What if the 11-year-old Courtney Cowan hadn’t run out of baking soda?
Today Cowan is the founder of Milk Jar Cookies and is launching a franchise program for her brand, beloved by celebrities from Wanda Sykes to Seth Rogan and more and initially made famous when retailer Williams-Sonoma asked her in 2016 to turn her cookies into a baking mix and sell it at their stores.
“That was really incredible to me. That put us on the national and international stage,” she said, and calls from the Today show and Oprah and the rest followed, along with a nationwide shipping program.
It all started with an early baking lesson. “One fateful day, in 1989, we were out of baking soda. I said, that doesn’t matter,” and made the batch anyway. “So I learned about leavening agents. That lit my brain on fire, the fact that there was science in this delicious hobby of mine.”
Later she was in L.A. working in television, “and I’d bring in cookies. Single girl in my 20s, I had nothing better to do with my life than bake cookies. I started to experiment with other ingredients and made other different concoctions,” she said.
“I loved the idea where I could take a classic dessert that hadn’t been in a cookie,” like a banana split, which her dad loved. “That became so fun for me.”
Whenever a TV show was canceled, “I would use the hiatus to say, OK it’s cookie time,” she said. By 2006, “I put a fax machine in the coat closet. I would work until 10 o’clock and I would have 12 dozen cookies to bake, and then take a nap and drive them wherever they had to go,” she said.
“Each step of the process I fell more and more in love with it. The creativity, and then the mile-wide smiles that would be on people’s faces when you show up with beautifully packaged cookies.”
‘We’ve been around longer’ than competitors
She had back surgery and wrote the business plan. “The rest is history,” she said, with her Milk Jar Cookies shop opening in 2013. Cost of investment for a franchise is $325,000 to $750,000. Her L.A. shop is the only one, so there are no financials to report in Item 19. Annual revenue is now $1.3 million at her shop. “We were doing $1.5-, $1.6 million prior to COVID,” she said.
“There was just an immediate momentum. Yes, there had been Mrs. Field’s. We were really the first cookie place that wasn’t in the mall. I had very humble dreams. I wanted to be the neighborhood cookie shop, the ‘Cheers’ of cookies, and know everybody who comes in. The first day, it was supposed to be the soft open, and people were slammed. We sold out at 2,” she said.
“I had never seen a place that had 15 flavors of cookies. Cookies are ubiquitous but also they’ve been very overlooked for a long time, as being thought of as a gourmet product. It was a missed opportunity, or an oversight for a very long time.”
Others are rushing into the space these days, including Crumbl Cookies and Chip City and Dirty Dough and Chip Cookies and Cookie Plug. The leader by far, Crumbl, is suing Dirty Dough and vice versa, revealing the cutthroat nature of a seemingly sweet business.
“I’m very well aware of everything that’s going on. I would say we’ve been around longer than any of those people and any of those companies,” Cowan said. “We have proven ourselves over 10 years. It’s been very methodical.”
Learning perseverance from hard times
Cowan hired Matt Hale, CEO of Modern Acupuncture, as a consultant, connecting with him “through my best friend’s boss’s husband,” she said. She also did a program with Goldman Sachs called 10,000 Small Businesses, in 2020. “It’s essentially an MBA. You come out of it with your five-year growth plan,” which in her case involved franchising.
Hale looked at her proposed deal with another consulting company. “She told me what they wanted in terms of equity and percentage of fees. I said all right, that’s it, I’m going to start this company,” meaning his own consulting firm, “and I’m going to be selective” of clients.
“I just think there’s another option out there. And you look at what these consultants say they’re going to do, and they sell a ton of licenses” but don’t get them open, he said. “That leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I want to help others that I think have a really cool mission and be fun to work with.”
His goal with Cowan: “Make sure all the things I know and all the mistakes I’ve made, can reduce her learning curve.” Modern Acupuncture was hit hard by COVID and has just begun a re-growth mode. Twenty-three clinics are open, down from 52 at the peak. “We were very fortunate to make it through COVID, particularly the service we’re in where somebody didn’t want to be touched for two years,” Hale said.
“And the thing about it, we had a lot of franchisees from other concepts. Massage Envy franchisees were getting hurt really bad too. It was a very challenging time. We’re going to push through.”
He learned perseverance from the hard times. “I took time to feel sorry for myself, but at the end of the day you have to pick yourself up. When I see Courtney, and how she wants to expand, has been a light for me. Hey, it’s like now I’m in a position where I can really help others not make the same mistakes,” he said.
Cowan’s goal will be to preserve the culture of “cookies and kindness,” she said. “I like to say pretty things taste better. I believe that. There is a feeling when you open the box that someone took great care to put this together for me. It does something for the mind. It makes you feel special.”