Crumbl: How We Built A Cookie Company That Brings In $1 Billion A Year

What do you think about when you think of hype? Well, what about cookies? I never imagined in my wildest dreams that we would do over a billion dollars in sales. We just thought it was a fun side hustle. With over 980 stores across the U.S. and nine international locations, Crumble has quite literally taken over the world. As I get older and as I build this company, I realize more and more everything that we do is really just something that anyone can do. Founded in 2017 by Jason McGowan and Sawyer Hensley, the brand has figured out its secret formula. Yes, its chocolate chip recipe, but also its recipe for creating buzz. From its weekly rotating menu to its iconic pink box, Crumble has mastered the art of leaving its customers wanting more. In the fashion industry, they really came up with this idea of these drops, and it's an idea that we use in our business, and it does. It creates that hype, it creates that excitement, and it also creates scarcity because you can only have that cookie for that week. There are three numbers to watch out for in Crumble's story. 68,000, the amount that Jason personally invested into starting Crumble. 300 million, the amount of cookies Crumble says it sold in 2022. And one billion, the amount Crumble brought in in 2022. This is Founder Effect. My name is Jason McGowan. I'm the co-founder and CEO of a cookie company called Crumble. I'm actually originally from Canada. I came here to the United States. I slept on my friend's floor. I just came with an entrepreneurial dream and wanting to build a better life for myself here in America. Prior to starting Crumble, Jason worked in technology at companies like Ancestry. Before Crumble, I was all about technology. I loved building things that were digital. I made that decision to kind of leave the tech world and go into cookies really after the first store opened and we started seeing a lot of success. I remember watching as families came in to try these cookies, and I thought my whole career I've been trying to bring people together. Is it possible that the solution is actually not a digital technology, but is it cookies? This is Sawyer Hemsley, co-founder and chief brand officer of Crumble. Sawyer is my wife's cousin. Originally, we didn't know each other that well, but I did business with him before and I invested into one of his companies, and it didn't work out. Ultimately, he had such good character, I thought if I ever get the chance to work with this guy, I need to do that. My role here at Crumble Cookies, I have the pleasure of maintaining and developing the cookies every week, and I also am in charge of all the visual, creative branding needs for the concept and company. The four ounces I think is the way to go. In 2017, Jason and Sawyer teamed up and came up with the idea of starting a cookie company. With no experience in baking, they started experimenting with hundreds of recipes. I had a full-time job, Sawyer was going to school, so we would kind of get together late at night and whatever time we could to just keep making these cookies and then taste testing them. We would change out one thing, like the milk chocolate chips versus semi-sweet. Which one would be better? And we had no shame. We would go to gas stations and friends and family, and we'd present two cookies and we'd say, which one tastes better? And every single family member that we had at the time said, you guys are crazy. I think it was about four or five months that it took us to really make one cookie. We did everything backwards that you should do in a business. We thought, let's do a business together. And then we came up with a product, then we bought the equipment, and then we started making the products. That same year, Jason and Sawyer stumbled across a building in Logan, Utah. This building became the first ever Crumble location. We realized that it was set to be demolished in six months. It was kind of almost an intrigue because we're like, we have no idea if this business is going to work. This could be really fun. Maybe this will be the perfect solution for us. And we negotiated it down to around $800 a month. I was like, OK, let's go for it. And so after we negotiated, that's how we got the building. Early on in Crumble, we decided to self-fund it. I invested $68,000 into the business as seed capital to get us started and going. Everything else from that has been self-funded from the success of the business. Within Crumble's first two years in business, Sawyer and Jason were able to open more than 15 locations. Eventually, we opened up our first franchise location. And this was store number three. As we opened that location, we had a ton of cookies on the menu. The doors were just flooded with people and lines were just wrapped around the corner. We were desperately trying to keep up with all the flavors. And it was really, really hard. And so customers were getting frustrated. Like, I drove all this way. I can't get this flavor. We sat down. We said, you know, out of every hard time in life, there's always an opportunity to think about how