A Great Cookie, Handed Out Everywhere, Built Four Bakeries

What if I told you that a guy, let's call him Shane, graduated from Tennessee and got his dream job working in logistics for Amazon? What if I then told you he gave it all up to start a cookie bakery? Well, his name is Shane, he did leave Amazon, and he now owns and operates Sugar Shane's Gourmet Bakery. We talked through how a background in logistics helped him run a business, how trying dozens of recipes finally got him to the perfect chocolate chip cookie, and how people still love free samples. All that and more on this week's episode of Marketing MadMen. They say marketing is a madman's game. So now we turn it over to Marketing MadMen with Nick Constantino and Trip Jobe.

Happy Saturday. Welcome to Marketing MadMen. Nick Constantino here. And today we're talking about sugar. We're talking about desserts. We're talking about cookies. We're talking about all the good stuff, all the good stuff that makes me have to watch my waistline and makes me have to work out so I can eat it. We're going to have a fun conversation. We got Shane Quillen here, who is the founder and master extraordinaire of Sugar Shane's Gourmet Bakery. And we are going to talk about a couple different things. One, opening a business. COVID seems to be a recurring theme that comes up in all of this. But also how you make some of the best cookies in the world and how you spread the word about it. So, Shane, how you doing, my man?

I'm doing well. Thanks for having me.

It's great to have you. So we got a whole tray of cookies in front of us. Before we get started, tell me about some of the flavors. Tell me about some of these cookies, because I'm definitely going to pop that puppy open and start eating in the middle of the show.

So actually, one of my faves is the cheesecake brownie bite in there. They're just cut in a quarter, smallest bite. So that'd be your lowest calorie, a good start too.

I'm not worried about calories. I'm going to talk my way through this and burn all the calories off by talking.

You got a classic. So you got the sea salt chocolate chip. It's cut in half. You see one piece kind of sticking up there. And then we've got some of our new ones. We've got new Fruity Pebbles on the menu, a Cookie Monster, which is a blue with a homemade chocolate buttercream. You've got an M&M swirl, so half chocolate, half vanilla. It's two swirled doughs together. And then you've got a banana pudding, a Betty White, which is a vanilla bean golden Oreo, and a Dashing Delta, so it's a cinnamon-based Biscoff.

Yeah, that's a lot. That's a lot going on. I know you're not allowed to answer this question, because it's like asking which is your favorite child. Which is your favorite?

Oh, no, it's easy. I'm basic. I actually like the sea salt chocolate chip the best. That's the first recipe I ever did.

Okay, so talk about this platter in front of me. Lots of people make cookies. Talk about what makes these cookies different. And obviously now with four locations open, word is spreading. Talk about why these cookies are different than what you would get at another bakery or another store.

Yeah, sure. So first of all, we make almost everything in-house. I mentioned the Betty White, that's a vanilla bean golden Oreo. We actually make the vanilla bean bark in-house. We make most of the fillings in-house, any buttercreams, any brownies, any blondies that we make for sale. And then we actually stuff them inside of a cookie. A lot of our dough needs to chill anywhere from 24 to 48 hours before we bake it. Most other bakeries will just freeze it or bake it right on the spot and then be good to go from there.

Yeah, you could tell, man. I mean, not only is this thing gooey and you taste the butter, but you could tell that this thing is fresh as can be. And even if you sit it out for a couple of hours, it's going to have that freshness to it.

And the second part of that too is the ingredients. I always say ingredients are more important than the recipe. The main reason is 83% European style butter. We get it from the same vendor every time. It's just tough to compete once you start using that type of product, especially on the butter end. Our flours are consistently the same, our sugars, our chocolates as well. And then like I said, everything else we make in-house.

Yeah, as I'm stuffing my face, you'd see. So one of the things that's incredibly important with this: those are all expensive endeavors you just talked about. Each of those ingredients, European butter, let alone crappy store brand butter, is expensive. So when you opened, was this part of the vision? Because most times what happens, people start with that vision and they adjust because it's just not sustainable. Talk about the vision and how you started to get here, because using those kinds of ingredients throughout is probably a testament to what your vision was when you started.

Yeah, so I always wanted to use gourmet ingredients. However, during COVID it was tough, right? A lot of times you didn't have the gourmet ingredients, and then you really saw it: I've never used this type of butter before. And that could have been just an 82% European style or not European at all. European is just the fat content, and that's all it really comes down to.

Kerrygold is a big one, right?

Yeah, huge one. So the moral of the story was we really didn't realize what our product was on the down end until we started using lesser ingredients. That's cheaper flours, cheaper sugars. And that's because we couldn't get them during COVID. So always, since day one, I wanted to use a gourmet product. And then we wanted to first specialize in that chocolate chip cookie. That's why it's my favorite. It took four months to figure it out. Some recipes we do within a week, and I'm not going to downplay the other recipes, but day in, day out, small increments: baking soda, baking powder, sugar, flour, the fat content, how long it chills for, what temperature we bake it at. There was a lot that went into it to ultimately get that chocolate chip. It's the same as the cheese pizza. If you go to a pizza spot, you can have the best pepperoni with spicy honey. At the end of the day, if you don't have a good cheese pizza, you're not going to get pizza.

