The DTC Podcast
The DTC Podcast

Raising Prices in DTC: How Last Crumb Sells a $140 Cookie Box

1d ago43:178,403 words

The Podafi briefing · AI analysis

Last Crumb adapts premium cookies for social commerce and physical retail

4 min brief · 3 takeaways · Based on this episode’s transcript

The 30-second brief

TL;DR
  • 01High-ticket DTC gifting limits impulse buys, prompting a shift to smaller packs for social commerce.
  • 02Shipping perishables sacrifices quality control, making physical retail a necessary top-of-funnel and quality-assurance channel.
  • 03Whitelisting existing organic creator content reduces creative testing costs for paid social diversification.

The big picture

Last Crumb built a premium DTC brand on $140 cookie boxes, but high price points limit impulse purchases and shipping risks product quality. The founder is now pivoting to physical retail and smaller TikTok Shop packs to control the final experience and capture lower-ticket buyers.

Useful for: Premium DTC food and beverage founders navigating the transition from pure e-commerce to physical retail and social commerce.

Synthesis of podcast conversations. Speaker claims are not independently verified.

01Social commerce

Smaller packs drive social commerce impulse buys

Last Crumb’s core $140 box is too expensive for impulse purchases. For TikTok Shop, they are developing a smaller, lower-priced pack designed for quick shipping and immediate consumption to capture social media viewers.

Why it matters. High average order values block impulse buying on social platforms. Adapting pack sizes and price points is necessary to convert casual scrollers into buyers.

Your next move · Podafi’s suggestion

Identify your most viral product and engineer a smaller, lower-priced version specifically for TikTok Shop or similar impulse-driven channels.

The catch. Ensure the smaller pack maintains brand quality. A degraded experience to hit a lower price point can damage premium brand equity.

Transcript evidence

From the transcript

our goal for tick-tock shop was to create a smaller pack something that is easier to ship easier to have quicker cookie porn style moments on social media
Read the source transcript

Evidence summary · paraphrased

The founder noted a $140 box lacks impulse appeal, so they are recreating a smaller box for quicker cookie moments on social media.

02Retail strategy

Physical retail controls perishable product quality

Shipping cookies leaves the brand at the mercy of carriers for the final 72 hours, risking melted or damaged goods. Opening physical stores ensures customers receive the product in optimal condition, directly from the heaters.

Why it matters. For premium perishable DTC brands, shipping variables can ruin the unboxing experience. Physical retail acts as both a quality control mechanism and a top-of-funnel marketing channel.

Your next move · Podafi’s suggestion

Calculate the cost of shipping damages and returns against the overhead of a small retail kiosk to see if physical locations improve net margins.

The catch. Retail introduces massive fixed overhead and operational complexity. Only pursue this if your unit economics and brand positioning can support physical locations.

Transcript evidence

From the transcript

you're still at the mercy of somebody else for the last 48 to 72 hours like it's in a UPS truck it's in a hot car
Read the source transcript

Evidence summary · paraphrased

The founder explained that shipping leaves them at the mercy of carriers for 48 to 72 hours, making brick and mortar necessary for quality control.

03Paid media

Whitelist organic creator content for paid ads

Instead of paying creators to make specific ads, Last Crumb identifies organic content that already performs well and matches their vibe. They then whitelist this existing content to run across Meta, Instagram, and YouTube.

Why it matters. Commissioning new ads is expensive and risky. Whitelisting proven organic content leverages existing momentum and reduces creative testing costs across multiple paid channels.

Your next move · Podafi’s suggestion

Monitor organic mentions and creator posts. When a piece of content naturally gains traction, reach out to whitelist it for your paid social channels.

The catch. Whitelisting requires creator permission and revenue sharing. Ensure your margins can absorb the cost of whitelisting fees or affiliate commissions.

Transcript evidence

From the transcript

if we see stuff that has our gas we've been made that works out well we're very quick to go to them like hey can we whitelist your your content
Read the source transcript

Evidence summary · paraphrased

The founder stated they do not specifically ask creators to make content, but quickly whitelist organic posts that match their brand vibe.

From listening to doing

Take one idea into the week

Suggested experiments, not proven results. Choose what fits your brand.

Test smaller social commerce pack

  1. 01Develop a smaller version of your best-selling product priced significantly lower than your core bundle.
  2. 02Launch the pack exclusively on TikTok Shop with short-form video highlighting immediate consumption.
  3. 03Track conversion rates and return on ad spend against your standard high-ticket bundle.

Measure: Compare conversion rate and return on ad spend of the smaller pack against the standard bundle.

