In a matter of a few days,
it was all over everybody's Facebook and it was exciting but also incredibly scary,
because I just thought, how are we going to keep up?
One business owner is cooking up a recipe for success with cookie dough.
Man, have you made it?
Cheers!
This is so awesome.
I'm Kristen Tomlan.
I am the founder and CEO of DO Cookie Dough Confections.
We specialize in all things edible cookie dough.
This is candyland for adults.
It brings everybody back to their childhood.
I got the idea for DO when I was with a bunch of my girlfriends.
We sat there in the car,
passing this tub of cookie dough around,
that was the moment where I was this could maybe be the next big thing in desserts.
Everybody I've ever talked to loves cookie dough,
so why can't we create a shop that's dedicated to it?
After months and months of testing the product, I launched online.
We had our kitchen in Midtown.
We were just producing everything there and shipping
nationwide and doing deliveries within New York.
And we started to get this organic walk-in traffic.
People found out where we were and wanted cookie dough on the spot.
So I thought if they're willing to come here and buy cookie dough,
maybe they will go to a store that is dedicated to it.
And I really think that this could be popular.
But I had no idea that it would be as popular as it was.
The opening weekend, we had a line that went
all the way down the block and around the corner and it was insane.
I had no idea that people would be willing to wait out in
the cold for four hours just to get a taste of what we were serving.
We just could barely even keep up.
We were blowing through ingredients so quickly.
Not only were we running out of cookie dough,
we were running out of everything to make it.
So, that first weekend we were open,
we had to close on Sunday and Monday to get deliveries in and ramp up production,
because we had sold out of every single thing that was edible.
At the height of the craziness,
we were getting through the four hour lines,
doing one to two transactions a minute and serving up to 5,000 customers a day.
We were basically running around here like crazy
people and running on absolutely no sleep.
We were barely keeping our heads above water.
The lines continued for months and months and months and still today on the weekends,
the line will be an hour, hour and a half long.
We had to work with the police and the community board
to move our line across the street to the park,
get out of the neighbor's way.
Now we've finally been able to catch up on
production and make sure that we have all of our flavors
in stock at all times so we're no longer running out.
My business grew exponentially once it went viral.
I had started here when we opened this store with 10 employees.
Now we have close to 80 different employees.
It was exciting and I couldn't be happier where we are today.
Everyone asks, "Why you think it was so popular?
Why did everybody go crazy for it?"
I think people love the product because it's kind of
like their cookie dough dreams gone wild.