September 2024 - CoTM - Black & Gold

This month’s COTM is the reason there is a Top Shelf Cookies, I usually send it out for our birthday month.  This year marks Top Shelf Cookies 10th birthday. I feel like I’m a totally different human than the one that took a silly game day superstition and built a job and a company out of it.

I took $2500 and promised myself when it was gone that I would just report back to my cubical and stop this silly fascination with being my own boss.  The deal I made with myself was that if the only people buying my cookies were people that I knew, I knew I could make cookies for friends, I could develop recipes for fun on the weekend.  But, I didn’t want to go back to a cubicle, I know it sounds dramatic, but it felt like prison.  Each day felt the same, wake up early, drive through Boston traffic, show up at an office park, work and try to figure out if I could minimize traffic on the way home and make dinner, watch tv and go to bed.  It was this cycle that was severely impacting my mental health.  At a certain point, kids didn’t seem like they were going to be in the picture - so I figured it was time to make a change.

So, I started to think about what making cookies and being my own boss looked like. 

In 2014, I moved stuff into CommonWealth Kitchen and got going.  I took a slow and steady wins the race approach. I made so many amazing friends.  I started to do farmers markets.  I hired people, I had to let people go.  I got the ecommerce side of the business going. I adopted a dog, so I wouldn’t be home alone.  It was weird to have so many new friends, but feel so lonely.

So, I kept trudging along and in the fall of 2019, I felt really stuck.  I needed to grow the business or figure out what a new job would be.  I felt like a bad sister, bad daughter, bad friend.  That week, I won the Brewing The American Dream pitch competition and was able to get coaching, funding for my ecommerce store and almost like a second chance.

I decided our big plan for 2020 would be to move into our own space.  I had long outgrown the shared space.  So, we started looking.  The day I sat in an old pizza joint a mile from my house, I could see it as Top Shelf Cookies.  I went out to the parking lot and checked my email on the way to the next location to consider for leasing and lost a big event, and that’s how the afternoon went.  See a space, lose an event or weekly order.  COVID was coming.  

So, I fought like hell.  I worked harder than I ever worked in my life, not because I wanted a storefront, but because I wanted to make cookies as a job.   So, we got a lot of support, I still get teary when I think of some of the messages people sent me with orders.

We decided to sign the lease and the buildout nearly killed me and then we opened at 516 Gallivan Blvd and I had a new job.  I had a new job in my neighborhood, doing what I love - I feel so lucky, but I don’t feel like lucky is the right word.

So, here we are 10 years into this thing all because of one cookie.  Black & Gold is always going to be my favorite, it’s the first recipe I created.  I loved every second of tinkering and adjusting the recipe.  I loved that my cousin and one of my best friends in the world, Annette, had given me some black cocoa, because it was just sitting in her pantry and she knew I would use it.  

I knew I wanted to do something with the Bruins to make it more of a game day thing.  So - I thought peanut butter chips reminded me of the older uniforms' look of gold, so that’s what I went with Dark Chocolate & Peanut Butter Chips!

I started to bring them to The Fours every home game, I started to make them for friends. I started to believe the Bruins would make the playoffs, when the playoffs started I started to believe they might win the whole thing.   Then, I started to believe in Top Shelf Cookies.  

So, for everyone else that believes in Top Shelf Cookies - thank you so much.  I love making cookies in the city I love, for the city I love and call home.  I’m very grateful.

Don’t Crumble,

Heather