Cookie Creations Cut Out for Success : Irvine Firm Offers Floury Bouquets for All Occasions
Substituting flour for flowers, this business’ recipe for success is to deliver bright, buttery bouquets throughout Orange County’s office buildings, hospitals and schools.
It’s a strategy that Cookie Creations’ founders, Ryan and Susan Slate, say has yielded double the sales that they expected when they began 21 months ago.
Cookie Creations is a specialty retailer that mixes the marketing techniques of a flower shop with the tasty appeal of a bakery. It makes and sells cookie bouquets and other decorative bakery goods that are most often bought as gifts.
“It gets hectic,” Susan Slate says. “We thought we’d get a break after June of this year, but it hasn’t been true.” The spring gift-giving season--with presents for grads, dads and brides--usually tapers off in late June, but monthly sales have continued to grow, she says.
The owners say they expect sales to increase to $250,000 this year, compared to $165,000 in 1993.
The centerpiece of Cookie Creations’ success is an oversized butter-sugar cookie that the company bakes and decorates, then fastens to a stick and arranges in a basket. The average “bouquet” contains seven cookies and costs $37.50.
“They’re different, original and a good substitute for flowers--especially for men who don’t like to get flowers,” Susan Slate says.
The Fountain Valley couple say they selected an Irvine strip mall for their bakery because of its young, affluent population and sizable business community. “We had to find an area that wouldn’t think $5 was an outrageous amount to pay for a cookie,” Susan Slate says.
Industry experts say that the company’s marketing strategy seeks to tap a certain desire among many Americans, especially those 20 to 25 years old, to maintain a low-fat diet but occasionally splurge.
“People seem to still want to be able to treat themselves to something on more of the decadent end,” says Jannie Herchuk, an audit partner in the Costa Mesa office of the Deloitte & Touche accounting firm.
Specialty gift-food businesses such as Cookie Creations have been growing in popularity for the past five years, Herchuk says, adding that having a good location in an upscale area with high foot traffic is crucial.
The bakery site doubles as factory and showroom for Cookie Creations. Passersby can get a whiff of freshly baked goodies and a kaleidoscope of color from the more than 50 bright bouquets on display. One whimsical basket filled with cookies shaped like clown faces suggests, “Let’s Clown Around.” “Holy Cow! You’re 50 Now,” says a bouquet of cookies resembling cows. A third basket, adorned with cookies decorated to look like an apple, a schoolhouse and chalkboard, heads “To a Class Act.”
At the back of the shop, about six workers roll, cut, bake, drill, decorate, arrange and package the cookies for local deliveries or for shipping. Cookies can also be purchased separately or in bouquets of three to 12. A single decorated cookie costs $5.
During a recent visit, the factory was abuzz with an order that came in around lunchtime for five, 12-cookie baskets to be shipped by 4 p.m. (The store normally requires a day’s notice for large orders but can churn out more than 150 cookies in 24 hours if necessary.) Two workers wrap the cookies in bubble plastic while store manager Bette Weitl whips trays from the oven.
The pace of business is very seasonal, Weitl says. During holidays the staff doubles in number to about 12, she says.
An early Cookie Creations customer is Scott Kambak, an educational psychologist in Fullerton, who began ordering cookie baskets as gifts to those who refer patients to him. Kambak, who directs a private school for students with learning and emotional disabilities, says he heard about Cookie Creations from his sister shortly after it opened.
Not only did the number of referrals grow but so too did his orders at Cookie Creations. He says he now sends about 24 bouquets a year.
“It makes a very unique thank you,” he says. “The price seems right to me . . . because of the response that we get. They’re very, very unique, very, very exciting.”
Irvine orthodontist James Passamano orders cookies for his patients to help them celebrate when their braces come off. The cookies--one for each patient--are shaped like a big tooth and say, “Keep Smiling.”
Many of Cookie Creations’ designs are gleaned from children’s coloring books, Susan Slate says. Professional cake decorators help refine the product.
Store manager Weitl says the shop often gets requests for cookies decorated with a company’s logo or motif. People also come to the store with pictures and portraits. Only once was she forced to turn down a design: a special request for a racy bridal shower gift.
But such snags seem minor compared to the Slates’ earliest and biggest hurdle: finding just the right cookie recipe. They needed a cookie that would taste good, hold its shape in the oven, withstand considerable decorating and remain upright on a wooden stem.
Ryan Slate says the winning combination of ingredients came from his grandmother in Orange, who sent over a recipe for vanilla butterfingers she had clipped from a newspaper about 50 years ago.
The Slates admit they knew little about operating a bakery when they started Cookie Creations. Susan Slate was a sixth-grade teacher at Richman Elementary in Fullerton and Ryan was completing a master’s degree in business administration at USC when they opened Cookie Creations.
After the birth of their daughter Melanie in April, Susan Slate says, she decided to teach part time this fall. Ryan Slate began working at a Los Angeles toy company after stepping away from the business in March, leaving most of the day-to-day operations in the hands of store manager Weitl, who is his aunt.
Family members have helped the store since its start, the Slates say. Unable to receive conventional business financing, the couple raised about $65,000 to start the business by taking out personal loans and refinancing their home. Family members offered sweat equity.
“My dad is an electrician, my brother is a contractor and Ryan’s cousin is a plumber,” Susan Slate says. “My brother-in-law took the photos for the brochure. My mother helped put wallpaper up and Ryan’s grandmother helped when it got really busy.”
The Slates say they had considered purchasing a franchise of Cookies by Design, a Dallas-based corporation with several stores in California, but decided they would rather do it on their own.
Bill Perry, who opened a Cookies by Design shop in Redondo Beach 10 months ago, estimates that the parent company has grown by 60% in the past three years.
Perry says he expects to soon be profitable after his initial $70,000 to $80,000 investment. “It’s about where we thought we should be. . . . Maybe we expected a little higher than we produced,” he says. Primary competition in this type of business comes from florists, he says. “But the key is that we can personalize” the basket.
C.J. Albers, who owns Conroy’s Flowers in Irvine, says she does not get many requests for cookie bouquets, but she does get “numerous” orders for bouquets of flowers accompanied by boxes of cookies. The flower shop can arrange for cookie bouquets on request, she says, “but I don’t see that as a big source of revenue.”
Irvine Florist manager Shahida Aziz says she too gets “crazy” requests for cookies on a stem but turns them down. Rather, she says, the shop offers gourmet baskets that can be filled with just about anything. The trend for orders at florists is more toward specialty gift baskets, Aziz says. “Everybody wants something unusual or something new.”
The owners of Cookie Creations say there is plenty of room for more of its bakeries in Orange County. If the pace of growth holds up, the Slates say, they will consider opening another shop in Newport Beach or Huntington Beach. “But it takes a considerable amount of energy to put one of these things together.”