Guardrail: Stop the test if the smaller pack's profit margin falls below your baseline after accounting for platform fees and shipping.

Context & limitations
  • The founder's view on GLP-1 drugs increasing demand for premium treats is a personal hypothesis, not an observed market trend.
  • Last Crumb's retail success in New York may not replicate in other cities with different food cultures and foot traffic.

Listen to the conversation

0:000:00
Original episode description

How do you raise prices on a DTC brand without killing demand?Derek Jaeger founded Last Crumb in 2020, priced a box of cookies at $110, then moved it to $140. He says that is when the company took off. Eric Dyck gets the full DTC marketing story on the DTC Podcast: pricing as positioning, ecommerce growth without a repeat purchase, and why he killed the weekly drop model that made the brand famous...

Transcript

EN

I didn't want to raise the bottom, I wanted to own the upper echelon of cookies.

We wanted people to be able to show it off, so we wanted the brand to be wearable. We wanted people to be excited and proud about being a part of the last crime. You could throw tens of thousands of dollars of certain products every single day. And if you turn those heads off, that brand would be non-existent. That's exactly what I didn't want to do.

And so, my rule in the beginning was no painouts. We had to go door to our given away cookies, we would do that, but there was no painouts. We initially priced at 110, and then we're like, let's go to 140, and we priced at 140. That's when the company I can actually took off. This episode is brought to you by Triple Whale, the AI operating system for e-commerce.

Just a quick gut check for brand owners and media buyers.

Have you started your Black Friday Cyber Monday planning yet?

If the answer is not yet, you're not alone.

But the brands that win BFCM aren't the one scrambling in November. They're the ones planning right now. And here's why it matters. BFCM keeps getting more expensive. Last year, ad spend climbed faster than demanded, CPMs went up, and the season stretch from a single

weekend into a full month of promotions. Show up unprepared and you spend more to reach the same shoppers right when your margin matters the most. Triple Whale built a free resource to help the BFCM hub. It's like a command center for planning your most profitable Black Friday.

With everything in one place. Real benchmarks from tens of thousands of brands so you know what performance should actually look like for brands just like yours. Free tools, to set goals, and forecast outcomes. Strategy guides and checklists covering ad performance retention and conversion.

An AI powered tactics you can put to work before BFCM weak hits. The best part, it's completely free and there's no log in required. Go to triplewhale.com/bfcm26 and start building towards your most profitable Black Friday Cyber Monday today. Derek, welcome to the D to C podcast.

Instead of to have you here, we're just a couple ex affiliate sitting around. One of us has built a cookie empire and we're here to talk about that a little bit. How are you doing today? Doing good math, stoked. It's going to be a good weekend here.

It's by the old affiliate conferences here. This week here in New York and I have a lot of old friends come in so it feels nostalgic a little bit. Affiliate's know how to have a good time generally. They know how to eat well, drink well, have some good time. How do they get into cookies?

Is the question? How did you get into cookies from being an affiliate marketer? I get it out, so I think that was the main thing. Take me back to those affiliate marketing days because I started an affiliate marketer in this industry promoting a number, basically you're a mercenary when you're an affiliate marketer, right?

Because you're the one having to put your money down.

Sometimes you have to put your morals aside slightly because you're promoting diet products,

or shady dating networks, or tool bars, which is what I promoted a lot of. Take me back to those affiliate market days and why you felt you needed to get out.

I've always been very into food and like working in kitchens with always a passion.

It was really into just recipe creation and science. Those were my real background, but I got into affiliate marketing probably in 2013, 2014, somewhere around there, a little bit early on in the Facebook days. It was a time when a lot of my friends were starting to get into it and I just kind of piggybacked off of that. I was like these guys are kind of out and about all the time, they seem to be spending

a lot of money. What are these guys doing? Start to learn the Facebook side and it's just so different. It looks like one set back then, like CPMs were like a dollar. You could sell ice to an Eskmo in that day. It just seemed like a very easy transition to get into selling other people's products. From the diet pills, the skin care, to all that stuff. It was a fun time. I was young and it was a good time to get into that and it's true. But it left you wanting, which is why you've kind of evolved.