can we do this better? We came up with the idea. What if we just rotate the flavors? Let's just drop them right on a Sunday where people can't get them. They'll be super excited to be talking about what flavors they want. And it allows us to continue to build and grow. And that's how the rotating menu was born. And that just changed everything in our business. Today, Crumble works with over 500 franchise partners worldwide. The franchising was really born out of a need to give a family member one of our locations. And as friends and family stores started opening and we started seeing more and more success, that's when we realized, oh, wow, this could not be just a Utah thing or a family thing. This could be a really big business. And at that moment, we said, we're going to go all in. In October of 2018, Crumble came out with its own in-house app, which helps streamline the customer experience. When you're done eating the cookies, you can rate how the cookies were. Or even before you're done eating the cookies, you can take a picture and send them to us. And so that lets us see across the nation, how's the quality in every single store? We can measure that quality, see changes or iterations that we need to do to fix the quality. I think another huge reason for our success is listening to the customer. In most businesses, when you go into an R&D kitchen, you come up with some ideas. Maybe you have people taste them a little bit, and then you launch your product. Well, what we do is we actually put them into 50 test store locations throughout the nation, and they all taste them, and they give us feedback. And that feedback gets circulated back to our R&R team, and they perfect the product even more. And then we launch the product nationwide. So really, a huge part of our success is leveraging our audience, talking to our customers, listening to them when they suggest ideas on social media. We actually listen. Crumble has also gained major traction online with over 16 million followers across its social media platforms. Shortly after the company launched its rotating menu, the hashtag CrumbleReview went viral on TikTok. All right, we're at Crumble trying the tres leches. Just the right amount of pumpkin, just the right amount of frosting. We were heavy in social media right from the beginning, watching TikTok and all these videos and really leaning into it and highlighting those people that were tasting our cookies and sharing their reviews. And as we did that, it just exploded. With Jason's tech background and Sawyer's marketing prowess, the cousins grew Crumble from a hometown bakery into a real-world unicorn company that brings in over $1 billion a year. When you start growing a business, there's all kinds of different degrees when you go to different stages of the company. The very beginning, it's me and Sawyer running around, doing the deliveries, answering customer service, trying to come up with the next great cookie. But as you get bigger and bigger, it's a different kind of business of how you can service your franchise partners. We've got to align all of us. So now you have not a few entrepreneurs, you have a thousand entrepreneurs. So there's tons of ideas and different ways you can move the business. And of course, as you get bigger and bigger and more and more successful, there's all kinds of critics start coming out. And our solution is to focus on the positive. What customers love our products? And how can we surprise and delight and satisfy those customers? Being a CEO or an owner of a business is always hard on mental health because, you know, at the end of the day, you're the last one. You're the one that has to make the decisions. If something's not working, the buck stops ultimately at the top. So although I'm at work and spending a lot of time and making sure I'm building this business, how I keep grounded is spending time with my family. That's important and even more important than the business. You know, I never would have imagined that Crumble would be a unicorn company. In 2022, we had our first year of billion-dollar yearly system-wide sales. And we have to pinch ourselves. You know, as you scale fast, you're going to have a lot of successes and you're going to have some learnings too. For us, we feel like we've hit that point where we've succeeded in the United States and we'll scale back our growth and it will start expanding internationally. So as we go to Canada and to the UK, that's where a lot of our growth will come as international. Crumble also plans to expand its dessert offerings in the future. In January of 2024, it launched its first non-cookie item called the Cinnamon Square. You know, one of the biggest lessons that I've learned from starting Crumble is just to get started. Whether you don't have a mixer yet or you don't have a recipe for a cookie, you just get started. You start doing things, you start moving. I think action in the early stage is what's really, really important to success, just to move. I hope that people look back at Crumble and say, this is a company that allowed us to create meaningful moments with those who matter most.