Celebrating our 5th birthday

Happy 5 YEARS to our little bakery! On May 26th 2020, we made our first-ever delivery, slinging cookies for free in return for reviews. That first day, I ran on no sleep, over-baked our snickerdoodle by a full minute, and our car broke down. We took orders by DM, and we had mostly normal-sized (1.5 oz) cookies with 1 Pudge flavor (oatmeal raisin). It was so incredibly far from perfect, but we never looked back.

Now let’s take it from May 2024. Here are a few highlights of our 5th year!

• We pushed hard on pop-ups in 2024 - doing about 2-3 a month on top of our twice-weekly deliveries & Friday pickups. We did one pop-up at Meta with our friend @lovethroughletterpress! (I’ll admit I actually had terrible sleeping habits over the last few years, but this was the year I actually changed everything and finally got used to the early wake-ups!!)
• We had a summer of failed tea flavors including Passionfruit Jasmine and Black Milk Tea with Mochi. I wanted to achieve strong tea-forward flavors, which was the crux for both cookies. After trying several methods that didn’t scale well, we put these on pause. These flavors were some of the best I ever made, but they softened too much within a few hours, and didn’t spread well. I hope to learn more to be able to fix these problems and launch these flavors in the future.
• We were in the newspaper (Mercury News) - a physical paper!! and had an article in SF Chronicle.
• We re-designed our logo and website in anticipation of the storefront (blog post here).
• We hired and trained staff starting last fall, and this was such an unbelievably un-sexy process! It was mostly taking feedback and reformatting the hell out of our recipes until our error rate was extremely low. I standardized a few small things here and there, and scaled up our recipes for the larger mixers that we have in our brick & mortar. We’ve come a long way from being just 1-2 people in the kitchen, but this process has given us a lot of freedom to do other things.

Flavor development over the years has gone down a lot as we’ve shifted our focus towards growth - especially this last year with the behemoth project of building out the store.

• 2020 - 2021: 9 total flavors
  
• 2021 - 2022: 20 total flavors in 2022 (technically 6 new; 7 updated)
• 2022 - 2023: 23 total flavors in 2023 (retired 1)
• 2023 - 2024: 24 total flavors (1 update)
• 2024 - 2025: 25 total flavors to date

The storefront process is so huge that it’ll have its own blog post, but I’d love to share more about the slow road from home bakery to brick & mortar. The last few years have tested us in many ways. It all fascinates me especially looking back.

• Product-market fit: I spent 1-1.5 years being an absolute anxious, obsessed wreck trying to reach product stability, standardizing our processes and so many meltdowns over Pudges gone wrong or being unpredictable.
• Maximizing me: We started with a 5qt mixer and a home oven, and we went really slow to be safe: adding an 8qt mixer, 2x 20qt mixers, then a single deck oven. I worked more hours, cried a bunch when it was physically/emotionally tough in the first few years, but kept going. It never felt great in the moment, but it always felt like the only right choice. Always another vote to keep going.
• Time & financial pressures: we started to pursue a storefront in 2023,  and wanted things to go SO much faster than they have. We really hoped to open in 2023… but we couldn’t even sign a lease until 2024. Financially, we are lucky to have some investors (not big deep-pocketed entities, but customers who believe in us). Sweat-equity aside, we’ve also invested most of our savings. It’s a scary place to be - with real pressure of investor obligations and an iron-clad lease above our heads. You feel like your whole life is on the line, and the only thing you can do is your best. To keep it together and make all the right moves as if you had some sort of security. 

The last 5 years have been incredibly hard, but the most fulfilling and awesome years of my entire life. While the storefront process has been horribly unlucky in so many ways, it has been confirmation after confirmation that we would do anything to bring this bakery to life as a brick & mortar - and to do it well. Not only do we have the huge honor of doing what we love, but to see our last 5 years turn into something huge and magical, and share it with the best customers we could ask for. I am so incredibly lucky to be doing this with Lawrance by my side - without him, there would be no business, full stop.

Thank you for celebrating 5 years with us. We'll see you soon in the store!

- Amy & Lawrance