Yeah, I think when you go to restaurants across the world, what chefs tell you is get the chicken. It's really easy to make a bone-in rib eye taste good. So get the chicken and see if they really know what they're doing. And I think, just in my limited experience in cooking and some chef work and all these things, what immediately stands out to me, and I freaking hate this word, but I'm going to say it anyway, is mouthfeel. It just tastes different. It hits your mouth with an almost consistent texture throughout. It's not crisp on the outside and soft on the inside, that's the first thing. And then two, the butter and the salt and the sugar are very pronounced, but they don't taste separate. A lot of times you eat a cookie and you get hit with salt and sugar on separate parts. This is a very consistent taste, which I think is a really good thing. That is my amateur read on it.

That's pretty good. I mean, it's true though. A lot of times people have a really sugary cookie and they dump a bunch of salt in there. Salt does help kill some sugar, but there is also a balance and there's also a product flow. That's what else you put in there besides butter, salt, sugar and flour to make it actually taste good. So you got butterscotch in there. I love butterscotch because it creates a sweet element, but it's a salty element as well. So it kind of cuts through some of that sugar, and then the cinnamon there is the complement piece for that cookie.

But also, from my understanding of butterscotch, the way it's cooked changes the chemical composition of it. I don't want to say it's got a smoke to it, but that's the closest thing I can say. It changes what it tastes like slightly. That's like going from sugar to caramel. Very different tastes because of how you cook it, how you make it. Same thing when you bake it too.

So it actually kind of exemplifies the flavors within that cookie. I mean, I wasn't a huge fan of butterscotch until I started baking. And I'll get into it, but I wasn't a baker up until four years ago. So that butterscotch was like, wow, this is an amazing product.

Well, you've done a natural segue for me. So let's start four years ago. Let's talk about how this puppy started.

It's a pretty interesting story. So before Sugar Shane's, I had a pretty extensive corporate background. I lived across the country. I graduated from the University of Tennessee with a supply chain degree. Worked for Kimberly-Clark as an intern and then full time, all based in Knoxville. A year after that, I went and worked for Dollar General's headquarters in Nashville. Wasn't really my thing. And actually, just six months later, I sat next to a guy on a plane who three months later called me and said, hey, I got a job for you in Southern California. So I went and worked out in Newport Beach. Absolutely loved it. I worked more on the private equity side, but still in supply chain. That's when I'd say my career actually really kicked off. I was traveling a bunch and got to become what I call, quote unquote, a foodie. Food was big in my family, but it was always just Italian food. My mom's first generation from Italy.

Yeah, mine is too.

Where's your mom from?

Bari.

Okay, my mom's from Florence. There you go, we got that in common. You know, food has always been there. She's a great cook, great baker as well.

No recipes. God forbid there's a recipe on her.

No recipes. I mean, maybe a chicken scratch on something that has a stain mark on the book. So food was in my DNA, but not high gourmet quality on stuff that wasn't Italian. And when I started traveling a bunch for work, I fell in love with food. I became like an addict of food. In college, I had started picking up cooking at a high level. So food was always in my DNA, but I never thought I was going to work in it. So fast forward, I moved to work for Amazon. I moved a team from Seattle to Atlanta, and we created an office over at Atlantic Station. And I was traveling for work all the time still, and for fun. I was in New York in late 2019 and came across gourmet cookies in New York City. Me and my boys went up to watch the college football playoffs, and then we went and watched a concert up there. I did a self-guided cookie tour. I did eight places in about three hours.

I took both my six-year-old and my two-year-old to New York for Christmas, so I probably did that same tour by accident with them.

Yeah, so I just bounced around. One of them was City Cakes, which I actually loved, but Levain was one of the biggest ones. And at that point I was like, this is it. I went back to watch the game. That's actually when Joe Burrow ripped apart Oklahoma. I'm an Ohio State fan, and Ohio State got clobbered in the second game. And I remember I told my buddies, who are huge entrepreneurs on the West Coast, I'm going to start a gourmet cookie company. At that point in time I hadn't baked at all. I went back to Nashville and started teaching myself how to bake. Fast forward three months later, it's March 1st. If you recall, March 10th or 12th is when the pandemic officially hit. Just like this, I would go into offices between March 1st and March 12th, passing out cookies to old clients, really from the private equity days, and saying, hey, listen, I'm starting a cookie business. If you like them, use them. They're like, Shane, what are you doing here? And I'm like, oh, I'm starting a cookie business, if you like them, use them. And two companies actually hit me back and said, yeah, we'd love to use you for St. Patrick's Day. I'm freaking out. One was a 400 person party. There's no way I was going to cover this. I called my mom freaking out. She's about to drive down here. Then COVID happened. So my idea of a gourmet cookie catering business, which was the first Sugar Shane's attempt, quickly ended. So I went back to the drawing board, taught myself how to use social media, how to use marketing, which I'll get into, and then how to ultimately grow the business. The next attempt was to open on April 1st, 2020, just a couple weeks later. I had this grand idea. Everyone and their mother and grandmother was trying to open a cookie business or baking business at their house. I saw all these people taking off. I was so excited. I launched my website, opened to the public thinking I was going to sell out. I got three orders.

Yeah.

