Making it Young: Irvington teens create Karma Cookies
It”™s 6 a.m. and there is homework to be done.
It sits in a gift box within a keyboard-pecking hand”™s easy reach: a selection of cookies artfully shaped and decorated in colorful artisanal detail for the holidays.
A diminished selection. The dog ”” OK, it was my inner Cookie Monster ”” already ate some of my homework.
A pink-cheeked, pink-mouthed, black-eyed Santa Claus. Red-striped candy canes ”” what”™s left of them from last night”™s cramming session. A star-crowned Christmas tree strung with multicolored lights. Perfectly shaped, perfectly edible blue-and-white snowflakes. A tasseled red-and-yellow stocking cap.
Butter cookies flavored with vanilla and almond extract. One of their bakers says it”™s the almond that brings out the rave reviews from teachers and students. (We do our own taste tests. That”™s our homework.)
The bakers themselves had left school a little early one recent afternoon to talk business with the man from the Business Journal. Andie Regan and Emily Lapine are 16-year-old juniors at Irvington High School. They”™ve been friends since third grade and business partners since their freshman year, when they founded Karma Cookies. They launched their website this year at shopkarmacookies.com.
“It takes a lot of practice to do these types of cookies” says Emily. They are priced at $2 to $5 per cookie, depending on ornamental detail. Their variously sized holiday gift boxes sell for $30 to $55 each.
“It took us a really long time to get to where we are now,” says Andie. “We just kind of went for it.”
“We just jumped right in,” says Emily.
They run their business from the home of Andie”™s family”™s in Irvington. We are in the teen”™s working kitchen, a former storage room that Andie in eighth grade was allowed to convert by her parents to nurture her precocious culinary skills and interests. It”™s equipped with a Blodgett commercial oven and a large stainless steel mixer that wouldn”™t be out of place in a bakery or mess hall kitchen. The cookie-cutter patterns that hang on a wall are more often decorative than functional in the girls”™ made-to-order cookie business.
“We”™ve always had a love for business and a love for baking,” Emily tells me.
Emily traces her entrepreneurial and culinary passions to her mother, Missy Chase Lapine. You might know her as The Sneaky Chef, the incorporated author of six books in the Sneaky Chef series that promote healthy eating and lifestyles in kids and adults. Reinforcing that maternal entrepreneurial inheritance, Emily”™s father, Rick Lapine, is founder and president of Hudson Home Group, a cookware and cutlery supplier in New Jersey.
The girls”™ business began with a class project related to their freshman-year reading of “Romeo and Juliet.” They sweetened their completed assignment by turning in “castle cookies,” says Emily.
With the Shakespearean castle, says Andie, “We made like a boy and a girl holding hands” ”” just like Romeo and Juliet.
“Our teacher was really impressed,” Emily says. “We got 100 on the project.”
Word of their cookies and baking prowess spread through the school. “Everybody loved them. But it”™s hard to charge a kid,” says Emily. And it”™s hard to succeed in business if you don”™t charge for your products.
“We decided why not take this to a whole ”™nother level,” she says. “We love business. No one”™s going to hire us at our age. We might as well start our own business. ”¦ We thought we can make this big.”
“We had a different idea at first for our business,” says Andie.
At first they frosted their cookies with symbols and claimed benefits for those who ate them that transcended the appetite of one”™s inner Cookie Monster. “If you eat this cookie, you”™ll be more peaceful,” says Andie, offering examples of their good-karma-creating early works. “If you eat this cookie, you”™ll be more loving.”
“We thought we were really limiting ourselves by just making cookies that are symbols,” she says.
Their creations have expanded with customer demand. They have made cookies decorated with the numbered jerseys of individual players on a high school lacrosse team. They have sent out cookies with company logos, soccer ball cookies, Star of David cookies at Hanukkah. Parents order cookies decorated with the college logos of their kids away at school.
“At the end of last (school) year, we were crazy-busy with college cookies,” says Emily.
“We did about 15 to 20 college logos,” says Andie.
“This week we sent cookies to the University of Wisconsin” that bore the image of the school”™s mascot, Emily says. “We sent 12 Bucky Badgers” to a sorority house.
Emily, who will spend 20 minutes designing a single cookie, compares their handmade Bucky Badger image to the photo of the mascot from which they worked. “We looked at the picture, and you couldn”™t tell the difference,” she says with an artist”™s pride.
Then there were the construction-themed cookies ”” buttery saws, hammers, hardhats, dump trucks, traffic cones ”” baked for the opening of an affordable-housing complex near Albany. It was built by Regan Development Co., the Ardsley company owned by Andie”™s father, Larry Regan.
“It”™s been very beneficial what our parents do,” says Emily. “They have a lot of connections. ”¦ It would have been really hard to do it alone.”
The Karma Cookies partners normally fill about five orders a month. “Now with the holidays coming up, we”™re already starting to do a lot,” says Emily. They just received a call for 100 cookies. “It used to seem like 12 was a big job for us. Now we can do that in our sleep. Now we do like 200.”
They run their business in addition to the Advanced Placement classes, SAT tutoring sessions and after-school sports of high-achieving Westchester students. “When we have orders, we are working every day of the week,” says Emily, “all afternoon and late at night.”
Andie, who plays on her school”™s varsity field hockey and lacrosse teams, said she often bakes until 11:30 at night and starts her homework at midnight or 12:30.
“Now I just got a license,” says Emily, “so my parents don”™t have to come and pick me up and drive me.”
The girls say they”™ve saved about $3,500 from their business earnings. Having relied on word of mouth, they recently launched a marketing effort, teaming with Sirota Public Relations, a Manhattan firm that has done work for Andie”™s father at Regan Development.
But college, and junior-year scouting visits to college campuses, loom. Their cookie business could be as fleeting as one”™s high school years.
“We”™re trying to really expand it for the year and a half or two years that we”™re here,” says Andie.
She hands me my homework as I leave.