Crumbl: Jason McGowan

Summary

How I Built Crumbl Cookies: A Journey of Innovation, Tenacity, and Community

Based on the podcast episode "Crumbl: Jason McGowan" from "How I Built This with Guy Raz" hosted by Guy Raz.

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Introduction

In this engaging episode of How I Built This, host Guy Raz delves into the inspiring journey of Jason McGowan, co-founder of Crumbl Cookies, alongside his partner Sawyer Hemsley. Together, they transformed a simple cookie business into a nationwide sensation by blending technology, viral marketing, and a steadfast commitment to quality and community.

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Early Beginnings

Jason McGowan grew up in Alberta, Canada, where his life was deeply influenced by his faith. As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Jason served a mission in Las Vegas, Nevada, during the late 1990s. This experience not only instilled in him tenacity and resilience but also ignited his passion for community and service.

Sawyer Hemsley, Jason's cousin, also served a mission and returned with a desire to be more involved in his local culture. This shared background and values laid the foundation for their future entrepreneurial endeavors.

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Transition into Entrepreneurship

After their missions, both Jason and Sawyer sought to find their purpose beyond their technical careers. Jason, with his background in technology and viral marketing, and Sawyer, with his analytical and design skills, decided to pivot towards entrepreneurship. This shift was driven by a mutual recognition of a void in their lives and a desire to create something impactful.

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Founding of Crumbl Cookies

In 2017, Jason and Sawyer founded Crumbl Cookies in Logan, Utah. Unlike traditional cookie businesses that rely on cherished family recipes, they approached cookie-making with a tech startup mentality. Their goal was to create the "world's best cookie" through relentless testing and optimization.

Transcript Highlight:

Jason McGowan [03:28]: "I launched my cookie business like it was a tech startup... until it was optimized for sweetness and texture and eventually buzz."

Their initial focus was on delivering high-quality, warm cookies efficiently. They built their own app to manage orders and deliveries, ensuring a seamless customer experience right from the start.

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First Store and Immediate Success

Crumbl's first store, launched in Logan, Utah, offered a single product: the chocolate chip cookie. Despite the simplicity, their meticulous attention to recipe perfection and customer satisfaction paid off.

Transcript Highlight:

Sawyer Hemsley [27:50]: "If that landlord had not lowered the price of that building, I'm not sure where we would be today."

The founders' strategic decision to secure an affordable lease enabled them to establish their presence without overextending financially. The store's success was immediate, with customers eagerly purchasing the warm, oversized cookies.

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Facing Competition and Scaling

Shortly after launching, Crumbl faced unexpected competition when a rival startup opened a similar cookie shop just a week before them in Logan. Instead of being discouraged, Jason and Sawyer doubled down on their commitment to quality and customer experience.

Transcript Highlight:

Sawyer Hemsley [34:31]: "They opened from their homes and they wanted to do delivery, and they launched one week before us... we knew that it all comes down to the product."

This focus on offering an exceptional product allowed Crumbl to quickly regain momentum and build a loyal customer base, despite the initial setback.

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Franchising and Expansion Strategy

Understanding the importance of scalability, Jason and Sawyer adopted a franchising model early on. Their first franchise location in Bountiful, Utah, opened to tremendous success, reinforcing the viability of their business model.

Transcript Highlight:

Sawyer Hemsley [40:05]: "We opened up a few more crumbles, and all of a sudden they started doing really well."

The franchising approach enabled rapid expansion without the need for significant external capital. By 2019, Crumbl had grown to 55 locations with revenues soaring to approximately $4.5 million.

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Role of Technology and Social Media

Leveraging their tech backgrounds, Jason and Sawyer integrated advanced technology into all aspects of their business. From their custom app for ordering and delivery to the use of AI-powered tools for training staff, technology was a cornerstone of Crumbl's operations.

Social media, particularly TikTok, played a pivotal role in Crumbl's marketing strategy. By engaging authentically with customers and embracing viral trends, Crumbl amassed a massive following that rivaled established brands like Starbucks and Domino's.

Transcript Highlight:

Sawyer Hemsley [57:19]: "We have more TikTok followers than Starbucks and Domino's combined."

Their innovative approach to social media included featuring customer reviews, showcasing behind-the-scenes store operations, and experimenting with unique cookie flavors that sparked conversations and increased brand visibility.

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Unique Business Practices and Brand Differentiation

Crumbl's commitment to innovation is evident in their rotating menu, introducing six new flavors each week unveiled during their popular "cookie drop" events every Sunday night. This strategy not only keeps the offerings fresh but also creates a sense of urgency and exclusivity among customers.

Additionally, Crumbl's distinctive pink packaging, inspired by a classic 1959 Cadillac, sets them apart visually from other cookie brands. This attention to branding details fosters a memorable and cohesive customer experience.

Transcript Highlight:

Sawyer Hemsley [55:28]: "We have our own custom app that shows people how to train... Our brand will always do that."

Their willingness to experiment with unconventional flavors, such as Everything But Bagel or Corbread, further distinguishes Crumbl in a crowded market, turning even their less popular flavors into viral topics.

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Challenges and Legal Battles

As Crumbl grew, so did its challenges. Rapid expansion brought logistical complexities, and maintaining consistency across multiple locations became a significant hurdle. Additionally, Crumbl faced legal battles when former employees stole trade secrets, leading to lawsuits against competitors mimicking their brand.

Transcript Highlight:

Sawyer Hemsley [63:36]: "If we just had luck and not all the other things, it wouldn't have worked."

These legal challenges tested the founders' resilience and commitment to protecting their unique business practices and recipes. However, Sawyer reflected that such battles caused temporary distractions from their primary focus on growth and innovation.

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Maintaining Growth and Future Plans

By the end of 2022, Crumbl had achieved over a thousand locations with revenues surpassing a billion dollars. Despite their impressive growth, the founders remain committed to strategic expansion rather than unchecked scaling. They prioritize quality, customer experience, and maintaining their core values, such as being closed on Sundays to honor family time and community.

Transcript Highlight:

Sawyer Hemsley [66:12]: "If you stop innovating, you stop growing, you start dying... We're really excited about it."

Crumbl continues to diversify its offerings, introducing cakes and pies, ensuring that the brand remains dynamic and responsive to customer preferences. Their strategic decisions, such as slowing down expansion to focus on quality, demonstrate a balanced approach to sustaining long-term success.

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Conclusion

The story of Crumbl Cookies is a testament to the power of combining technology, innovative marketing, and unwavering dedication to quality and customer satisfaction. Jason McGowan and Sawyer Hemsley leveraged their unique skills and experiences to build a brand that resonates deeply with a diverse customer base. Their journey underscores the importance of adaptability, community engagement, and strategic growth in building a lasting and impactful business.

Final Transcript Highlight:

Sawyer Hemsley [67:34]: "It is just tenacity and hard work can get you through a lot of stuff. And second is the timing... And I think the other thing, too, is the learnings from my faith..."

Crumbl's evolution from a single-store operation to a billion-dollar enterprise serves as an inspiring blueprint for aspiring entrepreneurs seeking to blend passion with strategic innovation.

Transcript

[Guy Raz]

Wondery subscribers can listen to How I Built this early and ad free right now. Join Wondery in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. If you've started your own business, you know just how many challenges there are, big and small. I mean, look at how I built this building. This show came with a lot of trials, late nights, very, very early mornings. But even though there were challenges getting started, there is something that makes setting up a new business easier. Getting connected with AT&T business it doesn't matter what your business is dealing with, AT&T business helps to make it much, much easier. And that's the point of a provider in the first place. Making building your dream easier. Wake up to the power of ATT [e-mail] that's business.att.com if you're running a small business, you know there's nothing small about it. Running a new business is all consuming. Every day there are new decisions, new problems to solve, and new challenges to face. But knowing you have the right tools can give you a ton of comfort. And that's why I really like Shopify. Shopify's point of sale system is a unified command center for your retail business. It brings together in store and online operations across up to one locations. Get all the big stuff for your small business right with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.combilt go to shopify.combuilt shopify.combilt your life isn't.

