Business Spotlight: Bitten by the Baking Bug

One-hundred pounds of flour, 50 pounds of butter, 20 dozen eggs and 60 pounds of sugar – it all adds up to another week at the office for Rex and Elyse Gomez operating their Cookies By Design franchise.

Under Sweet Freedom LLC, the Gomezes in 2006 purchased Springfield’s Cookies By Design rights from Todd and Amy Carroll. The $75,000 transaction, plus a $30,000 franchise transfer fee, provided a new opportunity for the couple, who relocated to Springfield from California in 1993.

Cookies By Design, 302 E. Republic Road, sells hand-decorated cookie bouquets, gourmet and pan cookies, and cupcakes. And with its delivery service, it’s filling a niche in gift orders.

“All dough is made here. We’re cracking eggs and measuring flour,” Elyse Gomez says, noting no frozen pucks or buckets of dough are welcome in her commercial kitchen.

The peak season runs October through Christmas, when the team daily churns out 2,200 cookies, or 250 dozen, made from scratch without preservatives. Seven-day workweeks are the norm in December.

“It’s crazy busy, but it’s fun,” she says. “Christmas is coming.”

Franchise fix
Gomez worked as a sales and marketing analyst for Springfield’s Reckitt Benckiser ingredient division, where co-worker Amy Carroll talked about selling her side business.

“I said, ‘Wow, that sounds like fun,’” Gomez recalls, before venturing in.

After balancing her corporate job with the franchise duties for 10 months, Gomez decided to apply her attention full-time to best tap into the nearly $15 billion retail baking and food services market.

The upsides to buying existing franchise rights, she says, are a ready-made business plan, a developed customer base and a knowledgeable staff.

Decorator and Assistant Manager Merilee Lewis has worked for Cookies By Design since Tom and JoAnn Dapp brought the franchise to Springfield in 1999.

“JoAnn hired me on the spot,” Lewis says while icing a mummy cookie for a Halloween bouquet.

Lewis’ biggest project was decorating 500 butterfly-shaped cookies in black-and-white icing for a promotional at Butterfly Palace in Branson. She regularly fills custom orders for area pharmaceutical representatives and corporate clients Digital Monitoring Products and North American Savings Bank.

NASB mortgage loan officer Scott Sallee places weekly orders to provide clients with mailbox-shaped cookies personalized with their new addresses. “It’s kind of a cap at the end of the transaction – the icing on the cake, so to speak. Clients love them,” he says of the treats presented at closing.

Cupcake craze
The Springfield franchise of Cookies By Design posted 2010 revenues of $72,000, a 24 percent slide compared to 2009, largely due to geographic changes in the way sales are routed by the corporate office, Gomez says. With fewer cookie bouquets selling, the Gomezes added cupcakes to their inventory in the fourth quarter last year.

“We had a lot of requests from customers,” Rex Gomez says. “We thought we might as well jump on because everyone was.”

In just two years, cupcakes have risen to the second-highest grossing sales product among retail bakeries nationwide, according to the 2011 Retail Baking Survey by Modern Baking, a Penton Media Inc. magazine. Roughly 38 percent of retail bakeries surveyed said cupcakes posted the greatest sales gains in 2011, up from just 6 percent of respondents in 2009.

The trend has taken hold in Springfield, where specialty dessert shops such as Alexandria’s Cupcake Cottage, The Cup and Star Cake have opened since early 2010. National franchise Gigi’s Cupcakes is planning a late September opening in Battlefield Market Place to offer 60 varieties, including Hunka Chunka Banana Love, Grasshopper and Amaretto Amore.

“Our cupcakes are more like your mother would make,” Gomez says, noting that Cookies By Design sold cupcakes at the Ozark Empire Fair this summer.

“It’s not froufrou,” adds Elyse Gomez, referring to the 5-ounce cupcakes made in jumbo muffin tins that sell for $2.75 apiece.

Cookies, of course, were the top-selling bakery item in Modern Baking’s latest survey, indicated by 43 percent of bakeries surveyed.

Now, with that one-two punch, the Cookies By Design owners and two part-time staff members are preparing for the holiday rush.

Flipping through a 4-inch binder, decorator Lewis says she works with 400 licensed designs, such as Disney characters, NFL and NCAA teams, and Winnie the Pooh.

“Customizing is really our thing,” Gomez says, with hundreds of cookie cutters hanging on the wall behind her as she flips through pictures of cookies shaped as Hiland Dairy milk cartons and a lightning bolt for National Weatherman’s Day.

The most popular bouquet, a seven-cookie arrangement, sells for $55. A single gourmet cookie is $1.25, while bouquets are as large as 15 cookies for $110.

Last week, Cookies By Design created a 12-cookie bouquet, with two-dozen gourmet cookies, for a pet owner whose dog died.

“Stuff like that makes you sad but at the same time … it just makes you feel good that you’re making people happy,” Gomez says. “People are really happy when they see us coming with cookies.”[[In-content Ad]]