Hooters has lost its nerve and its audience. How would I turn it around?
Hooters has announced it wants to be family-friendly.
Yes, the Hooters that dresses its waiters up and sells the concept of sex as its main differentiator.
It's a bit like if Matcha rebranded to contain alcohol, or Sabrina Carpenter promoted maxi dresses, and it's completely missing the point. Being family-friendly is not, and should not be, what they're about.
The CEO, Neil Kiefer (who is one of the original founders), told People magazine that Hooters was always "a beach-themed place centred around the Hooters Girls, good food, and an easy place to relax." Describing it as a neighbourhood, family-style place that you should be able to bring along the kids to.
I'm sure you're currently rolling your eyes at that. Like I was and like the entire internet did. And that's because it goes against everything Hooters has stood for in the past.
I (a heterosexual woman based in the UK) am, of course, not the Hooters target customer, and have never been. That's a good thing: brands need to be clear about who their customer is not in order to be undoubting about who it is. Whilst it wasn't meant for me, Hooters has (or had) undoubtedly built one of the most ownable positions ever seen in food and hospitality. The idea of them being family-friendly is a complete oxymoron and is completely the wrong move.
What had they got right?
Naturally, they're trying to make a dramatic pivot because their business isn't going well. But besides the bits they've got very wrong, there are things they've got very right.
In 1983, six businessmen in Clearwater, Florida (none of whom had any restaurant experience) opened a bar and grill. By their own telling, they just wanted "a place they couldn't get kicked out of." They named it Hooters. The name was a double entendre, and nobody was pretending otherwise. They put the waitresses in white tank tops and orange shorts and called them Hooters Girls. The owl logo was named Hootie.
Subtlety was not on the menu, yet by refusing to be subtle, they built something truly rare. Whether they meant to or not, Hooters built a clear intersection. A newly created space that they owned, and were the only ones competing in. Sex and food.
There are millions of restaurants, and probably the same number of places built around sex appeal in some form. But a sit-down restaurant that openly combined proper comfort food with the Hooters Girls made the whole thing silly and fun, and perfectly attracted their target customer: men.
By the mid-2000s, Hooters had grown to over 400 restaurants across 29 countries, with revenue nudging a billion dollars a year. They had a recognisable jingle, a casino in Las Vegas, and even a short-lived airline.
The brand had cultural weight in a way most restaurant chains can only dream of. You didn't just know what Hooters was, you had a feeling about it. I, despite never having set foot in one of their restaurants, can pick out their staff uniform and logo, and tell you what they stand for.
And the reason that works is simple. When you own a distinctive intersection, you become very hard to misunderstand. People know exactly what they're signing up for. The ones who like it, love it. The ones who don't, stay away, at no loss to the brand, just as proof that it does stand for something strong enough for people to stand against them.
Safe is just a synonym for forgettable, and Hooters back then was never at risk of being forgettable.
So where did the wheels come off?
The original founders sold the brand's intellectual property in 2001. When private equity arrived, Hooters of America grew quickly, took on significant debt, and began making the decisions debt-laden businesses always make: short-term thinking, cost-cutting, and inconsistency from one location to the next.
By the late 2000s, the cracks were showing, and by the late 2010s they were impossible to miss.
From 2018 to 2023, US systemwide sales dropped nearly 15%. The number of domestic restaurants shrank by 12%. By the time Hooters filed for Chapter 11 in March 2025, it was sitting on roughly $376 million in debt, with annual repayments alone eating around $30 million a year.
But the money is the symptom, and as always, the real downfall comes down to the brand.
Because what happened is Hooters stopped doing either side of its intersection well.
Their entire reason to exist was the combination of two things: great food and the (great) Hooters Girls. For that positioning to hold, you need both halves to be pulling their weight.
The food got worse. Not catastrophically, but it went downhill enough that people stopped raving about the food and it became largely 'average'.
The experience got confused. Competitors had spotted the success and decided they wanted a piece of the pie. Twin Peaks and Tilted Kilt were growing at 30% whilst Hooters were losing. And the response seems to have been an attempt to out-sex the competition, with uniforms drifting into what "appeared to be a thong". But with no investment in the atmosphere or food itself, Hooters were no longer owning their own intersection.
The result was a brand that had somehow managed to be more provocative in execution and less interesting to spend an evening in. They pushed one dimension harder without making the whole thing better. And simply stopped being fun.
Which brings us to now
After the March 2025 Chapter 11 filing, the original founders bought back around 140 locations that autumn, with Kiefer returning as CEO saying: "We hate to see what they've done to it. We need to try to improve it."