[Jason McGowan]

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[Guy Raz]

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[Jason McGowan]

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[Guy Raz]

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[Jason McGowan]

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[Sawyer Hemsley]

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[Guy Raz]

Hey, just a quick note before we start the show. In this interview you're about to hear, my voice sounds a little bit off. I was battling a pretty nasty cold that day. But the good news is it's an awesome interview, so you will not want to miss it. Okay. Onto the show.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Sawyer called me up one day and said, hey, there's a building here and I think we can get it for really cheap because they're gonna demolish it soon. I'm like, oh, I think he was asking something like $1,200 a month or something for it. And I was like, sawyer, we need to get it to 8 or $900. And I often think about how many decisions or $300 decisions that are life changing for you, you know, and I still to this day, if that landlord had not lowered the price of that building, I'm not sure where we would be today.

[Guy Raz]

Welcome to How I Built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and behind the movements they built.

[Jason McGowan]

I'm Guy Raz, and on the show.

[Guy Raz]

Today, how Crumbl rewrote the recipe on cookies with a B. Testing new recipes each week, a massive TikTok following, and a thousand stores over just eight years. When most people think about starting a cookie company, they might picture warm memories or grandma's recipe, you know, a cozy kitchen, right? But Jason McGowan, he launched his cookie business like it was a tech startup. He and his cousin Sawyer Hemsley would tweak and test the recipe over and over and over again until it was optimized for sweetness and texture and eventually buzz. And then Jason built an app to manage ordering and deliveries. And this was all for just one store in Logan, Utah, a small city about an hour and a half north of Salt Lake City. Now, if all this sounds a little bit excessive, it might be worthwhile mentioning that Jason had spent his entire career up to that point working in tech, where he learned about viral marketing and network effects. Almost from the beginning, he had big ambitions for crumble. From that single location in Logan, Utah, Jason and Sawyer opened 300 more stores within four years of launching the business in 2017. 300 locations within four years of launch. Just let that sink in. Today, the company has over 1,000 stores across the US and Canada. And a big part of the appeal comes from a methodical and thoughtful design approach. For example, Crumbl cookies have always been packaged in pink boxes. The bakeries are clean and gleaming and spare. And each Sunday night, the brand does a cookie drop in which it reveals the six flavors it will sell that week. And some of them are weird but also designed to go viral. Flavors like everything, Bagel, cornbread, blue, icy, raspberry. Not surprisingly, that cookie drop has become a particularly popular event for teenagers. Jason and Sawyer saw potential in TikTok back in 2018, and they used the platform to build a massive following. In fact, Crumbl cookies has more followers on the platform than Starbucks, Domino's, and Taco Bell combined. Now, I should note that Crumbl is somewhat polarized in the food world, and the company has done a pretty good job of embracing that role. Whether you love them or hate them, there's no denying the impact Crumbl has had on the dessert world and on the playbook for how to build a food brand in the age of social media. As for Jason, he grew up in Alberta, Canada. He wasn't a focused student and pretty much ended his formal schooling in the eighth grade. But growing up, the church was a huge part of his life. Jason's a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and In the late 1990s he came to the United States to serve as a missionary in, of all places, Sin City, Las Vegas.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

You know, you'd wake up at 6:30 in the morning and you start, you know, studying your scriptures and reading the Bible. And then also I was going out there and sharing with others kind of what I believed. And so, yeah, you were going out there, you were knocking on doors, you were talking to people on the streets, inviting people to come to church, and riding in a suit and tie in Las Vegas weather during the summertime was always an experience I will never forget.

[Jason McGowan]

On your bike?

[Sawyer Hemsley]

On my bike, it was really, really hot. You learned a lot of tenacity and you learned a lot of being able to be rejected or grit. I remember one moment I had on my mission, I was riding my bike and I had my helmet on and someone had a bottle and they whipped it at my head and I put my helmet down and it crack helmet. And all of a sudden the substance started just kind of going down my face. And I looked later and realized and from the bottle it was spitting chew tobacco. So someone had thrown a bottle at my face. And I remember that moment that I was just. I wasn't even sad. It wasn't even like, it was just a. I was there just so focused on helping other people. It just didn't bother me. And I remember thinking, man, this is something that was unique. And just the gospel brought me so much joy.

[Jason McGowan]

All right, so you do your mission in Las Vegas with the intention of going back to Alberta. What did you think you were going to do after? Did you have any thoughts about what you were going to do after?

[Sawyer Hemsley]

I didn't really have a lot of thoughts afterwards. And so when I came home from my mission, I had that other like, wait, what am I doing? What's the purpose of my career and what should I do? And then I realized that I wanted to be more part of the culture. And where I was back home, there was only a few members of the church. And so it's like, oh, maybe I'll go move, you know, where there's more members and where, where Else other than Utah.

[Jason McGowan]

Right. So I can, you know, 40, 45% of the state is. Are members of the church. There probably was a bit higher.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yes.

[Jason McGowan]

Back then in 2003. And by the way, where in Utah did you go to?

[Sawyer Hemsley]

So I went to Provo, Utah.

[Jason McGowan]

Provo, of course. Home to BYU Collegetown.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yep.

[Jason McGowan]

But you weren't there to go to BYU or to explore it necessarily.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

No, I went to a small college. It's called the LDS Business College. You know, my. My main focus there was to get my GED and try to get back into. I was going to try to go to college and try to get a career. And as I was doing that, I was in class and LDS Business College, and they wanted us to write a business plan for another business. And I remember thinking, wow, that's so much work to do for somebody else's business. Can I just start it? So I just asked the teacher if I could just start something. And I realized at the time it had to be an Internet company because, yeah, that's when I started teaching myself, you know, how to design and build websites and do all those kinds of things. And. And I built a couple of websites for people and made, you know, $1,000 here and $1,000 there from just little odd jobs for people. And I was like, oh, my goodness, this is. I'm making some money. This is fantastic. And so eventually I built a website called Build you'd universe. So the BYU.com was available because the.

[Jason McGowan]

School had not secured it, and BYU.com was available. Wow.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

And when I say it's available, someone else had it. So I had to buy it off somebody, at least it from somebody. And, you know, and it started growing pretty quickly. We started getting people online really quickly. Facebook was going. I'm like, this is social networking. This is where the future is.

[Jason McGowan]

And what was it? BYU.com.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

It was like a social. It was a social network for BYU students. So we were going to go just after BYU students. This is really similar. Around the time, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and stuff was starting to grow Facebook. And I was like, oh, we got to do one in BYU here. And so we started building it, and the church noticed it. And when I say the church, I really mean BYU actually noticed it. And BYU sent me a cease and desist letter of like, hey, you know, don't. That's our branding byu. And at the time, I didn't. I didn't have much means. I didn't have, you know, anything. And so I was just like, well, you Know, if they're asking me to not do this, then I'm not going to do it anymore. So at the time, though, I had someone named Paul Allen, and Paul Allen had started Ancestry.com and so he saw what I was doing with BYU.com this.

[Jason McGowan]

Is not the Paul Allen who was also with Microsoft. This is a different Paul Allen.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

No, he calls himself Paul Allen the Lesser. So although he went on to create a billion dollar company, multibillion dollar company, he's still Paul Allen the Lesser.

[Jason McGowan]

And Paul Allen was local. He was there in Provo.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yep, he's there local in Provo. And he saw what happened when he [e-mail] and how he created the MyFamily.com brand under Ancestry. And he wanted to try to maybe replicate something, some social experience with family members, for families sharing photos and that sort of thing. And so at the time, I remember Facebook was, was growing, and I remember it was being very successful. And when I ended up going with Paul, very shortly after, all of a sudden Facebook opened up their API and was like, you can now build on Facebook. And we said, wait, what if we show people how they're connected to each other, show how they're related, and then when they come into the app, they can share family memories and photos and experiences. And Facebook was really meant for college students at the time, but maybe we could be the family part of it within Facebook. And so we launched it and it just started exploding immediately.