So I freaked out, went back to the drawing board, and did fake sellouts for the next eight weeks. I knew it was going to work because in late June, I was getting DMs from a grandmother in Mississippi saying, hey, I've tried to get these six weeks straight, and they sell out every time. I wasn't selling anything.

Yeah. False advertising be damned. It doesn't count. It's COVID.

It's the Wild West. It doesn't matter. Then on July 1st, that's when we first got our first pop-up.

That's awesome. Let me set the scenario, because we're going to get to a break here. From what I've heard, I'm going to make a couple of guesses. Most people that do this don't have the background you did. You have the Italian mother, who is about improvisation, and food is the centerpiece of everything they do. You have the supply chain background, which is logistics, which is really important for baking. You cannot improv in baking. If you are not specific to a T and don't understand how each thing plays with each other, you're screwed. But you didn't have any preconceived notions of the industry or of food whatsoever. So you went in clean, but with a good fundamental background of how to go into this, which probably helped. And then you saw the corporate side, and in your corporate dealings you probably saw the successes, but also the failures. So you were also learning on the fly from other people's failures. Is that a pretty good rundown of the situation you put yourself in?

Great rundown. I actually did a quick write-up on LinkedIn a couple weeks back about why I can't stand it when people like myself bash their corporate experience.

Yeah.

I got my structure out of it. My SOPs, how to run meetings. That's what corporate America is, right?

If you think about it, when I was young and coming up, it was Xerox training. Xerox barely exists anymore, but their sales training to this day still exists for a reason. Everyone changes it. They tweak it. They do their best to put their own name on it, but really that's all it is. All right, so we're set up for this. We're going to have a great discussion after the break. I'm with Shane Quillen from Sugar Shane's, and you've been listening to Marketing MadMen on Xtra 106.3. We'll be right back.

Now back to Marketing MadMen on Xtra 106.3 FM.

Welcome back to Marketing MadMen on Xtra 106.3. We were rudely interrupted as our producer came in here and had a moment eating a chocolate chip cookie. So let's keep the conversation going. All right, so we set up why you did it. We've set up how this started. Now let's talk about the four years of going from your house and your fake orders to now, oh my goodness, there's a business model here. And what you've accomplished in that time is pretty crazy. I'm going to guess you had some ideas of scale already in your head, but bring us up to date now. Talk about the past four years.

Yeah. So we opened our first store to the public in July of 2021. However, I took over a condemned space in roughly September of 2020. That is now, quote unquote, called the lab. It's still my number one store. It's 800 square feet underneath the subway. It's on 14th Street in Midtown. So geographically, it's great. The area, I wouldn't call it rough, but there's some crime and some other things in the area. It's still close to the Midtown station. So as far as where you would like to be for delivery apps, it was perfect. For the first two months, I had to clean mold off the walls and remove the drywall.

Yeah. Because you're still cooking in there. I mean, let's call it what it is. You're still cooking. We're joking about this stuff, but the environment you cook in, when you're talking about baking soda and chemical reactions, is incredibly important too.

So I ripped up the floor. I had no background in this at all. I wasn't a handy guy at all before I started doing this. But when you run a business, you typically become one, especially in the restaurant industry. So we quickly got some momentum locally after we had our fake sellouts. We were still shipping nationwide, but I started doing deliveries from Bankhead to northern Buckhead for $5.

Okay.

We did that just on Saturdays.

And I have to imagine that's almost a loss leader. Taking $5 to deliver those things, with the traffic, and with me just showing up in Bankhead, the odds of getting robbed are even high. So you had some barriers to entry there.

I mean, a great story is we went from a $20,000 house to a $6 million house. I looked it up. So that's why cookies work: all walks of life can eat a cookie and all walks of life enjoy cookies. It was, I wouldn't say a shock, but some sort of disturbance, like, whoa, this thing has feet. Because if you think about it, a lot of industries can only go one way or the other. With cookies it doesn't matter if you've got $5 in your bank account or $5 million, you can still buy a chocolate chip cookie. So in December of 2020, we started selling higher volumes. I landed a law firm. Early on I started doing what we're doing here now: I bring cookies. To this day, I still bring cookies to every single restaurant I go to. Most people expect it now, but it's completely fine. I'm going to Delbar tonight. They'll know exactly who I am when I walk in. They'll know the purple box is for them, and they'll treat you better. But I really do it just to get my brand out there.

Yeah, and by the way, Delbar serves desserts, and they bring you desserts too. That's amazing. And I will eat any dessert that comes in front of me, so that's completely fine.

But it's just that presence. It's an old school mentality, early and often. Like I told you, on March 1st I was walking into offices. That'll never get out of my DNA. I don't care how big this thing gets, I will always have a purple Sugar Shane's box and drop that off to you. But fast forward the next couple months, I was still working full time at Amazon. And they work you at Amazon.

I have a buddy who runs one of the warehouses. He's outbound at one of the warehouses up in Leesburg, Virginia. And I mean, the hours, the extent of it, it's fire drill after fire drill after fire drill. From what I understand, they have an outbound and an inbound lead, and those two people are literally like the generals of an entire staff. And that place can't shut down. If it misses one minute, everything's delayed. It's all screwed up.

