In this narrated explainer, Michael Girdley chronicles the rapid ascent of Crumbl Cookies from a single Utah shop in 2017 to a franchise network of over 1,000 locations across the United States, Puerto Rico, and Canada by 2025. The video details how cousins Sawyer Hemsley and Jason McCowan, despite lacking baking experience, applied tech‑style A/B testing to perfect a chewy chocolate‑chip cookie, leveraged the nostalgia economy, and introduced a weekly rotating‑menu that created scarcity and social‑media buzz. Their marketing strategy borrowed from street‑wear drops, emphasizing Instagram‑worthy packaging and a custom Pantone pink box, which helped amass 16 million combined followers on TikTok and Instagram. The founders adopted a franchising model—initially reluctant but catalyzed by family interest—to scale capital‑light, opening hundreds of stores annually. By 2023 franchisees generated over $1 billion in sales, and the brand now sells more than a million cookies daily. The narrative also addresses challenges: labor lawsuits, health concerns over high‑calorie cookies, inconsistent product quality across franchises, and growing competition from brands like Insomnia Cookies and Dirty Dough. Girdley concludes with lessons about transposing tech‑startup tactics to the food industry and the importance of first‑mover advantage and community‑driven marketing.
Chapters
Crumble Cookies went from one small cookie shop back in 2017, started by two cousins with no baking experience, to 8 years later today having over 1,000 shops nationwide and growing incredibly fast. What is the rise and how did this all happen with Crumble? That's what this video is about.
Today's video is sponsored by HighLevel. More about them later.
Two cousins, Sawyer Hemsley and Jason McCowan, in 2017 were in Utah and neither one of them had any baking experience. So like any good entrepreneurs, they decided they wanted to get in the cookie business. Started with the same idea that had basically worked for decades for Insomnia Cookies, which was late-night chocolate chip cookies delivered warm to people's dorm rooms. Well, if DoorDash could bring you a burrito, why couldn't they bring you cookies?
One cousin, Jason, was actually a tech guy.
It caused them to actually do something pretty interesting as their first choice, uh, in this whole adventure, which was instead of opening a bakery to start, They went and used a technique that's commonly used in tech called A/B testing, where you put out two options in front of people and you see which one they choose. And they use this to figure out what was going to be absolute best cookie recipe for them. They tweak one ingredient at a time, changing them and then handing out the options to people at places like gas stations and in public to see which one they like better. 6 months later, after producing many batches that were basically not very good and that customers described as flat or yucky, they ended up with a chewy, warm, and gooey recipe for the cookie that Jason described as absolutely perfect. And this early founding story kind of represented one of the great things about Crumbl that you'll see later on, which is from day one, they were super involved in understanding what exactly their customer wanted and super involved in staying very connected to those customers. Fresh off this knowledge of what the customer base really wanted, they decided in 2017 to open the very first Crumbl shop. And they did it there in Utah, and they used $68,000 of Jason's savings to open the very first low-budget shop. This initial shop sold exactly one thing: their recipe for the perfect milky chocolate chip cookie. And guess what? People absolutely loved it. Lines were out the door and they were packed from day one. And these guys didn't know it, but they had hit on a trend that's happening right now and is huge in the United States. Is the idea of the nostalgia economy. It's the idea that people are hungry for things that are real, and those are often things that are from the past. And you know what? A thing that's from the past that people love and have good memories of? Grandma's delicious chocolate chip cookies. And that was their business. In fact, during the pandemic, a survey asked people how they were finding solace, and 2 out of 3 people reported finding comfort in nostalgia foods during the height of the pandemic. The boys had found something magical. Before long, demand just kept exceeding their tiny kitchen's capacity. They even responded by offering a second flavor of cookie, a chilled pink sugar cookie. I haven't had one. That would hopefully meet demand, but it didn't work. They had what we in the business world like to call a champagne problem, which is there was so much demand that they couldn't keep up. So much so that people would line up, wait for hours, and then discover they couldn't actually get a cookie. Wasn't good for the brand, and it wasn't good for longevity to have that happen. They needed a way to have people not leave disappointed without cookies, and this insight and response to the problem led to a breakthrough idea that would change the chain forever.
Before I tell you what that idea was, big thanks to HighLevel for sponsoring this video and helping us pay for our editors. HighLevel is the all-in-one CRM that handles all of your emails, text funnels, and more all in one place. Think of it like the Swiss Army knife for small businesses. You can join thousands of agencies and entrepreneurs using HighLevel to meet all of their marketing needs. Use my link to get an extended free trial, which gives you 30 days free instead of the regular 14. Go to gohighlevel.com/myname, Michael Girdley, to sign up today. That's gohighlevel.com/michaelgirdley.
Thanks to them.
And now back to the video.