[Jason McGowan]

Wow, you were just teaching yourself this stuff. And this really starts a career of working in tech, like, particularly with social media sites.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yes. And I think that's where I got a lot of my experience and my analytical kind of experience, you know, when you're growing so fast. And, you know, Paul was a great mentor too as well, to help me, you know, with understanding marketing and technology and data and all that sort of things. So when you start making a tweak or a change to a UX and you realize, you know, it increases 5, 10, 20%, all of a sudden you started understanding user psychology, how they interact with the apps, how to make things frictionless. Like, my learning curve just was exponential at the time. And building this product over time, we ended up reaching to about 120 million users. So it was, wow, it grew fast.

[Jason McGowan]

You eventually left Family Link and went and started your. Your own next business called pick.com, which I guess was like, it was like a social shopping site. I think it was created around the same time as Pinterest.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

It was actually. Yeah, I always joke That I always had the idea. I just never had the execution. In the early days, that was my curse to start other companies that someone else executed better on.

[Jason McGowan]

And I read that even before you launched it, it was acquired.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah. So it was acquired by a company called Fundly Early. For us, it was a nice payday, and it was just something that was. Was a great moment. And at the same time, too, when we were doing fundraising, there was another investor who really wanted us to go do a whole concept with him. So that was hang time. That was the concept to kind of, you know, like, it was similar to Foursquare, you know, Then that's when, you know, we moved our. And moved. My wife and our early family, we moved out to Tiburon and lived in California for a short period of time.

[Jason McGowan]

And I should mention, you were married. You were married, and you had, I think, at least one kid at that point, or maybe two. So you moved to California to. To the Bay Area.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yep.

[Jason McGowan]

And how long were you. Were you there?

[Sawyer Hemsley]

I was there for a very short period of time. I think it was six months or less. And it was just, like. It was so exciting, just, you know, walking down the streets, and everyone was just, like, working on the next big thing. And. And so, for me personally, it was really, really great. And then we both felt some personal feelings of. That we actually should not be living in California. We should move back.

[Jason McGowan]

You and your wife felt that?

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah, me and my wife. Yeah. And we felt feelings that we should be moving back to Utah.

[Jason McGowan]

And where did you guys move to? Back to Provo.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah. So moved back to Provo. In fact, we had our house up for sale, and we were going to rent it out to somebody, and we ended up just moving back into the same house.

[Guy Raz]

Wow.

[Jason McGowan]

So, all right, you're back in Utah, and then you go back to. Well, you return back to sort of your kind of your roots, which is you went to go work at Ancestry as a director of product in 2015.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yep.

[Jason McGowan]

Meantime, your wife has a cousin. There's this kid, Sawyer, who's at. He's a student in Logan at Utah State University. And I guess he somehow gets connected with you because he's interested in becoming an entrepreneur and has an idea for, like, a clothing brand while he's a student in college. Tell me a little bit about this idea he had and how he approached you.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah. So he wants to start a clothing company, and I gave him some money to do it, and it was called Ember Embr. And I didn't know if it was going to be successful or not at all. And for me, it was really just. This guy was really excited, and I thought I wanted to kind of help him along his entrepreneur way if I could. And it didn't work out. And he came to me at the end of it and was like, hey, I need to pay back all this money I borrowed from you.

[Jason McGowan]

How much did he borrow from you?

[Sawyer Hemsley]

I don't even remember, to be honest with you.

[Jason McGowan]

Was it less than 25,000 or 50,000?

[Sawyer Hemsley]

It could have been somewhere around there. Yeah. But he wanted to pay it all back, though, which was significant for him at the time. He's a college student, and I was like, sorry, that's not how it works. It failed. If the business would have succeeded, I would have made money and you would have made money, but it didn't work out. But I was just so impressed by his character and who he was as a person. That really made me think, this guy's a good guy. We needed to start something sometime.

[Jason McGowan]

Just to pause for a sec. You were working at Ancestry. In the back of your mind, were you still thinking? I. Because you had seen all of these people in the Bay area and all these people that you'd come across had these huge, probably successful exits, and in the back of your mind, were you still thinking, I'm still. There's still something out there for me to start?

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah. I think when you get a taste of virality and growth, there was kind of this void and this feeling of like, what am I working on? What's even my purpose here? Am I working on things just to work on things, to make money? Just not feeling like I was making a difference, truthfully. And that was kind of a really painful almost just to be like, what am I even doing? And is my time valuable and worth it?

[Jason McGowan]

All right, so let's get to the cookies here. So you are obviously searching for something interesting, something that would be. I don't know, it would fill a void that you kind of had. And. And so how did the cookies come about? What. What even prompted that? I mean, everything up until this point was around technology, right?

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah.

[Jason McGowan]

And that was your background. You'd been in social media, and you'd been a, you know, sort of focused on virality and. And then cookies. So how. How did that conversation even start with Sawyer?

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah. So Sawyer and I were just trying to come up with some ideas, and we thought. And we just were. Our families, love, you know, And I think in the culture in Utah of people bringing treats and baked goods to Each other and, you know, for parties and family get togethers and that sort of thing.

[Jason McGowan]

It makes so much sense that baking culture is a big part of the sort of church culture because it's about community gathering. And also it's a vice. Right. It's like the only vice, really. But as I started to dig into it, it really made a lot of sense to me why small town Utah was the perfect place to start this thing.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah, you know, I. We thought at the time, well, would it be cool to kind of do something? And we thought, well, why not do cookies? There's some local cookie shops here that started doing cookies too, as well. And you had other places in the east coast that were doing large gourmet cookies that were really big. And. But what was actually really exciting for me at the time was not just the cookies, but was the technology behind it. You know, at the time, you know, doordash wasn't really prevalent. And so it was like, I could order pizza or that's about it for delivery. I'm like, that doesn't make any sense. And so I thought, well, if we create cookies, the most important thing, though, will be the technology. And we could build this technology and we could leverage it to potentially deliver other things to homes and that sort of thing. So it was kind of early. It was like the doordash thinking earlier on.

[Jason McGowan]

I mean, initially it was inspired by delivery. I mean, there was. We've done insomnia cookies on this show, which is also a great story. And that started out as a delivery brand. And the. So the initial idea was, let's have a cookie that people can order, like through doordash to their dorm room or whatever.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah, that's kind of was the. The start of it. But the problem is, is we had absolutely zero baking experience. We didn't know anything. So although our family ate a lot of treats and we had that culturally there, our personal experience hadn't been that strong at all. And so at the time, we were like, okay, well, delivery is the most important. What if we just buy this from Cisco or some other brand and just deliver them to houses? And then we. You know, the thing that I know and Sawyer felt strongly this way, too, is if our names are going to be on it, it has to be the best. All these kinds of things. And so it kind of started us down a quest of, okay, well, how do we create the world's best cookie? What's the methodology for creating the world's best cookie? And traditionally, people would just. They would take their great Grandmother's recipe or a recipe, they found a line and tweak it or something like that and create this recipe. And we thought, what if we did something different? What if we take the same methodology that we use in technology, this a B testing model, and let's taste test our way to the perfect chocolate chip cookie.

[Jason McGowan]

Right? So it sounds like already you dropped this idea of we're just gonna deliver whatever cookie we can get. You know, because this is like 2017, this is early 2017, where you start to talk about. Sounds like pretty quickly you land on the idea that this is going to be a cookie shop and not a cookie delivery service.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Well, that was. No, that's a great question, because earlier we were deciding whether we should actually even have a storefront or whether we should do just delivery. And originally we thought about even just delivering it out of a home. So we'd make homemade cookies, bake it, and then deliver them from our home.

[Jason McGowan]

You know, you're thinking, okay, let's figure out how we're gonna sell these later. But now let's just kind of work on a recipe and let's just make cookies. And so you guys go down a rabbit hole of cookie making for several months. And what, I mean, what were you trying to do? I mean, what were you trying to figure out during that time?

[Sawyer Hemsley]

We were literally just trying to figure out what tasted the best. What we would do is we would literally take a chocolate chip cookie and we change out an ingredient, and we would go to friends and family, and even we started going to local gas station. Like, just random people. People looked at us that we were crazy. We were like, hey, here's. Here's two chocolate chip cookies. Can you take a bite of each of these and tell me which one you think is best? And so then we were trying to decide between milk chocolate chip or semi sweet. We're like, this is a big decision. Like, for us, it was like the world depended upon whether the chips were going to be milk or whether they were going to be semi sweet. And so we put a survey out on Twitter, and the survey results came back, and it was 70% milk chocolate chip, 30% semi sweet. And that's how we decided that we were going to go with milk chocolate chips instead of semi sweet.