You're talking about your first moves, I guess, into the cookie space. We built up a nice company, we were out in San Diego and then we moved it to Puerto Rico for a couple of years, but this was near the start of COVID. I was getting pretty stir crazy and I just really wanted to get back to building my own brand. I wanted to have something that I felt excited about to grow and to be a

part of and always said I wasn't going to get back really into the food industry, but this was,

uh, I think it was my call and I had to get some creative juices flowing and it always kind of

let back to cookies and so we started putting together what would be last crumb in 2019, 2020. What were your first moves when you decided on cookies? We knew we had a product because I've been working on these recipes for being on the greater part of 15 years and so the first move was

Find a branding agency that understood the vision that I had for the last cru...

to find that person pretty quickly and in Los Angeles and then it was just such a fun brainstorming

year so we spent a year putting the brand together so everything from not just recipe development, but, you know, packaging creation, photography, and copywriting social media is like everything that a polished company would need before launch and when we launched it, I think people were

pretty shocked to see such a polished product and I think that's what kind of got us off on a good

foot. What was the brief? Explain to me the vision for it because it wasn't, you're not talking Oreos here, you're not talking chipsahoy, talking about the vision that you went to this branding agency with. The antithesis of every mom and pop bakery in the world, like I want to be so far

on the other side, like everything was just so pastels and cute and fluffy and big sugar laden,

cookies and donuts and it just wasn't sexy and I wanted the opposite and I think we had to justify the product with a brand that's kind of stood on its laurels of being like this premium product so we took a lot of inspiration from the supreme and the kiths and other fashion brands and then Michelin star restaurants how they hold themselves and I think our goal was to bring a online experience that felt almost in person and so there's a lot of box to check it off and I was like

hey I want I want all of these things in the last crown let's see if we can build it and you know let's gather these that took you're to put all together. Talk about the price point did you did you know you wanted it to be where it ended up? Yeah I mean that was that was one a is was we wanted the highest end product on the market and we wanted it by a substantial clip like

you know there's always a market for cheapest thing in the industry and the most expensive

thing in the industry and I think everything else in the middle is just kind of fighting for

for market share and to me I didn't want to rates the bottom I wanted to own the the upper echelon of cookies you can't just price expensive cookies like it so there had to be a lot of other value props the company and so we made sure that's every little piece added to the value and they were for that price point and so how so when you say you went to market with a really polished product was the whole unboxing experience built in that first sort of year of working

with that branding agency and maybe describe what you're going for with the unboxing experience of these cookies which sounds like it was as big or if not a bigger part of the value than the cookies themselves yeah I think you know it was really it was there's a big upswing in during the TikTok and Instagram days like early 2020s we wanted something that was obviously Instagramble and and easily adaptable for social media but we wanted to have function as well so the box itself

the outside of the box was the shipper box so we didn't have to have the shipper box on top of that was great but it was very interactive you had a pull tab and then it opened up perfectly to fit this gift box on the inside and we tested even different angles of the cookies so like hey each

cookie it was like it has to look at you from a 35 degree angle you have to be able to see at least

90% of the letter lettering from the name um I wanted to see some of the cookie but I wanted to be kind of faded out so every little nuance was was tested and worked on and we definitely could have a cheaper box so smaller box one that was a little bit easier to to manufacture but we didn't be this very egregious box and it made a standout we yeah it was it was a big part of the brand and then just talk about the visual aspects there and you mentioned what you didn't want to be

which is the frilly puffy baking mom and pop kind of shop and you went with something that really yeah reminds me of I think you mentioned kith and supreme really made me feel like liquid death when I saw which when I think about it with last crum it has that idea like this is your last cookie your last meal that you'd have you'd want one of these cookies talk about the badass branding that you brought to it yeah I mean I think liquid death was on the vision board when we were

putting this brand together we wanted you know we took a lot of inspiration for fashion brands so we wanted the brand to be wearable like we wanted we wanted people to be excited and proud about being a part of the last crum so whether it's wearing a merch or gain a box online or you're seeing that your doorstep like we wanted people to be able to show it off and I think that adds value so we wanted to make sure that every little nuance of our brand added value to that

price point and you know I think cabinet high high ticket item automatically gives you that if somebody gets a box of last crum looks up how much it is see a hundred and forty dollars like

You're excited that that person thought about you enough to get you quite a q...

and all all those things kind of went into our thought process when we were initially launching

the brand so you've got this incredible looking product you've got this unboxing experience you've

got a great brand what was your initial go-to-market strategy like then this one was a drop on normal and I think we were really the first to do a food drop model on the direct consumer side at least it was very structure like we knew exactly how we wanted to drop the cookies so every Monday noon we would put the site live but ninety nine percent of the time the site was just hey sign up for sign up for drop sign up for the notification and then you had this very set window

and our website account down to it and you know then I think everybody's seen that now but it was really the first of its kind at the time and so the drop model also took inspiration from the fashion brands like kids would have drops supreme and have drops and we thought that would be a strong value drop

in the beginning so that's what we went with and it was all organic too right I think I think we

we spoke about you sort of I just saw a post recently a that was sort of this bombastic post about how if you're spending over thirty percent of your money on ads in your building a brand you you might as well be a category manager at a traffic platform because that's where all your values going is into these traffic platforms and at least if you worked for a traffic platform you'd have health care which a lot of brands don't so talk to me about your your organic approach

