recurring customer brings history into the room. Advice can build on the previous appointment. The next visit does not begin with an introduction.
“Sustainable growth isn’t built on constantly chasing first visits. It’s built on deepening engagement with the clients already in our ecosystem.”Andy Taylor, 2026
This is growth by return ticket. It is less glamorous than a rush of openings and more demanding than a promotion. The service must justify another hour on the calendar. Staff must educate without turning checkout into a siege. Franchise operators need enough consistency to reproduce the model and enough judgment to keep it personal.
The discipline of boundariesKnowing what the business declines to be
Taylor’s recent description of Heyday begins with limits. “We’re not trying to be everything to everyone,” he said. He separated the company from a traditional spa, a salon and a medspa chasing trends. The useful word there is not not. It is trying. Consumer brands often collect categories as though breadth were a personality. Heyday’s operating logic depends on restraint: a focused service, recurring behavior, consistent execution and long relationships.
Such clarity is particularly valuable in a franchise. A fuzzy promise becomes fuzzier with every handoff. A narrow one can be taught, measured and improved. Education happens in the treatment room, Taylor says, and product recommendations should follow the customer’s needs rather than a hard sell. If that interaction works, retention follows. The spreadsheet receives its reward later.
His professional biography credits him with opening more than 80 retail units across several industries. Yet the more revealing pattern is qualitative. At Pret, he learned the choreography of a high-frequency shop. At Ando, he saw technology collide with food and delivery economics. At Levain, he helped a local institution travel through stores, boxes and freezers. At Heyday, he is applying those lessons to a service in which much of the value walks into the room wearing a name badge.
The scuba years no longer look like a detour. They look like an early version of the same job: prepare the system, train the person, respect the environment, earn trust. A chief executive can make growth sound abstract. Taylor’s career keeps returning it to the physical world, where a sandwich is eaten, a cookie arrives intact, a client books again, and every grand strategy eventually has to fit through a front door.