Firm Displays Cookies Like Flowers
John Cummings is rolling in the dough - cookie dough, that is. Three months ago, Cummings opened a Cookies by Design franchise store at 5503 N. Wall.
In the store - one of more than 100 Cookies by Design stores in the country - Cummings, wife Annette and two employees make specialty cookies.
“This is like a florist’s shop,” Cummings said. “We do most of our business from phone orders and then deliver.”
The sugar cookies come on sticks, are stuck in baskets and look like bouquets. Cummings’ collection of 200 brass cookie cutters allows him to cut the dough to make anything from apples to zebras. Then the staff uses icing bags to decorate the cookies in full-color designs.
Cummings’ main means of advertising is walking around hospitals and office buildings with the bouquets. On trips to deliver bouquets, he frequently takes long detours down hallways and pops into every office to ask for directions.
On those trips, Cummings said, people flock to see what the colorful creations are, and he hands out brochures.
The playful aspects of Cookies by Design captures the Mead High School graduate’s imagination.
Three years ago, Cummings was working in quality control for a computer firm in San Jose, Calif. But he hated the sterile atmosphere of the work.
At home with his children, he dreamed up ideas.
One of them was a model train on a track that circles a Christmas tree.
“I was looking at a train on the floor around the tree, and I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if I could get one up into the tree,” he said.
In his garage, Cummings carved out of wood a circular train track that sits on a Christmas tree’s middle branches. The idea took off, and a Pennsylvania model train company, Bachmann Industries of Philadelphia, bought it.
That item was sold in Target stores two Christmases ago.
“That was my ticket back to Spokane,” he said, and his seed money for the Cookies by Design store.
Cummings’ main cookie market consists of businesses that buy lots of cookies as thanks for big purchases or for employees.
But the bouquets also are available to the public. They come in wicker baskets with three to 12 cookies stuck in them.
A bouquet of three cookies costs $15. A bouquet of 12 costs $60.