Sawyer was the marketing-minded cousin, and his idea was to then bring the techniques that folks like Supreme and other brands like that were using to basically create product drops in order to communicate with the fans and create excitement and scarcity to bring people in the door. Give you some context. New releases from brands like Supreme will often sell out in seconds and people will resell them for thousands of dollars in profits on places like eBay. It's a crazy model and shows what scarcity can do when it creates demand. 2018, Crumble introduced its now famous weekly rotating menu. Instead of having the same menu every day, on Sunday night they would go on social media and have a big event and announce the flavors for the week. And suddenly there was scarcity because these were flavors that would only last that week. So people knew they had to get in or they were going to miss their opportunity to have, well, the next newest invention coming out of Crumbl. Red velvet one week, peppermint cup next week. I don't know, bark whatever next week, chocolate bark. Basically, you see what they had done. They'd taken cookies and turned them into a game. Scarcity and anticipation kept customers coming back every week to to see what the new thing was. They would talk to their friends about it. It created a community. Pretty awesome. But these guys were smart. They understood their customers and how they thought, and they knew that it was important not only for the cookies to taste great, they had to look great, especially when you took a photo of them to put them on your Instagram or your TikTok feed. And that's precisely what they did. Everything from great packaging to great look and feel for the cookies was super important because in the end, these consumers were gonna be posting about them on social media and giving them free marketing. Sawyer said famously, "The better the product looks, the more likely it is to get shared online." And the company leaned into this. They actually worked with color company Pantone to create a custom color of pink for their boxes so they would look perfect when they were shared on Instagram. 2021, the company's TikTok account got 1.6 million followers within the first 6 weeks of opening. They had figured out social media for sure. Fast forward to 2024, the brand's combined presences on social media sites like Instagram and TikTok, they have a combined total of 16 million followers. All this meant that Crumbl shot past all the other cookie providers. Uh, probably the most famous of those was Insomnia Cookies, famously located near college campuses. They were founded in 2003. They had a grand total of 350 stores in the two decades that followed, but they never were the viral sensation and didn't figure out marketing to the correct type of consumer like Crumbl did. While Insomnia was doing flyers and posters and radio ads, Crumble was talking to consumers in a more modern way via social and authenticity and all that kind of stuff that works today. And this stuff spilled over into mass media as well. The New York Times would routinely do reviews of new Crumble flavors. They weren't even talking about Crumble the business. They were talking about Crumble the product. In other words, the mass media was playing the game that Crumble had created. As the pandemic came, many eateries totally floundered, didn't do well at all. Crumble actually survived and thrived. They reached by the middle of 2022 over 100 open locations. By 2021, they had expanded to over 300 locations, showing just how dominant they'd become using these advanced techniques. By 2023, their franchisees were selling a combined total of over $1 billion worth of cookies a year. How did they grow so quickly? Well, it turned out they used a strategy called franchising. And the franchising model was kind of one they approached reluctantly. You see, Sawyer's mom back in 2018 had seen how successful the cookie shop was. She wanted in on the action, so she asked them to make her the first franchisee, and they did. Franchising can be an amazing business because it's capital light. What you do as the franchisor, and these guys did too, was you license the intellectual property, your brand, your system, all that kind of stuff to the individual entrepreneurs that you sell franchises to. Those franchisees, they bring the capital, they open up, and they run the locations. In return, you as the franchisor, you get paid fees, royalties, all that kind of stuff. And you notice here what was the magic about it. You as a franchisor, you don't have to invest a lot of money. You're just selling intellectual property. It doesn't cost you much to open up each new franchisee. In 2020 onward, they started opening hundreds of franchise units per year. Crumble expanded to 149 stores by 2021, over 300 by the end of 2021, and ultimately to more than over 400 stores by mid-'22 across 45 different states. Pretty incredible. By July 2025, the chain had over 1,000 restaurants. Selling cookies across the United States, Puerto Rico, and Canada. Just incredible growth for a chain that hadn't existed just 8 years prior. Look, I'm making this all sound like wine and roses, but the journey hasn't been perfect. They've been sued by the Department of Labor. Some of their franchisees have overworked teens. They've had some questions and concerns about the health of the cookies. By the way, before you buy one, go look at the nutrition information. Some of these cookies are like 1,000 calories. Yeah, it doesn't surprise me why Americans are so big. Don't, don't, don't eat these things. They weathered lawsuits from former employees who tried to start competitors. And perhaps the biggest problem that they had was their core success. This idea of Instagrammable cookies started to fall apart as they grew really quickly. There's a lot of folks, you know, talking about kind of expectations versus reality on Instagram. And some franchisees were putting out pretty nasty looking cookies. So where is Crumbl now? Well, in many ways it's still on top. They have thousands of stores. They're selling over 1 million cookies each individual day, and they continue to open up new franchises. And the things that I read from people on Twitter and stuff like that who are franchises of, you know, of Crumbl, by and large, they're all doing really well. People, it turns out, like to eat sugar, fat, and salt, which is what's in a cookie in America, and they keep coming back to buy them. And Crumbl is a huge beneficiary of that. But the reality is competition in the United States doesn't stand still. Folks like Insomnia, Dirty Dough, Crave, other brands. There's dozens of them. They're out there all trying to come after the same market. The good news for Crumble is it has a thing called a first mover advantage, which means the person who creates the market and goes after it first oftentimes gets advantages that they get to keep. In the case of Crumble, they're really big. They have a beautiful brand, and most importantly, they have a ton of social media following and a community that keeps coming back to buy their cookies. And for example, this scale allows them to do things that other chains can't. For example, they can go test their new recipes in a subset of their stores before releasing them out to the entire chain. Something a chain with, say, 1 or 2 locations couldn't do at all. And in the end, it's awesome that these guys who had no baking experience went into the baking business and the cookie business more like a tech startup than they did as a restaurant. And I think that's a huge takeaway from this story, which is you can do so well taking the ideas of what has worked and what has not worked in other industries and then applying them in new industries. And you see so many times with, especially with businesses like Crumble, those genius ideas that you learn in one place can prove to be genius ideas in another place. And it's just our job to take them, identify them, and then exploit them in new markets to ideally make ourselves some money. All right, that's the story of Crumble. Let me know what you think in the comments below. Like, follow, subscribe. Thanks. And, uh, by the way, I try to read all your comments, so let me know what you think and how you feel about the beer. All right, catch you next time.