[Jason McGowan]

Right.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

When you're making the world's best chocolate chip cookie, it's not just about the ingredients, but it's how you prepare the ingredients. It's how you mix, how long you mix for. And I don't want to give away any trade Secrets today. But, but how long it rests for, the size of the cookie, the temperature of the cookie, if does it rotate, does it.

[Jason McGowan]

Do you slam the pan in the middle of it? Right. Things like that.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah. There's a lot of nuance to, you know, how much you whip the butter will depend on how the shape of your cookie. And we were doing it actually in Sawyer's mom's house at first and doing it at a home, in a home oven versus commercial equipment. We learned as two totally different things. And then when we got the commercial equipment, we were like, oh, we have to do this all over again, because it's actually completely different.

[Jason McGowan]

Well, but there's a leap from making it and then saying we're going to invest in commercial equipment, like, because I think this is like a five month process, Right. Of you guys experimenting with different recipes. But what was the catalyst that got you to say, you know what, let's go to the next step and buy commercial cooking equipment?

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Well, you know, there wasn't a lot of Grandmaster Planner thinking. It was just tenacity of saying, we're on a mission and we're gonna accomplish this. And we realized that, like, you had to have the equipment for us to actually figure out how to do it. And so we did. Sometimes I think we say we did this backwards, meaning, like, we rented out the building, we got the commercial equipment, we did all that, and we still didn't even know what the recipe was.

[Guy Raz]

When we come back in just a moment. Crumble is finally ready to launch. But just before it does, Jason learns.

[Jason McGowan]

Of a rival startup in the same.

[Guy Raz]

Town doing exactly the same thing. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built this. Do you ever feel overwhelmed by how many options there are these days? Whether you're on vacation and trying to see all the sights, or you're at a restaurant with a huge menu, finding something that's just right can sometimes feel impossible. The same applies if you're a business owner who's hiring. It can be overwhelming to have too many candidates to sort through. But you're in luck. ZipRecruiter now gives you the power to proactively find and connect with the best ones quickly. How? Through their innovative resume database. And right now, you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter's resume database uses advanced filtering to quickly show you the best candidates for your roles. And if you see a candidate you're really interested in, you can get their contact info instantly. Skip the candidate overload. Instead, streamline your hiring with ZipRecruiter. See why 4 out of 5 employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Just go to this exclusive web address ziprecruiter.com Bilt right now to try it for free again, that's ziprecruiter.com BILT ZipRecruiter the smartest way to hire As a founder, you're moving fast toward product market, fit your next round or your first big enterprise deal. But with AI accelerating how quickly startups build and ship, security expectations are higher earlier than ever. Getting security and compliance right can unlock growth or if you wait too long, stall it. With deep integrations and automated workflows built for fast moving teams, Vanta gets you audit ready fast and keeps you secure with continuous monitoring as your models, infrastructure and customers evolve. Fast growing startups like LangChain, Rider and Cursor trusted Vanta to build a scalable foundation from the start. I love that over 10,000 companies, from startups to huge enterprises, trust Vanta because it makes me trust them. Go to vanta.combilt to save $1,000 today through the Vanta for Startups program and join over 10,000ambitious companies already scaling with Vanta. That's V A n t a dot com built Vantage to save $1,000 for a limited time as a designer.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

You know clients want it all. A stunning site that runs their business and scales with their success. But tight deadlines shouldn't mean compromising your vision. WIX Studio is built for designers like you. Plan sites in seconds with AI powered site mapping. Then design starting in Figma or in the WIX Studio editor with precise layout tools. Then bring your vision to life with no code, animations, AI tools and one click responsive design. Design smoother and deliver Sooner. Go to wickstudio.com.

[Guy Raz]

Hey, welcome back to How I Built this.

[Jason McGowan]

I'm Guy raz.

[Guy Raz]

So it's 2017 and Jason is still working on the perfect recipe for his new cookie business. And meanwhile his partner Sawyer is in Logan, Utah scouting out a place to build the first store.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Sawyer called me up one day and said, hey, there's a building here. It's there used to be, you know, another business in there. It was super popular. It's this particular location and I think we can get it for really cheap because they're going to demolish it soon. I'm like oh. And now at the time for me that was actually exciting because if this didn't Work. I didn't want a five year lease on my hands, you know.

[Jason McGowan]

Yeah.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

And so this like, this was like part of our like test and learn, you know, culture here. It was like, oh, this will be fantastic. We'll, you know, we'll rent it. And so I think he was asking something like $1,200 a month or something for it. And I was like, sorry, we need to get it to, you know, $800 or $900. And I still, to this day, if. If that landlord had not lowered the price of that building, I'm not sure where we would be today.

[Jason McGowan]

Wow.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

I called that the multi billion dollar decision because I often think about how many decisions are $300 decisions that are life changing for you, you know. And I mean, it was a, it was clearly would have been worth whatever. Right. But the landlord ended up saying yes. He's probably like, who else am I going to get to rent this building that I'm going to demolish? It was probably, it was a win win for him too as well.

[Jason McGowan]

Okay, so you, you get this shop that's going to be demolished. And at that point, now what's, what I'm curious about is the shop was in Logan, Utah, and I think you were living in Provo, right?

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yes, yes.

[Jason McGowan]

Which has got to be an hour and a half, two hour drive.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

It is. So Soyer lived in Logan though. And so it was close to Sawyer. And the idea was that I'm gonna build the technology, do the marketing, and Sawyer would do the kind of run the store. But while we were getting up and going, I was traveling there all the time.

[Jason McGowan]

Right. And you got the lease so you could start to move the equipment into the, into the facility. But before I ask you about like sort of building it out, I mean, it's only gonna be around for six months, right. Before they can demolish it. But I mean, this was gonna be a small business. It was gonna be a small side hustle.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah, that was it. This is gonna be a side hustle. It'll be fun. It'll be great for learning for Sawyer. And really, if the technology ends up being really successful, then we had something really good that we could use.

[Jason McGowan]

And what was the technology side of it going to be like? Cause it was gonna be a shop selling cookies. But tell me about what were you gonna focus on?

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah, so I was focusing on, okay, how do we get our first product, which was the chocolate chip cookie, and then how do we build the technology, meaning like routing it to houses.

[Jason McGowan]

So this was still going to Be a delivery business. Even though there was a shop, it.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Was going to be delivery business. Yes, yes.

[Jason McGowan]

So you had to hire drivers and things like that.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Exactly. So we hired our own drivers, did our own thing. How do we keep these things warm? All those kinds of things were things that we were working on really early on.

[Jason McGowan]

But if it was because, just to put this in perspective, I mean, Logan, Utah, northern Utah, close to the Idaho border, population 50,000 people. I mean, we're not talking about, like, even Salt Lake City. This is not a huge number of people there. Right. And so to me, the idea of putting all this time and effort into building out, like, a delivery network of drivers and how to keep it warm for a population of 50,000 people seems nuts. I mean, right? I mean, it does.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Well, when you put it like that guy, it does seem a little bit more nuts even when you say it. Yes, it. In my mind, I often listen to Paul Graham, and he talks a lot about focusing on a few customers and making a product or experience really well for them, and then it will scale eventually. And so my whole thinking was, okay, how do I build something that will make these people extremely happy? And we were going to build it along the way. And I was as much fascinated with scratching that itch of just doing something that could be different and physical and not in the technology world. And it was so, like, going from, like, pixels to actual physical things was so, like, alive. Like, like my. All of a sudden, my career and what I was doing was like, all of a sudden there was color to it. You know, I was like, oh, this is so exciting. Like, I was as much fascinated by the learning experience of what we were doing as much as, like, the business or making money or any of those kinds of things.

[Jason McGowan]

Yeah, but to justify the time and the effort and even the money that you're putting in, you had to have thought that this could maybe lead to something else. Like, it sounds to me that, like, the cookies were interesting, but that maybe the technology that you were building, the distribution network, that's something that you could sell eventually.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Totally. Yes.