Yep. And it is crazy how much one little increment makes such a big difference there. But where I was going with this is that it made me really start focusing on scheduling, even in today's world. When you work in corporate America, it does help with scheduling, but I'm talking about your life schedule too, because, no offense, your business runs you, you don't run your business. That's how it goes, especially early on. So I start at 4 a.m., I get up, and I know what I'm doing until 9 p.m. every day. I do. I will run through it the day before, sometimes on Sunday for the full week. But I know exactly, at least the night before, what I'm going to do for the rest of the next day. That's the structure you need to get there. So until we opened the doors to the public, and that is just letting people in the door, I was really focusing on structures, SOPs. At this point in time, I had one intern.

Yeah, that's the corporate America in you.

All she did was social media for me. She got me into TikTok, got me to do Instagram Reels, and then I naturally became a better social media person because I was around her so much. To this day, I still do social media. But when we opened in July '21, we had a black folding table. We had one long table and some equipment. And where I'm going with this is you don't have to have every bell and whistle to open. I was doing crazy numbers early on because of the story and everything else. I think it's your advantage if you don't have the nicest thing when you open up. Because otherwise you're not going to be able to improve on that. Things are going to break. It's going to look worse.

Soft opening.

Soft opening.

Soft opening. I tell people this when they ask about golf all the time. I'm like, don't go buy clubs right away, stupid. Use the worst clubs you can find. And then when you get the hang of it and use real clubs, you're going to be like, oh my God, I can play golf. So it's a similar story with the equipment. Look, I hate to say it, but you're talking about excuses here. Somebody who blames the equipment. Whatever the phrase is about the good watchmaker, it's not the tools, it's your hands, your hands are the tools. So I think what you did a really good job of is you focused on the product first and you let the product speak for itself. And then if you have the nerve to just go hand it out to people and start your business that way, word spreads. You worried about scheduling, but the implementation was always a work in progress. Like, I'm going to make it with what I have here, because I know in the future when I do get equipment, oh my God, business is going to be so much easier, and when I do get a social media person. But you knew enough to be dangerous and your hands were in everything.

Correct. And so really from July of '21 to July of 2022, when we opened our second store, there was a nice growth. You go from I bake everything, to I have bakers, to I don't bake anymore. I didn't really have a problem with that. I think sometimes when chefs run restaurants, they run into this issue where they want to touch everything. A lot of times people ask me why more chefs don't have restaurants. And I think a big issue is, I heard a great quote, it was, keep your hand out of the mixer and your head out of the oven. And it's perfect, right? If you own something, you need to step back and manage it rather than touching every little thing. Now, of course, you want to taste test and everything else. But for the next year, I really focused on how to raise a team, how to grow a team, and then how to put our processes in place. Because we went from doing just a lunch order or just a dinner order to multiple stores with caterings backing it up. And that was the big moment during that time period.

Yeah, CEOs don't go on sales calls. And there's a reason. Especially when you talk about restaurants, the difference between what the front of house and the back of house do is so drastic, but they don't work without each other. If your head is in the oven, you might not see that the dishwasher isn't washing the dishes fast enough, which all of a sudden means the plates aren't being served fast enough. So again, I think that's the supply chain stuff. One little kink gets broken and it's all broken. If you don't know every part of that silo, you're screwed. But at the same time, if you want to be involved in every part of that cycle, there's no way your business is going to scale.

Which is pretty cool too, because when I had my first early staff, there were some things I couldn't implement. For example, running pivot tables for my team. I realized some individuals early on didn't have a college degree. Some didn't have a high school degree.

Yeah, and you want them to run pivot tables.

But now, even those that don't, we have training in place for them to learn it. So now everyone at Sugar Shane's can run a pivot table. Now everyone can order inventory. Before, they'd look at an Excel sheet and be like, what is this? I don't know how to move around in it.

Which is amazing, because, you know, it's a Steve Jobs quote, but what you're doing is empowering your people to potentially get jobs elsewhere, and then treating them well enough that they stay with you. And that's just not how business is done. To be honest with you, no offense to the corporate world, they've gotten away from that. Yeah, they're training people, but they're training people and psychologically convincing them and using all these tools to keep them there, not to go branch out. What you're doing is giving these people life skills. And you know what's going to happen? They might not realize it at first, but they're going to wake up one day and be like, holy crap, I can go do whatever I want to. And that gratitude, I think that is always a pay it forward thing, which is important. So I think we did a great job of setting the stage. Tell us where we are today, and let's talk about some of the modern marketing techniques that you're using.

Yep. So today we've got four locations. Three are in the Atlanta metro area, technically four if you count Kennesaw. There's Midtown, the original we went over. We're in Ponce City Market. That was our third location. Our second one's in Sandy Springs. It's off Hammond Drive, in the Lumen area.

I was just up there, literally over the weekend. Our old office was over there, before that State Farm building went up. Oh my goodness gracious, it's insane over there. Crazy.

And then the fourth is our first franchise, which is Kennesaw. Kennesaw opened only three weeks ago. Great story about Kennesaw. I worked with a guy at Amazon, and it's an even better story than that. He actually still works there, so it's him and his wife. His wife does more of the Sugar Shane's side than he does, but they're a great partnership. It's amazing to work with someone that you've worked with previously, let alone at Amazon, and they have franchise experience. I would have been very hesitant to open franchising without a perfect opening match. Anyone that knows anything about franchising knows no one really cares about Sugar Shane's corporate stores anymore. Why should they? They want to look at the franchise stores. So if your first couple struggle, you're done.