I guess I think a lot of that stems from the affiliate being on the affiliate side because you know you could you could throw tens of thousands of dollars a certain products every single day and if you turn those ads off like that brand would be non-existent like you would those these things would evaporate into thin air but they were able to generate revenue because they put so much money behind the advertising and that's exactly what I did them want to do like no way talks about those

brands like you know you and I've seen five hundred a thousand of these products that come through

some of them I've done a hundred million dollars in sales and we've never hear about them that's

the last thing we wanted at last ground we wanted to make sure that people were talking about us or can we we were able to to grow the brand organically and so my rule in the beginning was no pay debts like absolutely no pay debts like anything we had to do like whatever other way

you can think up to grow the company like we would think of that but you have to go door to

or give it away cookies we would do that but there was no pay debts and then so how did you get the words out about the drop was it mean you had you built up a little bit of an Instagram following that you were leveraging I think a little bit of Instagram following not me personally but the brand you know started off doing doing local drops in Los Angeles and gained out the friends of family and you know we had the brand and team behind us and they were able to push it a bit

and you know just like we've had a small kitchen our kitchen was tiny this was a this is a passion project for me like maybe it was just kind of a fun thing to do to on the side while I was still writing the marketing companies and the first few drops you know it was local in LA we had like 50 boxes we would sell out 50 boxes and then slowly but slowly like people would start posting you know we get some organic posts and people like oh these cookies and then I remember

we were at 100 we initially priced at 110 and then we're like let's go to 140 and we priced to that 140 and then that's when the company I actually took off which was kind of crazy like we once we had the increased price point people saw us a little bit like we were we had much more of a differentiator at that point which I thought was pretty interesting because we were testing different price points and we ended up laying at 140 and that's that's when

I think we got the major traction very cool and you got some celebrity love early on describe how that

went down being in Los Angeles there's always that chance right to get somebody to

who knows somebody that to get a box in front of an A-list or a B-list or Chrissy Tegan got a box very early and I'm sure how she heard about it or got it but she got it a box organically she posted and it went ballistic like it was it was right during the start of COVID and people were online just looking for something to connect with and you know one small post of her like the next week we sold out like one second and then every week subsequently he's just got bigger and bigger for the next

you know eight to nine months and so that was fun it was like probably the most fun time I never had as an entrepreneur or a business owner it was just a really fun experience to see the company grow and a rapid rate and to sell out having having that drop model and having it must have been really satisfying and it's also like it it creates anticipation for the people that don't get it in a way right like were you able to sell out even like you're very first drops

yeah so like app like we sold out the first two drops we had very few boxes like we had like like I said like 30, 40, 50 boxes for those first handful drops but then you know we worked

Then as soon as we even wrapped up we would sell out even faster and I think ...

just the cloud we were getting from everybody posting like people were posting their receipts like

that was that was a cloud like you didn't they didn't see the box yet there's like oh I got it like

I can't believe I got my hands on last chrome and and it was just crazy it was like a wild time and we almost didn't appreciate it enough because it was just so new to us too like we're like oh maybe this is just what happens when you have a really cool product and people just want to buy a bunch of it so we were navigating well we had small cases so we we may as

we could but you know we were always navigating like hey do we try to expand super quickly do we

get a second kitchen and we were just like you know let's let's make sure that the band is still there and we ride the demands we fulfill under the demands so we always we're growing a little bit week by week but yeah it was it was cool time was it you baking in your 500 square foot kitchen did you have a team in the kitchen yet or was it still a lot of you sifting flower me 16 flower I had one guy who's us making like a me and like co-founder at the time like we were just

making cookies and it's very small kitchen and box them up ourselves packing ourselves super booster up so at what point did you decide that you had to scale up from your 500 square foot kitchen you know we had a lot of early interest in in some investors trying to get in and you know wanting to grow the company quickly and so once we had those discussions we know we were very careful where to raise capital we haven't raised too much over the last couple years but

