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The best-selling cookie at New York City bakery Janie’s Life-Changing Baked Goods is called the Pie Crust Cookie. It’s made with a flaky pie crust bottom with a small bit of pie filling in the middle, and buttery, crumbly streusel on top. “It’s that bite of pie that everybody’s looking for,” said Janie Deegan, the bakery’s namesake owner. “Everybody loves the pie crust.”
Deegan has been baking these cookies for more than a decade, first from her home kitchen. In 2015, she couldn’t have realized that one day, she’d field corporate orders by the thousands, supply cookies to Madison Square Garden, one of New York’s most iconic venues, and maintain three brick-and-mortar locations in Manhattan, all serving fresh-baked cookies well into the evening.
But the Pie Crust Cookie has done more than delight thousands of customers over the last decade. It’s won Deegan awards, including the title of Food Network Chopped Sweets champion. Most importantly, it’s given Deegan a sense of purpose, helping her to build a thriving business (also from scratch) as a way out of the dark clutches of addiction and homelessness.
That story – her story, built right into the name of her business — plus an expanding line of cookies (the Pie Crust Cookie now comes in dozens of flavors) and a few high-profile deals, has helped her business grow.
A nontraditional path to becoming a business owner
Deegan got her start selling cookies at street fairs and other markets. (She was a Square seller back then, too!) After some initial success, she was ready to expand, but nervous about next steps.
With no business degree and no formal culinary training, Deegan had to slowly figure it out by herself. “I just started my own education journey on how to build a business in New York City,” she said. “I was a nanny at the time. I don’t have family money.”
She worried her background — a formerly unhoused woman recovering from addiction — might kill her chances of launching and maintaining a viable business in a competitive market. Then she was accepted into a culinary entrepreneurship program (she calls it “a mini-MBA for food businesses”) and after learning how to brand, sell, and tell stories about her product, she changed her mind.
“I got this idea that maybe my brand story was a positive thing and an asset,” she said. “Not only to me being authentic Janie and getting to live my life not hiding from my past … but also, there’s something really magical about a young woman, or anyone, recovering from a dark place.”
Staying flexible led the business to scale
Now, Deegan is entrenched in ownership. A 2,800-square-foot facility in East Harlem serves as the brand’s headquarters, handling the majority of production and wholesale shipping. Smaller storefronts in the West Village and Upper West Side of Manhattan bake cookies to order — a very important part of the bakery’s value proposition to its customers.
She also knows how to think on her feet. The day before we spoke, one of Deegan’s storefronts finally reopened after weeks of unexpected closures. (A landlord issue, she told me.) During that time, she reassigned employees so none lost work hours or wages. Still, it was a wild two weeks, she said.
“One of my best assets as a business owner is that I am really malleable. I’m really easy at pivoting and going with the flow and seeing where opportunity is, instead of, like, ‘I have this vision and I won’t stray from it,’” she said.
How digital ordering helps Janie’s fulfill big (big) sales
About a third of the bakery’s retail orders come via third-party delivery apps — especially late at night, Deegan said. The bakery also takes orders through its own cleverly named website, getJanies.com, which is powered by Square. That website can handle huge orders worth thousands of dollars apiece, and has become a vital ordering channel for the brand’s corporate clients, including Facebook and Google.
“Big companies… don’t want to necessarily order on DoorDash. And the assistant isn’t going to call us and talk to someone on the phone — or send a million emails back and forth,” she said. “Nobody actually likes to talk on the phone.”
Surprisingly, that’s true even when the orders are large.
“You could order $4,000 worth of cookies for a month from now without having to talk to someone,” Deegan said. “It helps us capture these large orders with no margin of error — we’re not going to miss the email, we’re not going to miss the phone call.”
Janie’s recommends placing an order at least a few days in advance, if not a week. The website allows anyone to place an order up to 30 days in advance — a clear, convenient, and contemporary way to feed an office or iconic NYC venue — full of dessert lovers. Those orders speak to the trust the bakery has cultivated with its customers, large and small, as it’s grown.
“It’s always shocking to me … I can’t believe this company is ordering $4,000 worth of cookies without even picking up the phone and confirming we can do it,” Deegan says.”
But can Janie’s Life-Changing Baked Goods do it? Of course they can.
