"I'd rather die trying than not try at all."
It's that philosophy that prompted Natalia Barr to launch a crowdfunding campaign earlier this year for her Oakland-based cookie business, Empowered Cookie. She's raised nearly $60,000 so far from 34 individuals, according to her Wefunder page.
The 38-year-old Barr founded the company, legally known as Barr Necessities, in 2018, and has raised about $540,000 over the last five years from friends and family.
She would have liked to have raised a venture capital round by now, but she says investors haven't been interested. They're waiting for the company to reach $1 million in sales — still a long way off — and it's incredibly challenging for female founders to raise VC. So Barr invited her customers to the cap table.
"What am I going to do, wait for this potential upswing? And everybody says that the fall is going to be an even worse time recession-wise than now. So it wasn't like the future was looking bright," she told me. "You've got to just shoot your shot, and I did. I've seen other brands do really well on Wefunder, and I wanted to open it up for our retail partners and our customers to be a part of our success, because they are who have made us."
Barr, a third-generation San Franciscan who has lived in Oakland for the past 13 years, describes herself as an "accidental entrepreneur." She started working in the food industry right after high school and was a private chef for a while before starting a catering business, which she closed when Covid-19 hit in early 2020.
Her focus then turned entirely to Empowered Cookie, which she had started a couple of years earlier after teaching herself how to bake pastries that would satisfy her own sweet tooth but didn't contain any ingredients she was allergic to.
"My years as a pastry chef taught me what a pain in the ass gluten-free baking can be, and how incredibly dry and bland and boring and just unfun it can be," Barr said.
The result of her kitchen experiments was a soft cookie made without gluten and cane sugar that still tasted good.
Barr currently sells six flavors in a variety of combinations featuring chocolate, fruits and nuts such as chocolate chip walnut, lemon lavender poppyseed and ginger molasses. They cost $42 for a pack of 12 directly on her website.
Two seasonal cookie flavors — peppermint double chocolate chunk and pumpkin chai ginger molasses — will launch this fall, and an at-home baking mix that requires adding only water will come out in January. They're all formulated around a base of almond meal, flax meal and coconut nectar. They're also vegan and don't contain any added protein powders or sugar alcohols.
She's also developing a cookie with oats and chia seeds formulated for lactation support. Those will launch with three flavors in spring 2024. Oats, almonds and flaxseed are among the commonly recommended foods to support breastfeeding, according to Very Well Family.
Originally baked out of a kitchen in Oakland, the products are now produced at a facility in Boulder, Colorado. She has two employees and hopes to hire two more soon.
Barr has also steadily reduced her net losses and is aiming to reach profitability by 2025. Revenue grew to over $191,000 in 2021 from about $184,500 in 2020, and she shaved her net loss to around $33,000 in 2021, down from more than $83,000 the prior year, according to Empowered Cookie's Wefunder page.
"You spend a lot of money learning what not to do. And so the money I'm raising now is being spent so much more wisely. Like, am I ever gonna pay for PR again? Hell no. Did I spend good money on it? Hell yeah. We just pulled out of Facebook ads," Barr said. "I'm able to shrink that loss because I've just spent time learning from my mistakes."
That has also included negotiating for free shipping from third-party partners.
And while many consumer brands start with direct online sales nowadays, Barr launched Empowered Cookie in local retail stores first, including Rainbow Grocery. Direct and other online channels became a lifeline in 2020 as shoppers turned more to online shopping.
She still tries to direct as much traffic to Empowered Cookie's website but now also sells on Amazon, Shopfiy and Bubble Goods, a marketplace for food products. Her cookies have even been featured in deals promoted by Good Morning America.
You won't find Barr's cookies at large retailers like Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, though.
"Our wholesale strategy is not to be in Whole Foods or Trader Joe's. It's to be in the gluten-free grocer or to be in the coffee shop or the gym. We sell in the City of Hope, which is a cancer research center," Barr said. "We sell where there is the least competition as possible. We sell in tiny little coffee kiosks that outdid the numbers of any grocery store. I like smaller places because you get better traffic and better relationships and ultimately higher sales."
Her customers are overwhelmingly female, over 40 years old and looking for healthier cookie options, she told me. For Barr, building and maintaining a direct relationship with her customer base is vital.
"You have to know everything about the customer in order to not lose money with omnichannel strategies," Barr said.