I think that showed us like okay let's just take this a bit more serious we ended up getting a

larger facility out in Pasadena after about the first year and then yeah that was a

that was probably the the easiest variable I think obviously the sales company and was the main factor like we were selling out like I would then one second pretty much for like 30 weeks straight like it was one second they're gone and there was I mean there was one week where we left I think over 1500 orders in the cart and I wish we had that cash now which we had that we were with all the take those orders but there was a pretty cool screenshot he just couldn't fulfill yeah I mean once

once you fulfill the number like there's still everybody that's in the queue that has the box in their cart thousands yeah another you mentioned you know some celebrity attention from Chrissy Teague and you mentioned your early seed round there I think that's one of the one of the other benefits

of being in LA is you just you do get in the front of a couple celebrity potential funders talk

about the people that you're able to bring on to the cap table and and how beneficial that's been

yeah this has really been the first company that I've ever raised capital for so it was all

fairly new to me it's even an navigate that part of the business but we were able to get some cool checks like you know small checks from celebrities that just want to be a part of it to you know guys that's have been needed visors at bus and consulting group and like you know they want to be on the board so we were able to take a plethora of different people like and it's great because even if they're a small investor you get some of their time and you're able to reach out to them and

pick their brains so I I know a lot people say like hey having a large cap table can be intimidating or not worth it I thought it was great I thought it was nice to have a nice people on board so did the little bit of seed funding you did get did that go into because it doesn't sound like it went into paid ads I did it go mostly into production yeah it was a lot of it into expansion production and growing in team we had a packaging you know just getting

ahead of orders on packaging you don't even want a whole bunch of initial boxes cost they were at outrageous amount like we like I but I was building this company it was as my vision was I just want the best of everything I didn't care what it cost it's just okay let's just get it and we'll figure it out later in terms of cash but those initial peos were kind of outrageous so getting out new boxes negotiate new new deals all that stuff kind of into that first small

seed pre-seed round you know that feeling when you're pouring money into social and it feels like you're just fighting everyone else for the same feed space what if we told you that adding TV to the mix doesn't just add a new channel but it makes all your other channels work harder your social performs better your search converts better it's like adding fuel to what's already working getting on TV is way easier than you think thanks to universal ads no hidden markups just a

hundred percent of your budget going straight to media and because you're working through a direct

Publisher relationship your ad shows up next to premium brand safe content ac...

publishers like peacock to be HBO Max Paramount Plus and more worried you don't have TV ready creative don't be universal ads can help you get a TV ad built fast so you can start testing now not next quarter and right now if you're a new advertiser you can use promo code ua dtc to get fifteen hundred dollars in matched ad credits that's your first campaign doubled terms apply head to universal ads calm to get your brand on TV today

talk to me about the limitations of the drop model and what was happening when you decided to pull back from the drop model and go to a more traditional e-commerce model I mean you can't have scarcity as a value pillar forever it's just people will see through that and we didn't want

to manufacture that you know so you need to figure out if you have a real company or if you just

have a hype company and one of the reasons we moved to an evergreen model is to see if we had a real company like if the major value pillar for last crumb was scarcity then you know I don't think it's a real company so we were very confident in the product and we had brave reviews on the cookies and so we're like let's let's give people more of an opportunity to get the products

and then maybe scale other channels so you know corporate gift in we were always looking

eventually to retail brick and mortar there were some challenges moving to an evergreen model when people knew us as this like hype drop model but we've since been able to get over those pumps did it involve having to invest more in paid marketing or you're still largely an organic operation we are still largely organic we do have paid marketing I think the the main thing that we saw was acquiring a single customer is tough like we don't have a subscription model

we we're a lot of our boxes are bought as gifts so you don't really have a gift subscription like you want to buy one off gifts for people from holidays or for self treats but we you know we

were heavily a gift in brand at the time so I think I think we weren't able to scale up ads as

quickly as we like to just because you know your cat your customer position shouldn't just go from a single order and so we basically focus on other channels for growth social media and corporate gift anything like that what can you say about how big the company's gotten what do you comfortable saying I mean we grow a rear I think we are excited to just say we're a real company now with a C-suite team and you know multiple managers multiple bakers are our kitchen facilities

16,000 square feet you know we do e-commerce and our retail stores out of there we're just hoping to grow every year at what point did you decide you wanted to replace yourself as CEO

had just something you always wanted I think it's a it's a dream that so many founders have

is to hire someone who's got you know maybe more organizational skills than they might have to really take it what was that process like and when did you decide you needed a CEO I've never been really CEO of the company I've always had somebody as CEO and initially in the beginning it was because I had my other company and you know that part was easy I was just like I had this company that is doing very well like I don't I don't really have I don't have time

to go all in on last crime and also I've never built up a brand like this before or let's start up like this so I wanted somebody that was going to take take the reins and you know it's been there done that yeah we've gone through a few CEOs actually through at this company and food stuff like it's it's it's a grind like it's not it's not all sparkles and in fairy tales

