Blaze Pizza opened Thursday at 2320 Lincoln Way, with a special deal on Friday.

Blaze Pizza offers “fast fire’d” personal pizzas. Customers can choose from their eight signature pizzas or build their own pizza with as many toppings as they’d like. Then, they watch as their pizzas are cooked in the restaurant’s main oven in 180 seconds.

Customers who showed on Friday that they follow or like Blaze Pizza on social media were offered a free build-your-own pizza.

This deal brought students and Ames community members to wait outside of 2320 for up to two hours.

But once inside, customers said that the wait was definitely worth it.

“The taste is different than other pizza shops around Ames,” said one customer, Amy Huynh. “It’s also very fast.”

Another customer, Randi Hahn, agreed with Huynh, adding “it’s cool that everything is the same price no matter what toppings you get.”

All of the signature and make-your-own pizzas are completely customizable, made in eight minutes and cost $7.95 no matter how many toppings are added.

General Manager, Doug Bremer says that this, along with the clean ingredients used in the pizzas, makes it a perfect restaurant for college students.

“Why wouldn’t we want to?” Paul McCrae, Director of Operations, said when asked why they decided to bring Blaze Pizza to Ames. He gestured to the long line waiting outside. “There’s 30 thousand students right across the street.”

These college students also make up about 95 percent of the 42 employees.

“These kids that we have working here right now, they’ve learned so fast and they care,” said Bremer. “It’s awesome working with college kids.”

The employees asked, spoke very highly of working at Blaze as well.

“I like that it’s so fast paced and I get to interact with so many people,” said employee Clare Nolan.

Another employee, Alissa Waterhouse agreed. Saying that the “social aspect” was her favorite part of the job.

“It’s not like working at a fast food restaurant,” said employee Brad Benson. “We keep busy but it’s also fun. There’s always music playing and everyone that works here just seems really chill.”

Another important aspect of Blaze Pizza is being a part of a community. Bremer and McCrae explained that they look forward to hosting pizza night fundraisers for community organizations and giving 20 percent of the profits to the organizations.

But most importantly, they look forward to “seeing the word get spread more and more, every week, every month and just growing and growing.”