Yeah, you lose complete quality control. And now that's a buddy, and in the best case scenario they open three or four, and then you grow that way. Now you're growing vertically, not horizontally. Because that horizontal growth is scary, because you can only have your hand in so many places.

100%. And the fact that they're somewhat local, we can get there in 45 minutes at the longest, sometimes 25 minutes, that's another great thing too. So we can show up. They were really willing to say, hey, we know you don't have amazing franchisee training yet. We don't have our documentation fully built for franchising, for what looks different from a corporate store. There isn't a huge difference. There is a little bit. And we really wanted to find what we call lessons learned, which is a big thing you pick up at Amazon: hey, what did we do during this time period that we could have done better? And they've helped out a ton with that. So that's been an amazing journey. They've loved the product too, which I think is more important than anything for franchising. Experience is important. It's great to have great workers. But if they don't love the product and just love the idea of making money, it's never going to work.

Yeah, no, I love it. And I think that we've set up a lot of different conversations here. So I'm going to put you on the spot and ask you a two-part question about marketing, because it's something we talk about on the show a lot that people get wrong: they put all marketing into one silo. So let's separate this out. What are you doing for current customers to market and remarket to them and keep them loyal? And then what are you doing to acquire new customers?

Great question. So for current customers, we've got a very heavy social media flow. I've got about 30,000 on one platform, we've got 4,000 on TikTok and 4,000 on Facebook. We've got a very consistent, steady flow of two things. One is interactive posts and stories every day on every platform. The second thing, and more important in my opinion, is our loyalty program. We've got 18,000 members just on the local side. We've got another 4,000 on shipping, since we ship too. Those are two different silos, right? So we have a nice strategy in place now. We send two emails each week and one SMS every other week. And then our top customers get up to three emails and up to two text messages. And what we've done is we've got it all broken out for the rest of the year now: every Sugar Shane's event that's coming up.

Give me an idea of what an event would be.

Yeah, so we've got St. Patrick's Day coming up, right? Green cookies. Four green items next week. We've got everything already in play. And for our top customers, we'll give them early access, like 10% off on shipping.

Yeah, and that's that new model, right? I think Taco Bell was the first one. They only have a certain amount of ingredients. How do they have a new freaking burrito every week? But people want that one thing once a month, and they want to believe that it'll never come back, that they're getting this unique opportunity. So did you start with the loyalty club in mind, or did you implement it as you went?

Implemented it as I went. But we did online instantly. One of the first things I did was correctly grab emails and text messages.

CRM systems. People screw it up from the beginning.

Every single time. And we've moved them over so much, I can't believe we haven't lost more than we have. But if you don't have the exact dates, the person that did it, you're not going to be able to roll it over. It never will happen. So that was a big thing, I did have that in mind. I read early articles, and this was a while back, about how Starbucks was integrating with Target, and how their loyalty programs were eventually going to combine. That was going to be on blockchain. That was my first thinking, way out there: how can I eventually combine with somebody else in a way that makes sense for Sugar Shane's? We're not there yet, but that's a big thing.

Oh my God. Like, I have a sandwich shop that has a similar thought process to me. They don't have cookies. I have cookies. How do we combine? And I hear right now one of the big things that's happening is they're trying to combine Applebee's and IHOP, because Applebee's isn't serving the breakfast crowd. So what you do is you have two separate kitchens, but it's just the one space. During breakfast time, IHOP leads, and during dinner time, Applebee's. IHOP bought Applebee's for that reason, and people thought it was crazy because Applebee's was double the size by revenue. They bought them, and now all of a sudden they're seeing a two to one, three to one return on those stores. So it has to be done the right way. I know Focus Brands is doing it with the pretzels and a couple of their different things. So I think that's a really smart idea. That being said, we've all seen what happens when you have to merge two companies together. When technology has to merge, that is not an easy endeavor, to say the least. So you're set up there. You have ways to keep yourself in front of current customers to make sure they stay loyal. And really, you're assuming they're loyal. You're just giving them a reason to take a second look at you: seasonal reasons, different things. Now talk about new business, talk about new customers. Because this market grows every day. I mean, we're going to be passing 8 million people pretty darn soon. I would say there's probably 90% of people out there who have never even heard of you, which is not a knock on you. That is a damn good thing.

We love it. So there's a couple things we do. Of course, the first is we're pretty good in the ad space, so I run a consistent flow of what I call a geographical ad. The cool thing is we can hit all four stores right now. Mainly it's a traffic ad, and that's on new customers. The ones we can retarget, we run back to a sales campaign, right? So we run at least two ads always on Facebook, Instagram, and now TikTok. TikTok actually just outperformed our Instagram and Facebook Meta feed for the first time, which is crazy.

And how are you rating what the performance was? Engagements? How are you measuring?