[Jason McGowan]

All right, so you guys had the lease, and what about the store? Did you do a build out? I mean, did you. It was going to be demolished, so. But you still have to make it look nice enough. Right? Because people are going to go into the store.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Oh, we totally did. And I was so nervous about it at the time. I mean, I built the first counter just to show you how frugal I was. Like, you know, we went in there and tore things out and started doing things. And even at the time, I didn't even, I didn't even know that you were supposed to get like permits and all those kinds of things to do a lot of these things. So we were doing some of these things without permits. And of course we were on social media. We were just sharing on social media behind the scenes what we were building and pictures of the build out. And at the time that was like, whoa. You can kind of get a live peek into, you know, a store, local store getting built out. And we started building a following that way.

[Jason McGowan]

All right, I think you opened the shop in the fall of 2017. And did you open with like one or two? Like how many different cookies did you open with?

[Sawyer Hemsley]

We opened with one. That's it.

[Jason McGowan]

Just chocolate chip.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Just chocolate chip. And the problem was we didn't have time to do more. Like the building was gonna get demolished. So it's like if we wanna build a full menu, like, there's no way. We we spent so much time building one product because we just were constantly trying to tweak it to make it better. That we're like, that's it, we're gonna launch with one. They're gonna be warm, they're gonna be big. We wanted them big because they're meant to be shared. So if you're taking them, you're kind of sharing them and all of a sudden people are trying them and that's how the virality grows within the, the food concept that we were trying to do. And I still remember, because, remember, I've been in social media for my whole life. So it was all about grow, grow, grow, grow. We'll worry about profits and revenues later. And I still remember this man came and he had on a plaid shirt, he had bought this box and this four pack of chocolate chip cookies. And he handed me money and it was like, whoa, wait, people are actually going to pay for this? Like all this energy and all this time. And we had, you know, I had it change. And I remember just thinking, oh my goodness, we created a business and it has revenue on day one. And I remember being so excited and.

[Jason McGowan]

Really you were building up, I mean, the social media presence. Presumably it was for a local audience, right? It was. You were trying to get people in and around Logan to be aware of it.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah, we were. And you know, Sawyer had a. Had his personal social media. They had friends and stuff like that. We actually leveraged that started off, it had like, I think 10,000 followers or something like that. I don't remember the exact number. But we got in the newspaper too, as well. And then our competition opened up one week before us.

[Jason McGowan]

Wow.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

They saw what we had done, and they opened up from their homes, and they wanted to do delivery, and they launched one week before us. And I remember just being devastated. Like, in technology, first movers advantage is everything. And that's been kind of built into my core. And we're like, oh, is this gonna work? Did they already get the first mover's advant? Are we gonna look like copycatters? It's just like, what's gonna happen here? And I remember just looking over at Sawyer, and I think that's why we spent so much time on the product, was because we knew that at the end of the day, it all comes down to the product. And I told Sawyer says, let's ignore the competition completely. They're not gonna be our customers. They're not gonna keep us in business. Let's focus 100% on our customers. If we build products that our customers love and they have great experiences in, the stores will win.

[Jason McGowan]

And so when you opened Right. A week after your competitor had opened, how did it do?

[Sawyer Hemsley]

It did phenomenal.

[Jason McGowan]

Lines were out the door just for chocolate chip cookies.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Oh, it was crazy, guy. I was still shocked to this day. All the social media marketing, and we did digital spend advertising, too. So all the stuff that I'd done before in the past, so we were able to market to everyone, and everyone saw it. It worked.

[Jason McGowan]

Tell me a little bit about this or the thinking around the branding or the look. Like, for example, I think from the beginning, you sold the cookies in these pink boxes.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah. You know, I think what was interesting is our competition at the time was going after the college market because it was, you know, a college town. The problem was, is the people that were coming into our building were women. And we thought, wait a second. What if we're focusing on moms and not on college students? And Sawyer had a core memory growing up where one of his dad's friends had a Cadillac, and it was pink, and he loved the color from that Cadillac. And we thought, what if we just take that iconic Cadillac color? It'll set us apart and we'll be different. And Sawyer really kind of loved that.

[Jason McGowan]

All right, so now you've got this, and you're going back and forth between Logan and Provo, like, every couple of days or once a week or.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah. Yes. There was times where I was slowly driving all the way around Utah looking for pink boxes and then delivering them. It was really One of those things behind the scenes where we were everything. I was on the phone with customer service, and at the time, we had a delivery technology that allowed us to do routing for the deliveries. And deliveries was really big early on because people are so excited you could get something warm delivered to your door. And. And word of mouth started spreading. But I was behind the scenes on the weekends, literally just moving around the routes. I had a big map, and I had all the deliveries on a map. And I was rerouting to try to make sure that the drivers would be optimally driving. And so a new driver would come show up, and all of a sudden they'd pop up online. I'm like, okay, I gotta reroute all these. So we didn't have any of the technology at the beginning to route everything perfectly. We were doing it by hand.

[Jason McGowan]

I mean, you were building a logistics network. It's like a mini ups.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yes, it was. And it was. It was a lot.

[Jason McGowan]

But how was that sustainable? I mean, delivering is really expensive. Right. From what I understand, it really only works on a large scale. I mean, you had drivers being paid hourly to drive to deliver cookies. And how did that work in terms of not losing all you.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Well, what we did early on is we made sure that all the cookies were warm. We had these cases, and we had these warmers, these gel packs that we'd microwave. Well, what we learned we could do was, is we wouldn't send out drivers with the exact order, because, remember, there's only one flavor. We would send them out with way more cookies than they already had current orders for. And so as a new order would pop up, if it was close to them, I would just slot it in. And so all of a sudden, the logistics became a lot. You know, lower cost because we were optimizing routes so much. It worked really, really well for logistics.

[Jason McGowan]

All right, so you've got this store that's really kind of starting to take off. And I mean, I guess not too long into the business, you decided to open a second store, like, by the end of 2017, decided to open one in.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah, actually, our second one, we opened up in Orem, Utah. And what's interesting about this is. And so there was another competitor that was in Provo area. And we were like, okay, well, how can we kind of win Utah? And we came up with the idea of using this technology and this delivery network to deliver to all of basically a big part of Utah. So we. Our second location was actually a warehouse. So while the competitors are only opening to a Small radius. What if we opened up to all of Utah county and we could start delivering into, you know, 10 different cities?

[Jason McGowan]

It'll be a central kitchen. Like a central commissary.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah, like a commissary. That's exactly right. So we created this commissary in this warehouse, and then we opened up to delivery only. So that became a very logistical challenge because we just had tons of deliveries. And it kept growing and growing and growing. Demand was outstripping, you know, our ability to produce them. And so, you know, we got some bad reviews. And it started being, you know, really troublesome for us to figure out how to actually service these customers. And that's when we thought, okay, we also need to have better experiences. And so that's when we decided, okay, we're gonna. We're gonna start opening up in other areas. But. And the reason why we opened up in bountiful, Utah, first, was because Sawyer's mom was going to be originally a third owner in the business.

[Jason McGowan]

And bountiful was going to be your third location.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah, Bountiful was going to be your third location. It was our first franchise location. And the reason we franchised that first location was Sawyer's mom was going to be a part of the business early on. And Sawyer's dad was like, you're going to spend a lot of time in this bakery. It's not going to make a lot of money. You're going to be away from. From the grandkids. I'm not sure is this going to be really worth it to you? So she decided to bow out and not do it. But they came back, and Sawyer's dad's like, she's going to kill me. She sees the success of the business. Is there any way she can buy a portion of the business or is there anything that we can do? And so that's when I started kind of, you know, researching. I'm like, well, franchising. That's like, we already invested the money. The business was self sustaining. It was already making money and paying for itself. There was no need for capital at the time. And we wanted to try to build this without outside capital. And so we started franchising. So we went to a franchise attorney, learned how about the franchising. And so we franchised our first location in bountiful. And I will tell you, I have never been more nervous about spending someone else's money in my entire life. You know, it was. It was one thing to waste my own money if it didn't work out, but to now have somebody else's money in there. I was so stressed out that I was going to lose Sawyer's parents money. And we get to the store bountiful. We leased the building. And I remember someone came in and they said, oh, this is going to be so amazing. It's going to be so amazing because every other business that's come here has closed down. And I remember just my gut just dropped. And like, oh, my goodness. We picked the wrong location. But we powered through it, and the minute we opened it up, the lines were just out the door.