it sits so you have to find the right person that's that fits that fits the space fortunately

we just got our latest CEO Casey he's he was former CMO at Blaze Pizza and we are super stoked to have how do you think about what we're going through this internally right now at D to C in terms of giving people more per view and more sort of you know ability to affect their particular products P and L in a way what do you have any advice when it comes to actually balancing you know giving a CEO total free reign and also just making sure they're on the same page with what you're thinking

how do you how do you think about managing your CEO man stuff right I think I think uh you want to bring smarter people into the company than then you are and I think for me it was somebody

has just had an incredible experience you know he has worked his way up that's multiple food brands

in the past different sea level sea level positions so the best way is you have to know when

The step back and went to apply your vision and went to hack we asked to the ...

we asked to you know investors in the board and if that that part I think that part is hardest I

think that part is where I'm still learning every day but I see a Mars as a partnership and he's incredibly strong at certain things I know I'm incredibly strong at the products and innovation

how do we make that mesh together so I think as long as the team is on the same page I think it's

it's like an atmosphere we mentioned Google and meta I think in our pre-interview we talked about tick-tock shop and how you had to sort of change the product a little bit for that environment talk about what you did for tick-tock shop so we don't have tick-tock shop live yet we're changing the products to go live into tick-tock shop and so one of the biggest pillars for 2020

six for last crumb is to be more of that self-treat available products treats a bad word but mostly

we want people to buy the product to eat it and we get a lot of people to buy the product to gift it and you know it's just not an impulse buy at a hundred and twenty dollars there's no there's no hundred and twenty hundred and forty dollars impulse buy unless you know man a fraction a small small amount people might have that that impulse so our goal for tick-tock shop was to create a smaller pack something that is easier to ship easier to have quicker

cookie porn style moments on social media and like hey I'm buying this box to eat I'm going to eat this box and the snatcher right now I got my put up I might play some video games for the night and eat all four cookies everything and so we're recreating a box that is able to is able to upheals of these types of purchase purchases or purchases what's something about building a cookie empire or like a cookie your a cookie perfectionist as a cookie perfectionist what's something

that people might not think about that goes into producing however many thousands of cookies you're

producing a day I mean I think shipping the cookies I think that's just such a an overlooked

piece of this whole puzzle is you know you can do we can do anything we can do everything in our power to make a perfect cookie and you're still at the mercy of somebody else for the last 48 to 72 hours like it's in a UPS truck it's in a hot car it's on their porch it's you know expecting the customer to to be ready to receive the box and hoping it'll probably re-heat the cookie properly and all these little things and I don't like not having that control like I I think this is

this is a good segue into the retail model on why we were opening the brick and mortar shop is having all of these little nuances that come up when you are having a shift product is tough and also having a very high-end product any little piece that looks off you know people are very quickly say hey I want you know that my talk looks a little melted you know this bag looks a little little scraped it's like it's UPS like we he's hard it's hard for us to control every little

every little factor so I I think that shipping out thousands of cookies a day it's a interesting thing to think about that most people might not think about I think also just each of your cookies is a little different to it all has different ingredients all different ingredients different like I yeah I can imagine it's a it's a complex challenge to make sure that it ends up in the customers the customer experience ends up consistent I'm the band of complexity

for our kitchen team they every time a new recipe comes out you know I get the little push back because I do I do want to make sure that we're putting out the best product out there and that means not having a similar base for all of our flavors like all of our flavors are a unique base like our red velvet is completely unique are been a bit of a grand prize completely unique a lot of the cookie companies will have a one based dough and they'll just have different ingredients

or like you know as a small tweak here and there are basically a complete unique pastry or dessert

almost in a sense in each of our flavors and so yeah it's a lot of ingredients that we keep in stock and might make it a little harder to scale and a fast fast clip but products first

product has to be first and that's what we've stood by since the beginning so is there anything

from your affiliate days you you articulated a lot of the ways that this move was sort of your move really away from affiliate marketing into a product into this level of perfectionism and and focus on the product is there anything that you that you took from your affiliate marketing days that you think has really served you well as a as a founder to this company I think I mean honestly aside from leadership just knowing my way around around the digital space like being

being able to chat very openly and being very educated on like the backends of of the of the

Paid platform so meta Google I think a lot of agencies might come into some o...

just being able to kind of put their foot down like say this is the way we're going to do it and

like you know maybe let's maybe try to do it this way or what do you think about this and I think

it's a good skill set to have that you know a lot of other founders might not have going to a brand like this and then talk to me about your move to New York because it's an LA based company but you now have opened your sort of flagship retail store in Williamsburg hipster capital of the world talk to me about that move and and are you and are you did you moved to New York or you still in LA? I'm in New York you have moved to how's how's that transition been coast to coast?