Yeah, usually click-through rate for us. So that's been a big push. Now, the other thing we do for marketing is we try to do as many events as possible. We have an intern, and all he does is events. We should do over a quarter of a million dollars this year in events. And all that is, we go to a wine fest, we go to a beer fest. Not only locally. I've done Charleston, I've done Birmingham, I've done Greenville. You pull up the sign, and someone had seen you in Greenville or seen you when they were in Atlanta. It's the greatest thing. Or you hear, hey, I've seen you in Ponce. I've seen your ad on Facebook. I've driven by your store in Sandy Springs, and now I'm hitting you here.

Or you hear, hey, I'm drunk and I'll eat anything. Put that damn cookie in front of me. That looks delicious.

It's great, and we love that too.

I started a personal chef company in Vegas. That's all I based it on. Get drunk, the food tastes better.

And a lot of what this is, too, is these cookies do fit that mold. For example, we do well at Ponce City Market because someone comes by and they see it, like, whoa, wow, this is huge. But we do new customers beyond just ads. We do a bunch of drop-offs. I've done every sorority house at Georgia Tech. I've done every fraternity house. We do a ton of donations. And I think the coolest thing we do is called Cookie for a Cause. Every month we pick one. This month is with what's called Pour Over Love. It's a foundation that helps the less fortunate get barista jobs. They're expanding their fleet. That's the gist of it right now. They bring them in for training and mentoring, and then they partner with some local coffee shops to get them a job. We change that up every month. So not only do we have a philanthropy play in place, you've got people that may never have even wanted a cookie, but now that we're backing their philanthropy, they're like, wow, this is amazing. And it's a huge new customer acquisition channel, because not only is the product good, but we're now supporting one of their causes, something that's close to their hearts.

Yeah, and I have to imagine coffee shops are probably a good target for expansion too, right? Because at most of them, their baked goods are awful. They make good coffee now, and you're providing that service to have the cookies there too. That's amazing.

They're awful. So we're in three restaurants, no coffee shops yet, because you see a price point issue, but we're close on a couple. That is usually our niche for other new customer acquisition. You go to Nam Kitchen in Sandy Springs. It's 3 miles down the road. Everyone knows it. No one knows who we are. They come in there, it's hot, fine dining, and she's got us on the menu as Sugar Shane's. It's a great way to pick up new customers: oh, I'm going to order a cookie cake next time I'm in the area, or where are these guys located? So getting our product in as many places as possible where people can actually see it is a push that we have day in and day out.

Yeah, and as of right now, that's not a competitive space. I know that's one of the rules of the liquor industry and the beer industry, where there are 8 million people knocking on the door asking for menu placements and competing for it. So, you know, if you got it, smoke it. While you have that opportunity, man, you get on every menu you possibly can.

And that's why we bring them everywhere, because you never know who's going to come up and say, hey, we love your product, we would love to trial Sugar Shane's desserts, or we don't have dessert. Usually at Asian restaurants, American guests don't eat the desserts. So that's another push we have. That's why Nam Kitchen in Sandy Springs works well for us. She doesn't have desserts. So this is where we come in, and our cookies are on the menu, and people love them, and we're another 2 miles down the road if they want to come into the shop.

And the value proposition is right, the price is right, because you don't want to put a cheap cookie on a menu and then charge $10 for it. So you already have a good price point. And again, look, it's all about value proposition, right? One of the things I always loved about Chipotle, I could cut it in half and have two. So your value perception is higher because it's really not just one. I'm sure some people eat the whole thing, but most people are cutting it in half, splitting it with somebody, which adds to that. So, okay, you've got your current marketing. What are the future plans? What do the next couple of years look like? Are you trying to come out with new cookies every couple of months? What does that look like?

Yeah, great question. So we originally started as Sugar Shane's, really gourmet cookies. Since then it's expanded. So all my franchises, including my stores, eventually will have to sell coffee.

That is not an easy process, by the way. You've got to go source that stuff. You've got to make it. Quality control is really hard to do in coffee. So I can't imagine that to be easy.

It's not easy. Now, our first franchise stepped up, and they were once again the guinea pig, and it worked out fantastic. We've got a guy who I'm friends with here. He's from Colombia. He's got a coffee shop in Smyrna, and we've used his beans at our stores now, and we absolutely love it. The product is flowing right in here from Colombia. He helped us fine tune our cappuccino and espresso machines, which is a huge piece, and obviously making sure the water lines run correctly. So we are trying to open a little earlier and then expand our products as well. I've got amazing banana bread. That's one of our best sellers. We change that flavor every week or every other week. We're pushing our cheesecake brownies, now a top five selling item. That's the cheesecake right there. We consistently sell other brownies as well. And now we do muffins and other breads. Zucchini bread is coming. We've got some banana pudding coming, where we actually make a cookie, but this is the actual product, and eventually some lemon bars. So our goal is, if it's a birthday, if it's a coffee in the morning, if it's a dessert in the afternoon, you come to Sugar Shane's. It used to be, I just really want a cookie. That's great, and there's a business for that, but for growth purposes, and since we have franchises that rely on multiple sources, our main goal right now is to expand our product offering, expand our hours, and become that go-to spot. As far as expansion, we've actually come to the realization that we're looking to go into more rural areas than we are today. Carrollton is a perfect example. I want to go to Carrollton ASAP. I'm waiting for the perfect franchisee fit. There's no competition there. They are a loyal bunch. If we do drop in there, we will be their only spot for breakfast and, to some degree, for coffee.