[Jason McGowan]

So there was no plan. I mean, again, like, it seems like it just kind of happened organically.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

It did.

[Jason McGowan]

They wanted to open, they wanted in. You sort of thought, well, let's try franchise model. The beauty of a franchise model is you. I mean, if you do it right, you don't need to bring in a lot of outside money because the franchisee pays the fees to build out. And so with the success of that shop, immediately you thought to yourself, okay, we're a franchise business now.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah. And we had friends and family who saw this. So I had friends in my neighborhood and. Sorry, I had some family members. And they all wanted to do a crumble. And so we opened up a few more crumbles, and all of a sudden they started doing really well. And then we had someone come in and they wanted to open up 20 locations in Colorado.

[Jason McGowan]

Wow.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

They came to me and they said, well, we have two conditions, Jason. My condition number one is that we own the marketing. We want to own our own customers and be able to do our own marketing. And I said, okay, well, maybe we could work on that. And the second thing they said was, there's no way this is going to work outside Utah if you stay closed on Sundays.

[Jason McGowan]

Right? You're closed on Sunday.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah.

[Jason McGowan]

The only way, if you let them open on Sunday.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

If we let them open on Sunday, they'll open the 20 locations. They'll grow it across all of Colorado. And they said, your business will never be successful outside of Utah if you don't. And I thought, we want to be able to give bakers time off. We want them to be able to spend time with their friends and families. And this is just core to who we are. It's spending time with family. And if people want to worship on Sundays or they want to do other things on Sundays, I don't want to work on Sundays. And I remember talking to my wife and talking to Sawyer, and we came to the conclusion that even though it financially didn't make sense, that it was important to us because that's really our mission of bringing people together. And they said, your business, that's never going to work outside Utah. And I said, well, if it doesn't, it doesn't. And that was a big kind of moment for us.

[Jason McGowan]

Franchising. The franchising model is complex, right? Because. And usually people who do it have experience in franchising. First of all, how did you even start? So once this one in bountiful becomes successful and you know that people want to start and open them up. Did you hire, like, consultants to help you understand how to do this? Who helped you figure this out?

[Sawyer Hemsley]

You know, so a lot of it, we just looked up online, and a lot of the people were our friends and family. So it was like they were very forgiving and patient with us because we would give them recipes. You know, at that time, we started having more recipes, and we started giving them recipes like two or three days before they're supposed to be made. And there was a lot of scaling pains and problems early on of us trying, trying to just grow it. And so after we got like, you know, six, seven, eight stores open, that's when things actually really changed because everyone kept saying, well, only people in Utah like sugar. You know, sounds crazy when you just say it like that. But that was kind of the thinking. And it's not going to succeed outside of Utah. It's hot cookies. They're not going to succeed outside of, you know, in warm climates. But then when it started working in Vegas and a couple other places, we really got to this moment that was okay. Sorry, this has been fun side business, but we're now going to take over the nation. We're going to go from a franchise business with our friends and family and trying to do something fun and and cool to let's create a real business and let's take over the United States with this concept when we come back.

[Guy Raz]

In just a moment. Jason learns that almost all publicity is good publicity, even when it's about flavors that flop. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built this. Hey, welcome back to How I Built this.

[Jason McGowan]

I'm Guy raz.

[Guy Raz]

So it's 2018, a year after launch, and crumbl cookies is growing into more than just a side hustle.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

It went from, hey, this is a cool concept. So, you know, we said, okay, we nailed it. Now how do we scale it it? Because it's a whole different skill set and a whole different business. Right? And so we went from these cookies and teaching people how to do it to how do we build this big franchise business? And we had one rule, which was, we need to fire ourselves. Every single day I wake up, I've got to fire myself from jobs that can be easily done by somebody else. You know, so customer support, we got to fire ourselves. We got to find who's the best customer support person we could find. You know, it's like, I can't be doing deliveries anymore. I gotta work on the business, not in the business. How do we fire ourselves from delivery drivers? How do we. And one of the things that we often would say to ourselves is, we need to quit making 10 store decisions. We need to start making 100 store decisions, 1,000 store decisions. For example, let me give you a specific example. How are we going to train all the bakers on the recipes? Because at this time, we had a rotating menu which. Which basically rotated every single week. How are we going to train the entire nation when we have a thousand stores and 30, 40,000 bakers? And so that led to the decision of building technology. So we have our own custom app that shows people how to train. We invested in videography and training tools, and people can see how many people are trained in their store and what their level is and their knowledge skills.

[Jason McGowan]

And that would come. I mean, that be. Would. Would come later, obviously, as you scaled. But I mean, I'm curious. In 2018, this is your first full year in business. By the end of that year, there were 16 locations. Right. Which is a really fast growth. I mean, not as fast as it would eventually become, but still, like, you know, and you had a brand and you had a quality product, and you had to ensure that all those 16 stores were doing the same things, right? That they were making the dough exactly the same way that they were frosting the cookies. Maybe you weren't frosting them quite yet, but. And then when you had a new cookie, you had to unroll, you had to roll that out to all those stores. Like, in that first year, how did you manage teaching people how to do that?

[Sawyer Hemsley]

A lot of it was sending over the recipes to them and doing just content videos of just sharing with them, like how they should make this, how this should be done, and how the recipe should look. And the second thing that we did is we had everyone send our recipe their pictures in, so they'd have to take pictures of the product. And we had people here that would critique and say, that doesn't look right. Let's see what you're doing here. Are you mixing wrong or you're over mixing or what happened? And so we were constantly, like, gathering data digitally, and we were really relentless. And so a lot of it was manual. The processes were manual, but that. That couldn't last forever. Me and Sawyer couldn't even open every store physically. But for the first hundred locations, for example, I did the real estate. So I went out and I met with the entrepreneurs and the franchisees, and I'd go tour the locations and we'd look at them and we would talk about them and we'd. You know, eventually I couldn't do that anymore, but I was there. We were boots on the ground. We were in it.

[Jason McGowan]

Yeah, well, I mean, you had to, because if the more stores you're opening, the more risk there is that one of them isn't gonna be up to scratch. Right. And you could start getting negative reviews by people who are like, oh, this crumble cookies place sucks. Right. It's one of those franchises. So it's like you really had to make sure that their standards were what you needed them to be. I'm curious, like, by the end of 2018, I mentioned you'd 16 locations, and I read that your revenue was about under a million dollars, but you were growing, obviously. And by the. By the end of 2019, so your second full year, you had 55 locations, and you were. You'd earned about four and a half million dollars in revenue. Do you think being in Utah at the beginning is a major reason why it was able to scale that? Because culturally it was the right fit and there was a fan base and it's baking and it's. You're closed on Sunday and all these things. Like, do you think had you started it, I don't know, in Los Angeles, maybe it wouldn't have worked?

[Sawyer Hemsley]

I think you're probably right. I remember reading the book about Sam Walton in Made in America and how he went to the outskirts of Walmart. It's almost like the Walmart strategy and where you go to all these smaller towns and populations of sixty thousand, a hundred thousand. So, yeah, I do think that it also created this energy, excitement when you go to North Dakota and there haven't been a lot of other brands that have gone to North Dakota. Man, you should see sales go crazy in North Dakota because people are talking about it. There's a thousand other concepts in, let's say, LA or New York, and you're just one of many. But when you're in these towns and you're taking care of these customers that maybe don't have a lot of options. It's also really exciting for them.

[Jason McGowan]

Yeah. Tell me about social media now. I mean, you came from this background, like you had all of this experience with social media. Tell me a little bit about how you started to think about leveraging social media to turn what was a. Basically a cookie, a good cookie. But there are lots of good cookies available in America. But how do you then use social media to really differentiate it? How did you start to think about that?