I love New York like I just I feel more home here than the West Coast like I love the people I love the energy I was in Puerto Rico before the so that was a huge huge change from PR to here

for me it's always been about the food like the food is the first it is the reason why we're

even in last crumb to begin with and uh LA it didn't have the right people in my opinion to that I want say to serve but I wanted I want to last crumb to be in a spot where people would tell

you very quickly they loved it or they hated it and I think I didn't get that in LA like every

LA was a bunch of fluff and oh I love it so much and they wouldn't take it bite a bit or you know just be like a very odd interaction that's counting their cars almost like in LA probably exactly and New York is a food capital the world I I'll stand by that you know I've been to Tokyo and I've been to you know a lot of the other food cities but New York is the melting pot of every corner over the world and you can find the best of the best of anything and so we want to be the best

of the cookies here and so we we knew that New York would be the first place for our retail store

and so we decided to pack up the whole company move it over to New York our production facility is in Brooklyn our first store is in Brooklyn it's been an awesome move like that couldn't be happier with the move yeah like to go from a product that you can only get in these hundred and fifty dollar boxes to a place where you can presumably go and just get a cookie is probably a really great top of funnel for for the product so with one cookie then costs a ten eleven twelve dollars

and we're actually uh we're actually eight dollars or eight dollars okay three for twenty five so yeah about eight fifty eight fifty eight fifty a cookie in the in the store it is on the higher end still four cookies but you know if we're talking about a living cookie at six fifty or last current eight fifty I think there's just so much more care and nuance that goes into our cookies that hopefully justifies the price point you know because our three-day process week every cookie

is on specific heaters so that it's the optimal bite that you have going into our store and I think I do honestly stand by it's the best cookie not just in New York I think it's the best in the yes I believe it I'm going to New York in a few weeks and I'm definitely going to be trying some what's the best flavor what's the what's the what's your favorite I would say our signature is

our banana cream pie it's my favorite so maybe that's why it's a signature it's just it's just

a perfectly balanced cookie it's like salty sweet caramelized bananas uh banana salted caramel we do at marshmallow meringue that we make in house that we torch on site we it'll be a mold and see salt vanilla wait for us it's just awesome sounds pretty awesome cookie it has the retail play opened up sort of a new potential phase of growth for you are you planning a step-out retail that will grow the the top of funnel footprint across the country I think what's great

about the retail is well like you mentioned it it is a top of funnel it's it's a big top of funnel for the e-commerce side but also it's a fraction of the overhead compared to our you know our main production facility so well yes we have to justify getting these smaller kiosks or or locations around New York you have to weigh that against you know all of the all of the top of funnel marketing we get from from these spaces too so like you know it might not

just be individual or suit like maybe we get corporate orders from from some of these spots maybe we hit a bank of America and fight I and we are able to do all their corporate gifts for the holiday season like there's just so much opportunity for having these retail stores and you're gonna get the best product in the retail store like that there's there's no way around it like you're getting same day cookies fresh off the off the heaters we can do a lot more techniques in store that we can

can't do when we ship cookies so we're we're excited to expand the retail model and I think that's our main focus right now is there anything else that's really worked well anything that you'd point to on the advertising side I know it's not a huge part of how you guys are growing but it's anything you point to that's done really well on the paid media side for instance creators

Are creators a big part of of what you're doing on the paid side on the paid ...

most of our most of our paid is internal creation and internal content I hate to say it's like the

same same wheel as as it was five ten years ago it's just continuing to put out a lot of content like you can't it's it's a unicorn to have those ads that run for six to twelve months like it's just not it really is not gonna happen so continually having content working with these creators too whitelist like we don't we don't specifically go to creators say hey make us content but if we see stuff that has our gas we've been made that works out well we're very quick to go to them

like hey can we whitelist your your content can we put on these different channels and then just diversify between the channel so you know a lot of people still might not have a YouTube these days we'll put the same exact video on meta or sorry on Instagram and then we'll put on YouTube and we'll get 300,000 views like three marketing so maximize new channels, maximize and the opportunity

you have to get all the eyeballs on the company and yeah keep it easy if you had to point to

the main factor in your success it seems to me it's definitely that ruthless focus on product product experience above all else would you agree it's 100% the product experience I 100% agree