But the strategy they've landed on, to my eye, is the single move that guarantees Hooters becomes genuinely irrelevant.
They're talking about a family-friendly rebrand, Kids Eat Free promotions and "more modest uniforms." All of which means voluntarily abandoning the category within the restaurant industry that they themselves founded. And walking straight into a fight with every other casual dining chain on identical, generic terms: food, friendliness, and family appeal.
That's a fight Hooters cannot win.
It's a brutally crowded space, stuffed with chains that have better brand equity in that territory, better unit economics, and no 40-year history of standing for something entirely different. The moment Hooters tries to out-family TGI Friday's (itself now bankrupt), it's playing someone else's game on someone else's pitch.
Hooters needs to get back to their roots
One of the most damaging things any brand can do is decide that its non-fans are the key to its growth. Especially when winning them over would require drastically changing the product, and risking alienating those who appreciated it as it was.
Hooters' instinct right now (to soften the concept, broaden the appeal, and make itself welcoming to people who'd never have walked in before) is a strategy built on the wrong problem. The problem was never that too many people dislike Hooters. The problem is that the people who should love it stopped finding it worth their time.
Step one: get specific about their target customer
My aforementioned "men" is not a target customer definition.
Hooters has always pointed itself vaguely in the direction of men. But which men? A 29-year-old on a stag do and a 67-year-old who wants a good meal and a cold beer in a room that's nice to sit in are not the same person.
Beyond the basics of age and gender, Hooters also needs to consider the moments when they want to serve their customers. What's the feeling, circumstance, time, that people need to come?
For example, they could focus fully on 20–35-year-old men celebrating in groups. Leaning all the way into the rowdy, celebratory, stag-do and sports crowds. Working to own that specific night out and be the place groups of men go to watch the game and have an unapologetically good time.
Step two: Make the staff the product again
The Hooters Girls have always been the core of the brand. However, "the brand" and "an afterthought" are two distinct roles, and Hooters has long treated them as the latter. The concept only succeeds if the women working there truly want to be part of it and genuinely enjoy their experience.
My strong suspicion is that Hooters is not, right now, an aspirational place to work. Which is fatal. Because if the staff aren't proud of what they're doing, the entire concept collapses from the inside.
So what would I change?
First up, the waitress pay needs to be significantly above average. If the Hooters Girls are the product (and they are), pay them like it. Not waitress wages plus tips. Something that reflects the fact that they are, literally, a core part of what people are paying for at the door.
On the point of acting, the best hospitality in the world is built on staff who are trained performers as much as servers. What does that look like for Hooters? Think of the restaurant that's known for their staff being purposefully rude (Dick's Last Resort), or the NYC Broadway restaurant where the waitresses all sing (Ellen's Stardust Diner). What craft can the Hooters waitresses be known for?
Step three: fix the food
Again, an intersection only works when all sides are excellent. If the food isn't worth talking about on its own merits, the whole thing is just a gimmick.
The food needs to be genuinely great, so it's a good enough reason for people to talk about coming.
And beyond that, it's again a great place to add interest and do something different.
There's a UK restaurant called Six by Nico, where the whole menu changes every six weeks around a new theme. Creating a kind of active pull to come back relatively frequently to try the new menu.
I appreciate that's a logistical nightmare to update the menu every six weeks, but perhaps Hooters could do a permanent core menu of their classics, alongside a rotating special seasonal dish updated each quarter? This could lean straight into the Hooter's personality, with each menu becoming a chance to express the brand and have some fun.
Step four: lean into the controversy
The controversy is the brand. It always was.
Not the controversy of being offensive but being unapologetically specific about what they are. By knowing they're not for everyone and not trying to be.
Every brand that's ever made real cultural impact has done this. They drew a line and stood firmly on one side of it. The people on the other side don't like it? Fine, they were never going to be loyal anyway. But the people on your side? They feel like the brand is theirs and feel connected to it.
You're never going to appeal to everyone. So you may as well really deeply appeal to the target customer you're focusing on.
What can you learn from their mistakes?
Businesses have to be distinctive. They need a real point of view, and if possible, to sit in a territory that nobody else is in.
But because that territory is uncomfortable or lonely, too many brands then start softening it until it's palatable to a wider crowd. And in doing so, rather than becoming more appealing, you become less interesting.
The answer isn't to stop being provocative, but to become excellent again. Being safe didn't save Hooters, and it won't save you either. So lean into those differences.
No brand is for everybody. And the sooner you stop trying to be, the sooner you can start building something that the right people actually love.