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Well, you know, I think one thing that we had done really early on, which sounds very simple, but lots of brands don't do it, is we actually engage with our customers. It surprises me today that so many brands and businesses spend so many dollars trying to attract new customers and then when they come talk to them on social media, they're just like, ignore them. They don't answer their DMs, and they just are constantly trying to grind and find new audiences or create new splashes. And so for us, we carefully, over long periods of time, have built relationships with our customers and people like, well, you have a cult like following. We have a, we call them cult like relationships here, which we respond back to our customers. We respond to their feedback. If they have ideas for cookies, guess what? We actually implement them. When they have complaints or frustrations about a product, if it tasted a certain way they didn't like, we take that feedback. We actually fix our products. And it gets harder and harder over time. But even today we have over 30 people that are just dedicated to responding to people. So I think as you build a social presence, you cannot underestimate the compounding effects of constantly talking to your customers that compounds exponentially over time.

[Jason McGowan]

How did you land on what. I think a lot of people think of crumbl cookies as sort of like a frosted cookie. It's almost like, you know, I think there was a cupcake craze. It's still around, right? People still go eat cupcakes. But, you know, a lot of your cookies have a, you know, layer of frosting on top, which is different, unusual. How did that come about? Because I think again that when I think of crumbl cookies, I think of that sort of really sort of lavishly decorated cookie.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

You know, one of the things that, you know, Sawyer and I think about a lot. So we constantly ask ourselves, how are cookies different, unique and special? And it allows us to just try crazy things, you know, and because our menu rotates every week, if something doesn't land, guess what? Who cares? At least we were Trying something fun, and it was different and unique. That's kind of been our mantra. You know, we started doing things like adding a frosting. And I remember when we add the frosting for the first time, like, operationally, it was extremely challenging. Customers love it. Which created demand, which created more efficiency.

[Jason McGowan]

Some people hate it, right?

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Oh, yes.

[Jason McGowan]

Which also works to your advantage because it's controversial. There are people who do see this, and they're like, that's disgusting. That's too much sugar.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

You're right. It does create this controversy and this conversation online. But at the end of the day, we look at the data and say, what do customers want? And, you know, we say this a lot here at Krembl is our critics don't pay for our business. Our fans do.

[Jason McGowan]

I think that's a really important point because I think a lot of brands and, you know, folks do pay attention to their haters, and that's not who's buying your product. I wonder about how did you start to think about really getting this idea of crumbl as a brand? Like when people think of cookies, for example, who were you targeting particularly? Because initially it was women. It was moms coming into the store and Logan. But I imagine eventually it was like, well, it's actually kids. Teenagers.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah, it's a combination of both. Those are our two strong demographics. It's both moms is kind of our primary, and then teenagers is our secondary. But how. So how do we think about brand being in the tech world and being around Steve Jobs and a lot of people call us the apple of cookies sometimes, and especially early on with our stores. And they're white. And unlike other cookie concepts, you can actually see them making the ingredients. You can smell the store when you get in there. But a big part of the brand is the rotating menu was born after bountiful. After the first week in Bountiful, by that time, we had something like 11 flavors. We couldn't keep them all in stock. People were frustrated to come get their favorite flavor, but they couldn't get them. And we sat down at the end of the week in that bountiful location, and we said, what if we rotate the menu? We drop it on a Sunday when no one can get it. People will freak out. They'll want the product. They'll be talking about the product. But then everyone across all of our locations can experience the same flavor at the same time and have conversations around them. You know, people are not going to remember the exact flavor that they had that week, or they're not going to remember the exact taste, although those things are really important. They're going to remember how they felt, what the experience was like, you know, and so. And sometimes it even works, even on product that is completely. People don't like. One good example was Everything But Bagel. We launched this Everything But Bagel. And all of a sudden people are like, what the heck are you even doing? Crumble. But the amount of conversation and the amount of people come in to try it and then telling us why it was horrible, it actually facilitated our mission.

[Jason McGowan]

When you make an Everything but the Bagel cookie, that's gonna generate a lot of conversation. I mean, it's. It's totally from a marketing perspective, like, it makes a lot of sense.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Totally. It makes a ton of sense. You know, and sometimes they may not even be the biggest sellers, but the earned media behind them becomes a really big deal.

[Jason McGowan]

When you're like a year or two in, right. I mean, and from the outside, it looks like, wow, you're just crushing it. 55 locations, you're a year and a half in $4.5 million in revenue. But actually, that's when you're extremely vulnerable. There are tons of examples. Not tons, lots of examples of franchise models that failed, that went under after expanding or selling tons of franchises. In a sense, you're actually still very vulnerable at that point.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah, no, definitely. And I think. I think people see it on social media, and all of a sudden they're like, oh, I could do this. This is just cookies. It's simple.

[Jason McGowan]

Yeah.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

So of course you have people, you know, competition, others wanting to open up stores. And so for us, though, that became. How do we become really nimble and really quick, even as a larger company? And how do we grow the store footprint to cover across the United States as fast as possible?

[Jason McGowan]

That was the realization that you had to do this very fast.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Scale, scale and speed. So scale and speed, you know, it creates this moat and it creates this experience that, you know, discourages competition. If you become the first movers and you see this with, you know, in n Out or whataburger, how one has the east coast, one has the west coast, and they're kind of, you know, several brands. And for us, our belief was, how do we. How do we go across the nation as fast as possible so that. That. That doesn't happen.

[Jason McGowan]

Yeah. Let's talk about TikTok, because you really figured out how to get virality, like massive viral. I think you've got 10 million TikTok followers on your channel, more than Starbucks Right.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

For example, Starbucks and Nucky combined. I think we have more than both those combined. Yeah.

[Jason McGowan]

So what do you. What did you do on TikTok that worked and that was able? Like, was it just images of cookies breaking? Was it just crazy cookies with wild frosting, like weird flavors? What were you putting out there that caught fire?

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Well, I think it's first and foremost, the. One of the most important decisions we made was to go on the platform early on and you see the engagement numbers, you see everything else, and you're like, this is going to be huge. Go all in on TikTok. So we had a first, earliest mover's advantage over a lot of brands. And the second thing that we did is I think a lot of brands and companies, they try to take their. Their content and they try to just disperse it across all the social networks and just like, it's all the same. Right? It's like the same video. So let's drop it on all five platforms. Well, the problem is, is the customers on X are different than the customers on TikTok and are different than the customers on Instagram and what they're going for and their motives and their desires are different. So how our photos look in the photography in Instagram, really big deal. TikTok, nobody cares, right? So, so what? The second thing that we did, other than just the early, you know, movers advantage, is we try to find out what the customers were already doing and leverage that. So one thing that we did was the customers were really excited about, you know, sharing their reviews. This is kind of where reviews started really taking off on TikTok. And so a couple of things started happening, like, wow, how do we champion these reviewers? And so we started, you know, putting their videos in the stores. People physically would walk in like, oh, my goodness, there's TikTok videos of, like, in the stores.

[Jason McGowan]

In the stores on a screen just on, like, replay.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Just. Yep, Replay doing it. Right. We started kind of highlighting the TikTok, you know, customers. We started reposting them, and then we started just doing reviews. And I remember I did a review and I did a positive review and I did a negative review on a cookie I didn't like because everyone has different taste buds and they're like, the CEO is doing a negative comment on a cookie. And, like, it just. We were authentic. We were just who we were. It wasn't like we were trying to do something or we were just trying to be authentic to the audience that was there.

[Jason McGowan]

So this is the other kind of, I think Differentiator, which is you change all of the cookies every week except for the chocolate chip cookie that stays right. And everything else is changed every week.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Every single week.

[Jason McGowan]

And you drop that. Those flavors. It's like a drop like a. Like a new purse or new sneakers. Like, you. You have a flavor drop every Sunday. And literally, I mean, even if you could have a week right, where only the chocolate chip cookie is selling well, but the other ones are not. Like, I'm looking at it this week here in my area, like, blueberry cheesecake is a flavor, and that might not be popular, or it might be super popular, but it's gone in a week.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Exactly. And you have people that they don't want to miss it that week. And so there's FOMO that plays involved in it. All those things come into play. But, yeah, people will freeze them. People will buy them in droves. If it's their favorite flavor, they'll buy them and they'll freeze them so that they can have them later.