I think you know for us it's always been you can always continue to evolve on product

and we're always testing we're always like tweaking things we've a lot of flavors in the pipeline that are rated to come out but do we want to be at the forefront of product first and foremost so at the end of the day you know you're gonna get a great cookie going into last ground and our new products still coming out of your cookie obsessed mind or have you hired like food scientists that are that are digging in on these challenges no every cookie comes from me so

we have you know other real chefs in the company right now and you know it's it's

you you you have to be reserved like you don't want to bring out too many products at

time because they could get way down like it I if you look at Levane like you know four power two and they've had like eight flavors over the last 25 years I think and they've created and it a monster so you want to make sure that you give each flavor it's it's time to shine and you don't need three people on payroll to do that where do you want to take this bad boy it sounds like it's just something you're happy to continue growing you know kind of organically as you are

through this this retail footprint that you're growing at how do you think where do you want to be in in five years with this brand I think you know we do absolutely new ambassadors on the team and they love the idea of taking this international which I agree I think it a high-end product fits well into some of these big-time cities so maybe the Tokyo's or the Saudis and I think it's it's more about finding the right fits for the last crowd as opposed to you know just trying to

become the Starbucks of coupons like we don't want that like I don't want I don't want to be the next crumble you know I want to care about the product and every every spot we we fall into so to me it's it's gross slowly and just make sure that you know every place that we pop up has the same care as our first or very cool I know you we you don't need to speak poor about about crumble but I'm curious what what what's a cautionary tale you take from the crumble

cookies trajectory because they're they're close to a billion dollar company at this point

they're two billion I think they're I think they're a two point two billion dollar they're

top-line value to two point two billion I don't know if they sold I think I've seen some negative presence in but maybe get out at the right time is it's probably my it's probably my advice like it seemed like they had enormous upswing in through 2020 to 2025 and now people are realizing that maybe this isn't the type of cookie I want to put in my body if it's on the business side like there's different there's probably ways that they could have approached it for the founders themselves

and maybe we've gotten out or on the product side maybe they could have pivoted a bit earlier and focused more on the products they've trying to come up with you know a thousand different iterations of a chocolate brownie cookie a bunch of things I think there's you can't fall them they have the biggest cookie company probably in the world aside from you know like in this field so we're doing a bunch of things right I've heard that Oreo is like half of the cookie market

I was talking with a guy that was trying to build like a diabetic Oreo cookie and he was saying that just Oreos as a kind of cookie just take up a huge like they're like the dark matter of the cookie universe do you have any Oreo competitors that are that are cooking up? I mean we I love Oreos like who doesn't love Oreos? They're awesome because they they're like

This Oreo and I'm gonna make 66 different versions of this Oreo and we're gon...

our market share every time we put a new version out but I think for us our our main

one that's the closest is our cookies and cream it's in store it's we make our own Oreo feeling that goes into it it has actually some Oreo crumbles on top it has a vanilla meringue built like buttermilk buttercream meringue that is is very light that kind of tops the cookie

it's just the ultimate version of a cookies and cream cookie love it last question are you

at all as a former affiliate you must be aware of the incredible stories coming out of the

GLP one campaigns that people are running are you worried at all about GLP ones like somehow you know slowing the trajectory of people eating massive cookies? I actually think it might be working

in our favor you think about it like GLP ones yes people are eating less sweets and eating less

junk eating less food but I think the stuff they're cutting out a lot of is the easy to snack on

you know I'm gonna grab some Oreos or I'm gonna grab some chips or um I don't want as big of a

meal but a lot of them still want their calories to count and you know if if you're gonna put some cookie in your body like I want the best cookie in my body for that particular amount of calories I'm allowed to happen today and so you know we can fit into that part of their day rather than eating a sleeve of Oreos like someone would maybe want to do you just like focus on premiere cookie experience that you're getting with last crumb yes or all right well for any

of our listeners who want to try I'm gonna have to go find some lackluster cookie just to fill

the whole in my soul after this podcast but if you want to try last crumb cookies make sure you

go to lastcrumb.com thanks for coming on the podcast Derek this is a really interesting one Eric that was awesome thank you thank so much for listening to today's episode if you're not a subscriber to our newsletter you can do that right now at direct to consumer all oneword.co i'm Eric Dick and this has been the D.T.C podcast we'll see you next time holiday starts early on Walmart marketplace apply to sell and get your inventory to Walmart fulfillment centers by September 15th to prepare

for millions of holiday shoppers build your seasonal assortment with customer favorites products Walmart customers love and are actively searching for add eligible customer favorites to your catalog and you could receive up to 100% off referral fees on those items get holiday ready with Walmart marketplace visit marketplace dot Walmart dot com forward slash D.T.C pod and sign up today

Keep reading