And it's only growing. It's only growing in affluence. It's only growing in size. As COVID forced people out of the cities, the cities became uber competitive. Even the suburban areas, I forget what they call them, those areas right around the cities, those micro cities are super competitive. Carrollton is a boomtown. People are retiring there.

We would love to grow in areas just like Carrollton from a growth perspective. We'll try to have a flagship store in a major city, but that is not an absolute must. More than anything, what I've learned is that when people franchise, they try to sell 100. I could sell 100 right now. But what does that do? They get quick top line money and then the business goes under because you don't have anywhere close to the support to back it up. So I'm going to take the growth perspective pretty slow. We're actually not even going to look at another franchise for the first three months of the first one. For my stores specifically, we'll look to add another micro store within the area. We don't need much square footage. We just got in with the Georgia World Congress Center, so we're a preferred vendor there now. We do events for them. Hopefully we eventually get in with Mercedes and then State Farm Arena. That fits us well because we still have kitchen space to do that. We still have a growth opportunity. If we want to knock down the wall to our left at our Midtown store, we can do that.

Yeah. It's also an area of credibility, man, to be in those stadiums, especially NFL.

Oh, correct.

So let's stop it right here for this segment. You're listening to Marketing MadMen on Xtra 106.3. We'll be right back, and we'll finish up after the break.

Now back to Marketing MadMen on Xtra 106.3 FM.

Welcome back to Marketing MadMen on Xtra 106.3. I'm here with Shane Quillen, the owner, founder, master baker, chef and supply chain guy from Sugar Shane's Gourmet Bakery. We had a whole third segment planned, but we're going to burn it to the ground and start with something fun. So I just tried the brownie cheesecake. Here's my review. One, it's probably fewer calories than most cheesecake. It doesn't feel greasy. The best way I could say this is it's like gelato versus ice cream. There's air beaten into it, so it's lighter and airier, and that is not at all what I was expecting.

Yep. So the thing about that is, I love it when I'm wrong. That took months. The chocolate chip took more attempts, but by time frame, I almost gave up on this one. It was hard to find the perfect balance where you bake it consistently, because the brownie obviously bakes differently than the cheesecake, and to have the right product mix as far as how much goes in each one, and to make it combine in taste. We struggled a lot.

There's got to be egg whites. There's got to be some whipped egg whites.

Yeah, and it bakes. It's like a 50 minute bake. It comes out beautiful every time now. But it's one of those things too: when you run a business, keep on trying, even if it doesn't work. We failed at that for months, I mean, over a full year. And I almost gave up on it. But I knew if it hits, it'll hit. And people go crazy for it. We used to rotate a brownie every month, every week. We've added brownies back since then, but we're not going to pull this off the menu. It just sells too well.

And it's the exact right size. I'm sure that's not the way you serve it, but that size is exactly right. It's like a little pop in your mouth. It is perfect.

I love that.

Because again, I'm not a big dessert guy during the week. When I'm at a dinner on the weekend, I love it. But man, you can't sit and eat dessert at 8 o'clock at night, go to bed and wake up the next morning. The world just doesn't work that way. So I love that as a little bite. So here's what we're going to do. Quick background. I spent some time as a personal chef. I fell into it. I was in Vegas, started a personal chef company, cooked for the Grammys, the Billboards, was flying all over the West Coast. Didn't really know what we were doing, but I had an Italian mother, so I knew how to grill. And then I had a guy who was classically trained at Johnson and Wales, and he was pretty much the preparation guy. And what I would do is, while he was preparing, I would take the food and hand it to the people right off the grill, because that's how they wanted to eat, like animals. No one wants to eat plated. I don't care what anyone says. I appreciate the preparation, the work that goes into it, but if you have a hot steak and you spend 10 minutes plating it, you just wasted the whole steak. So let's talk a little bit about food. You said you travel a lot. Talk about some of your favorite food cities.

Yeah, so some of my favorite food cities. I am huge into, I love Mediterranean food. So for me, my favorite country for food has been Israel.

Okay. Super trendy right now, by the way. Everywhere you go, there's an Israeli restaurant in the top five or ten in the city. And it's crazy.

I mean, it's crazy how many successful ones we have here. I think Lena has amazing Israeli food, really amazing Mediterranean food. I actually went to, quote unquote, one of the best Mediterranean restaurants in Miami a couple weeks back. I liked Atlanta better.

Not as pretentious, man. For all it's worth here, especially if you go to Aziza and some of the others, they try to make you feel like you're in Israel, like you're in Tel Aviv or something. Miami wants you to feel like you're in Miami.

They don't care about anywhere else.

I have Greek in me, by the way. I'm Italian and Greek, so I have a huge Greek descent. I've grown up on Mediterranean food. I enjoy it. I think it is one of those cuisines that has come into the light at the right time, but it's still so misunderstood.

Have you been to Israel?

I have not. I've been to Greece. I've not been to Israel.

I wish I knew the name of the restaurant, but we went there, and a buddy of mine's friend's girlfriend set it up. We get there, and I guess it's one of the toughest restaurants to get into in the city. Still one of the best meals I've had in my entire life. I kid you not, it was expensive. But they put down this platter and there's no forks or knives.

