Does your small business have a deeper purpose beyond generating profits? If not, you might be overlooking one of the most important aspects of your brand image. In this episode, Jon Aidukonis, along with Octavia Treadway and Ken Treadway from Love You Cookie, discuss the importance of building a brand with a purpose and how small business owners can make a difference in their communities.

Podcast Key Highlights

• Strategies for Building a Brand with a Purpose
  • If you’re unsure of your small business’s underlying purpose, start by identifying the core values of your brand and think of the different ways you can use your business resources to make a difference in your community.
  • Once you develop a specific goal or mission, consider organizing some community outreach events and pop-ups; these will not only raise awareness about your cause, but they will also help you gather more public support.
  • You should consider collaborating with other likeminded organizations who want to accomplish the same goals.
• Strategies for Accessing Wider Product Distribution
  • If you’re struggling to generate interest from a particular retail buyer, you can always reach out to their supervisor to see if they can arrange a meeting for you.
  • When emails or cold calls fail, try approaching the retail buyer in person with samples of your products.
  • Don’t forget to contact smaller local venues for distribution opportunities as well.
• The Advantages of Having Non-Profit Driven Goals
  • Connecting with your audience on a personal issue helps humanize your brand. You’re not just another business owner who wants to promote his products or services, but a real person who genuinely cares about his community.
  • Your personal story and mission can help inspire other marginalized groups who lack a voice or representation.

Links

• Love You Cookie

Transcript

The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are for informational purposes only, and solely those of the podcast participants, contributors, and guests, and do not constitute an endorsement by or necessarily represent the views of The Hartford or its affiliates.

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Jon: Hello everybody. And welcome back to another episode of Small Biz Ahead, the small business podcast presented by The Hartford. This is Jon Aidukonis flying solo this week without my partner in crime Gene Marks. But I do have some special guests on to talk to us all about building a brand with a purpose, how to think about giving back to your community, and how to do that while keeping things sweet with cookies. So I can’t really think of anything better to kind of roll around in today. So I am joined with Octavia Treadway and Ken Treadway from Love You Cookie based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. How are you two doing today?

Ken: I’m doing well. We’re doing well. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having us.

Octavia: I’m doing well also.

Jon: Awesome. Well thank you for joining us. Now, Love You Cookie, it’s like an online retail bakery, right? You sell delicious looking cookies to people across the country, and you have a pretty interesting mission where it looks like the proceeds of the company go back to supporting causes around providing access and availability of mental health services to people who might be underserved, specifically in the BIPOC community. So I would love to hear a little bit more about the company, it’s starting, your roles, and kind of how you were able to combine such seemingly different things together into one business model.

Ken: Thank you. First off, we want to thank you for having Love You Cookie, having us on this podcast. We’re very excited to speak about our product and what we have here. Let’s just go back a little to 2020. And when we look at 2020, just everything that happened with the world shutting down and COVID rampant and having to stay in our houses. It was during this time that one of our founders and our cookie genius, Sarah Brima, she went in her kitchen in an attempt to lift the spirits of her family. And from there, that’s where we created the chocolate chip with sea salt cookie, which is our original cookie.

Ken: With that cookie being a hit her husband who’s also founder of the company, Sahr Brima, he was so impressed by the unique texture, I mean the beautiful part of the cookie is that it’s crunchy on the outside and gooey on the inside. And he was so impressed by it that he felt that she should share it with everyone to see how it would do in a taste test. Once it was given to one of the other founders, Kamal Mohamed, Kamal inspired them to go out and to begin to sell the cookies and then it was at that time that Erin Bankson, who is also one of the founders, went and found the logo and you have the birth of what is Love You Cookie.

Ken: So it all began at a time where we were all isolated and our founders wanted to bring joy to those at a time where we seemed that we were a part. And I think that goes into specifically what our mission is, the mission of being defiant optimism, defiant optimism. And it sounds really like a very fancy word but in all actuality, defiant optimism is rooted in the ideal that there are still good things to enjoy and to work for. We want people to understand that it’s not all about the hustle and bustle. You can have fun and you can enjoy yourself and what you’re doing and making, and have fun at your job.

Ken: But not only that, it’s not just about having fun at the job, but it’s for us to encourage other people to defy the odds and to spread hope in their lives, and their families, and in their communities. We were at a time where there wasn’t a lot of hope. People didn’t have much to smile about. People couldn’t go out, people’s lives were impacted, and one of the things we wanted to do was to make a cookie.

Ken: And what it also did during this period of time, it impacted a lot of people’s mental health. And the one thing that our amazing gourmet cookies are, we wanted to be a vehicle to achieving our core mission of bringing awareness to mental health issues and eliminating the barriers of mental health and wellness resources, especially of our black, indigenous and people of color, and that community.

Jon: That’s an incredible story. And I really like the line defiant optimism. I don’t know where I got it. So I can’t take credit for the origin of this quote, but I say it often, “but all I need is a dare and a one in a million chance.” Right? And typically we get the spirit of that a lot on this podcast, you have someone who had a great idea, they put it into the world and that’s kind of all they needed to make something grow. But what I really think is incredible about the story that you’re telling and how it’s kind of started, is that was much bigger than a sense of self or a business notion. This kind of birth moment is really around the idea of community and not just giving something delicious, but truly giving joy to your point, which is really incredible and I think something we could all use more of in the world, right? So thank you for bringing that to us and I’m sure the community appreciates it as well.

Ken: Yeah. We like to look at it as a form of some type of healing. I mean, at that point in time, there was a lot of hurt that was going on. People couldn’t reach out, family members couldn’t see each other. So why not send them some form of love in the form of a cookie? Just to show that healing, that we can be a community, we can be a family.

Jon: It’s awesome. It’s true comfort food, in the most pure definition, it’s true comfort food. So let’s talk a little bit around the operations just as you’re kind of mentioning. So distribution, so you had someone who was a great baker, you had someone, it sounds like her husband who had kind of the vision to say, “this can be bigger and we should pursue it.” And you talked about two other partners, one that seems to be a little bit more into the brand identity and graphics side and kind of your sales partner as well. So how do you go from having an idea and getting cookies in the hands of friends to kind of getting it into a channel or venue that people are paying for and kind of sharing with others?

Ken: I can use two words, Sahr Brima. Sahr Brima, our owner is an accomplished attorney, but not only that, he was so sold on the fact of what this cookie, the impact that this cookie could have, that he literally drove that cookie to get to places. If I could give one story, there was a grocery store chain in the Minneapolis area that nobody could get into, no one. I mean, it was so hard in order to get into this chain. Sahr Brima called the gentleman at the bakery constantly, daily, trying to get in and wasn’t getting anywhere.

Ken: So Sahr being defiantly optimistic, goes above this person’s head and goes to his boss and speaks to his boss. His boss ends up talking to the guy below, he ends up getting a meeting, gets samples of the cookies to the guy at the bakery, it’s in all of the stores and the story from their is they loved the cookie, of course. And once he got the introduction, once we get the introduction of who we are and what we’re doing, the cookie is going to sell itsel