[Jason McGowan]

But this is interesting to me because I have spoken to a lot of conferences of franchise owners, and, you know, they always have some criticisms of the parent company. And I'm thinking, if I'm a franchise owner and I'm paying, you know, you 8% or 9%, and, you know, you're telling me I've got to make the almost everything bagel cookie that week and no one's buying it. And I'm like, well, last week we had the butterscotch crisp cookie, and that was crushing it. Like, I'm annoyed because I'm making less money that week.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yes, well. And I think that's part of the business. And so, yes, you have some franchise partners who probably are frustrated and wish we had this flavor versus that flavor. One thing that we've done recently is we've brought our franchise. We bring a council together of franchisees. So we have several franchisees who've run extremely well, you know, well run stores. And they come together and they help us pick the flavors together. We do it as a team.

[Jason McGowan]

I mean, sometimes, like, what is the criteria for put, like, you've had like pineapple dole whip cookie. Right. Or cornbread cookie, which doesn't to me. Or strawberry limeade with nerds candies. That just sounds really gross to me. How do you.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Have you tried it?

[Jason McGowan]

I haven't. No.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah, so you gotta try it. I can tell you haven't tried that one because you probably would like that one.

[Jason McGowan]

You know, like, how weird. Are you willing to go?

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah, I think we can go pretty weird. Why not? It's fun. So we will, Our brand will always do that.

[Jason McGowan]

I mean, the flip side of, I mean, innovating, obviously, but the flip side is, is that you do too many things. Right. Is that you're pushing too many things out. But I guess that you're. What you're saying is you experiment and if it doesn't work, you just move on. You just kill it.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah. And I think that's why our franchise partners are willing to work with us and willing to try new things.

[Jason McGowan]

Because they know you're going to kill stuff if they don't work.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

They know equally, equally that we're trying new things. That will kill something when it's a bad idea. That's culturally like just part of who we are.

[Jason McGowan]

Yeah, I know. Covid was a huge, you know, like actually was a huge sort of boost for the brand because a lot of people were on social media, they were noticing the brand and in many states the stores could stay open. And that also inspired and continues to inspire copycatters. Right. Which I think is a form of flattery, but also can be threatening to the business. And you did file lawsuits against competitors that you felt were copying your brand or your look or the boxes and things like that. And this was, it was, it was dubbed the Utah cookie war by the newspapers at the time because these were both Utah based companies, both of which are still around. In your view, like, is it worth it to go after somebody who's copying your. Because we've had founders in the company who's just say, at the end of the day, it's not worth the time and the effort to do that. You just focus on your brand and others say no, you've got to go after every single one because they can threaten your business.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah. You know, I think that's a great question. I think my answer before and after all this experience is probably different. The biggest struggle we actually had was what's my fiduciary responsibility as CEO? Because it was not like people were just copying us. We had somebody that came and worked for our company and stole our recipes.

[Jason McGowan]

Your trade secrets.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah, stole our trade secrets and then started. So for us, we of course felt like we had a very strong case and the judge felt like we did too as well. But the court of public opinion is different. It's about sound bites. And by this time we got larger. So they tried to create it to be a David versus Goliath experience.

[Jason McGowan]

I think even one of your competitors that you sue to get Billboards or consider doing it, then that would say things like cookies. So good. We're being sued.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yes. And that was the company that actually had an employee that worked for us that took the recipes. But looking back on it, I think, I don't think it was worth the time and the energy. Our whole career has been built on not focusing on competitors. And then all of a sudden this happened and it caused us to lose focus for a little bit, to be honest too. So I would probably lean more into the camp with not being worth it.

[Jason McGowan]

By the end of 2022, you reached a billion dollars in sales. So listen, roughly five years after launch, which is absolutely incredible. I mean the growth was just astounding and entirely self funded. Right. I mean there were no investors at that point.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

No investors. Yep. We had no investors still to this day.

[Jason McGowan]

Right.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Well, we actually took on a minority partner just a few weeks ago and that's the first time we've had a minority partner.

[Jason McGowan]

Congrats.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Thanks. It was a pretty exciting thing and we're not really announcing any of the details of the deal, but the company value is amazing and we had just a few of us on the cap table and that was it.

[Jason McGowan]

So I'm curious about something and I don't want to rain on the parade, but part of my job is to ask questions. That might sound like that, but when I was growing up, the big cookie brand was Mrs. Fields and it was started in Palo Alto by Mrs. Fields, Debbie Fields. And it was everywhere. It was in every shopping mall. It was everywhere. And they were good cookies. I remember and I can't remember the last time I saw Mrs. Fields. I'm sure they're around somewhere, but I don't know where. It can't be as big as it once was. I mean, there is always a risk that, you know, the sort of the virality or the excitement or the novelty of it wears off. And so how do you. I mean, I know for example, you've slowed expansion, which again doesn't suggest that that's happening, but you've got over a thousand locations and you were growing very rapidly and now you're going to slow down expansion a little bit, but how do you protect the future of the business? Like how do you make sure that in 20 years this isn't Mrs. Fields? If you care at all about that.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Well, how I look at it. No, of course we care about that. We care deeply about that. We want to crumbled to be a brand that's around forever. We're really excited about it. And we're very optimistic. You know, even just now, we took a minority investment. Could we have taken the whole company off the table? You know, that's. That's. That could have been a possibility. But it doesn't matter what business you are, you know, if you stop innovating, you stop growing, you start dying. So, for example, today, a lot of times, people don't even know it yet, but we're not just cookies anymore.

[Jason McGowan]

You have cakes, too?

[Sawyer Hemsley]

We have cakes, yeah. We've got pies. You know, one of our slowest times of the year used to be Thanksgiving week. Well, guess what we did last last year. We just sold pies for Thanksgiving week. They loved the pies. The sales were off the charts. Right. And so, you know, we did slow the growth, but some of those growth had to be slowed because we were opening, you know, two, 300 units a year. Right. That's like, doesn't matter what brand you are or how big you are, there comes a point when, you know, you've got to open the right amount. And so we still plan on growing, right? We still plan on growing 100 units or so a year. But we want to be a little bit more strategic in how we do it and where we place them and all those kinds of things. That's how we stay ahead.

[Jason McGowan]

Jason, when you think about the journey you took and where you got to now, how much of this do you attribute to the work you put in and the grind? And how much do you think has to do with just getting lucky in the right timing?

[Sawyer Hemsley]

Yeah, I think for me, it's been the combination of three things. One, it is just tenacity and hard work can get you through a lot of stuff. And second is the timing. There is luck involved in there. And what would happen if I would have started BYU.com before Facebook? But then I think the other thing, too, is the learnings from my faith and having that be a part of my focus. And those are the three things that I think about. But if we just had luck and not all the other things, it wouldn't have worked. If we had all the tenacity in the world and all the faith in the world, and we didn't have a little luck along the way, you know, that wouldn't have happened. So I think it's a combination of all those things, and any successful entrepreneur, you know, they may or may or may not admit it, they have those things in their life, you know, and I think that's what helps makes them successful.

[Guy Raz]

That's Jason McGowan co founder along with Sawyer Hemsley of Crumble. By the way, remember how Crumble's pink packaging was inspired by that 1959 Cadillac owned by a family friend of Sawyer's? Well, in 2021, Sawyer actually had the chance to buy that very same Cadillac pale pink with those classic tail fins over the wheels, and it's now become kind of a mascot for Crumble. They call it the Pink Caddy. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the Follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And if you're interested in insights, ideas and lessons, particularly for small business, sign up for my [e-mail] or on substack. This episode was produced by Alex Chung with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Karla Estevez. Our engineers are Patrick Murray and Jimmy Keeley. Our production staff also includes Casey Herman, Sam Paulson, Kerry Thompson, Kathryn Seifer, Noor Gill Rommel Woods, Andrea Bruce, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built this. If you like How I Built this, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short [e-mail] survey.

[Sawyer Hemsley]

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