Yeah, that's how I like to eat, man.

Yeah, so the bread's sitting out there, and then they would just dump a hot tomato dish in front of you. And then you have a yogurt next to it.

That's how I like to eat, man. Some people are disgusted by it, but I am one of those people. I like everything on the plate to be mixed. I want the vinegar, the crisp. I like the consistencies being different. I love that.

I was in Turkey, and this guy was preparing these kebabs and he was licking his fingers. Of course I crushed it. The two people I was with were like, what the heck? I'm not eating that. I'm like, dude, come on, are you kidding me? Still one of the best meats I've ever had in my entire life. He's on the sidewalk just ripping it apart. So once again, it's that same thing.

I love Turkish food. I love the Mediterranean. I love when you start putting in the sumac, because that's where Greek and Mediterranean and Moroccan all differ. You start putting in a little more cinnamon and sumac and za'atar spices, and that goes into Iran and Persia. And it's funny. I think one of the things about food is it's so uniting, if you have a freaking brain and you pay attention, because Iranian food and Greek food are so similar, yet the perception is that Iran and Greece are opposite parts of the world. It's so despicable how we have no idea about geography, but we make these assumptions. With Iranian food, there's such a wealth of flavors and influences. Have you been to Colombia?

Yes. We've been to Cartagena in Colombia. Do you know why the Italian food is good in Cartagena?

No.

Okay, so Venezuela and Italy used to trade. Well, then Venezuela had a civil war.

Ironically, my wife was on an aid mission in Colombia and was watching the people come down the mountains from Venezuela, and saw how messed up it is. And that's a funny one. I'll give you a great example. We just booked a trip to Lima, to Peru. One of the funny things I find about Lima is lomo saltado is literally French fries, soy sauce, and Latin food together on a plate. And you're like, where did this happen? It's because people were escaping China. They ran to Peru. They were working on railroad tracks. They brought soy sauce. Then all of a sudden they had Americans with French fries. So they make this dish, and it's one of the best dishes in the world. Just all that stuff put together. Look, we can go 55,000 minutes on food, but talk about some of your favorite restaurants in Atlanta. Again, the Israeli ones are great, but talk about some of your other favorites.

Yeah, so The Consulate. We do the same thing, right? When you have to continually change your menu, it's tough. So The Consulate, for people that don't know, has a globe that gets spun every three months. It's the first Saturday of the month. And for the next three months, they do that country. As long as it doesn't land on Antarctica, Greenland or a body of water.

And that is so freaking hard, because I've been places in the world where I've tried the food and it's just, I remember I was in Holland and I was like, I don't even know what I'm supposed to do here. Even in Germany to an extent, I was like, so you want me to eat liver balls for every meal? What is this? And to a certain extent, and I know England has changed, but English food is not great, man.

It's not.

Now, English restaurants have apparently boomed because they finally started acting like Americans and just opened different things. But that is not an easy thing to do.

Yeah, it's not. A couple others. Just for the pizza, it's one of my favorites. We mentioned Delbar, I'm going there tonight. I love Umi. I think it's funny, Atlanta's got two Michelin star sushi spots. I think the best bang for your buck sushi in the city, though, is 8 Sushi. The rolls are somewhat affordable. Good vibe. It's been there, I think, since 2008. One of my go-to spots. And then right next door, I love The Optimist for a seafood spot. I've been to the one in Nashville. I hate saying I think the one here is better, but I enjoy the one here better.

That's his flagship. For what it's worth, things change quickly, right? All these celebrity chefs have closed down restaurants. The ones that were here have closed down. I think it was Hugh Acheson who was supposed to be at the Centric, and he closed down two days later. It is wild. I just went to the reopened Holeman and Finch, and from what it was, this little place in this little shop, to what it is now is drastically different. And I know what happens. I saw this happen in DC when I lived there. You get a wave of all this amazing up and coming youth, it's inexpensive as the city booms, then all of a sudden it gets to a point of no return and it becomes corporate America and every restaurant is the same. I'm praying it doesn't happen here. I live by Buford Highway, and I'm already seeing it start to lose some of the gems of Buford Highway in each direction, and I don't want that to happen. I think one of the things about Atlanta is we are still desperately seeking a culinary identity.

Right.

You can't say fried chicken, because the whole South is fried chicken. You go to Nashville, and Nashville hot chicken is such a staple. We don't really have an identity. And it's because perceptions of the South are so broken, and no one understands what an international city this is. And maybe the thing is, this is the capital of the South. We have a little bit of everything. I mean, Ethiopian food is unbelievable. With Ethiopian food, you're eating with your hands because they think the silverware is going to poison you. I think Atlanta needs to find that identity. So I think we will leave it on that. Shane, this has been an awesome conversation. We covered a lot, as we always do. Tell everybody how to find you.

Yes, you can find us at Sugar underscore Shane's. We're on TikTok and Instagram, and on Facebook at Sugar Shane's ATL. Once again, we've got four stores in Atlanta. We're open seven days a week.

Go try one. I bet it will not be your last one, I promise. You've been listening to Marketing MadMen on Xtra 106.3, and we will catch you next week.