Sugar Cookie: Part 2-The Leap into Entrepreneurship

The Story of ArmStina’s Cookies

It’s all a bit of a blur trying to think back on it. As I write this, I’ve just finished cleaning out part of our basement and letting go of 90% of my cookie cutter collection. As I went through each scrapbook container holding my cutters, I began to get emotional. “Wow, this is tough,” I said to Armando. “I never thought I’d have an emotional connection to cookie cutters.”

Thinking about it now, it makes sense. Armstina’s Cookies was a huge part of my life. As I went through the cutters, memories of cookie sets I baked and decorated flashed in my mind, as if I were looking at them through a viewfinder toy. The Halloween horror character set I offered, the unicorn set I made for my niece’s eighth birthday, the cute mini Valentine’s Day cookies I packaged on cards with puns, the Easter cookie sets, the Christmas sets, the Super Mario cookies for my son’s third birthday, the Barbie roller skating set, the princess set, the gorgeous safari animal set, the LOL Dolls, I could go on and on.

I really enjoyed that walk down memory lane. It’s proof of my creativity, resilience, confidence, entrepreneurial spirit, courage, resourcefulness, and strength; things I’d forgotten I had in the past couple of years.

But let’s rewind to May of 2019. I had just quit my stable full-time job without a backup plan. This was it, Christina, either sink or swim, I told myself. And so, I dove into the deep end headfirst. I put on every hat I could think of, and there were still more waiting for me to discover. I fully leveraged all the tools Etsy offered to grow my business, making the most of every resource it provided to reach new customers and streamline my operations.

I had to be smart with my time, as I still had to show up for others, I was a mother and wife, after all. So, in order to consistently create new content, I recorded myself decorating each new cookie design. Armando would take the videos, edit them, and post them on YouTube and Instagram.

I was the CEO, COO, head of customer service, head of sales, and the maker. Armando was my right-hand man, all while juggling his full-time job. He was a husband, father, videographer, social media manager, and assisted with too many other things to list. As we continued to fill our calendars with business and figure out how to diversify our revenue streams, we threw everything at the wall to see what would stick.

I decided to start offering holiday preorders with limited pre-designed sets that customers could choose from. This was a new way to bring in revenue beyond just waiting for custom orders to trickle in. The first preorders I offered were for Halloween and included our popular horror characters, a Hocus Pocus set, and classic Halloween designs. Since I had never offered sets like this for shipping before, I could only offer them for local Chicago pickup.

The support from our customers was overwhelming and I reached capacity within a few hours. I was fueled with excitement and couldn't wait to start baking and decorating. However, I didn’t have cookie cutters for these designs, so I had to hand-cut all the cookies. It took me over 10 hours just to hand-cut and bake them.

This was the first time I grossly underestimated how much time I needed to bake and decorate these cookies. I knew I couldn’t keep operating this way as it was inefficient. So, we made our first big investment in the business and purchased a 3D printer. Armando taught himself how to design and print cookie cutters. It started with making cutters for me to use on a few custom cookies, but it quickly opened up more creative possibilities and saved us from having to buy new cutters.

As our Instagram following grew, so did our YouTube page. Our Nightmare Before Christmas cookie decorating video exploded on YouTube, and things started to escalate from there. That video currently has 2.5 million views. It brought more eyes to our business, and other bakers began asking about our cutters. We saw another opportunity for a revenue stream and took it. We began selling our cookie cutters. Eventually we invested in three more 3D printers to keep up with demand and allow for growth.

At this point, about 95% of our business was running through Etsy, but it was limited and restrictive. We were surviving on someone else’s land, and they could take it away at any moment if we didn’t play their game properly. Yes, Etsy offered visibility, but everything came with a cost, and my growth was reaching its limit. That’s when I decided it was time to venture out and build our own website. In January of 2020, I removed all of our cookie business from Etsy and moved it onto our website. We decided to keep selling cookie cutters on Etsy and our website, as they were easier to manage.

Remember those hats I hadn’t discovered I had to wear yet? Well, building an entire website was one I definitely didn’t initially plan for, but it became the next chapter in my journey. I had done so much research months before the transition, but I was overwhelmed and began to doubt myself. A website, Christina? You aren’t smart enough to build that. Who do you think you are? No one is going to visit the site. You’re going to lose business. These are just some of the things I would tell myself when imposter syndrome took control of my mind.

Imposter syndrome can make you feel like you're not capable or deserving of what you've worked so hard to achieve. So, when it was time to take the next step in my business, I was scared. I worried about what others would say if I failed, and I found myself comparing my chapter 3 to someone else’s chapter 20. The fear of failure was overwhelming, especially knowing there wasn’t anyone coming to save me. But when I looked back at my life, it was clear that I had always defied the odds. Since the age of 16, when I didn’t have much parental guidance, I was determined to build a life I wanted, one that wasn’t defined by society or anyone else’s expectations. And so, I did what I always do: I just started and figured it out along the way.

Armando and I worked together to get the website up and running. For the first time, I was able to offer Valentine’s Day cookie preorders with both local pickup and shipping options. We were no longer limited by the growth another company would allow. We kept grinding, adjusting to running most of the business on our own terms through our website. Things were looking up. We’d worked so hard and had the opportunity to invest in other forms of education.

After all the hard work, the sleepless nights, and the fears, it was finally time for the next big adventure, one that would take us all the way to our first and only Cookie Con in March of 2020.

Thanks for reading! Part three will be available soon. Be sure to follow along to see what happened next.