Queer-immigrant-owned company shares love through cookies
A cookie brand born in Farmer's Markets discovers their mission after a chance encounter with the lead singer of Imagine Dragons.
This is the story of Wunderkeks, an Austin-based baked goods company specializing in cookies, and building safe spaces with those baked goods.
We're joined by Hans Schrei, co-founder of Wunderkeks.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
8/2/2022
Kurt Elster: In today’s episode, a cookie brand born in farmer’s markets has a chance Instagram encounter with the lead singer of Imagine Dragons and ends up giving back to the LGBT community in the process. That’s quite the journey. Joining us to tell us about is Hans Schrei from Wunderkeks. This is The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I’m your host, Kurt Elster.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: Hans, welcome.
Hans Schrei: Thank you. Thank you for having me, Kurt.
Kurt Elster: So, all right. Wunderkeks, what the heck is it? What do you sell?
Hans Schrei: We sell cookies and brownies. Brownies have become quite important lately. But yeah, cookies and brownies, so basically baked goods.
Kurt Elster: So, you have an online store. Is it on Shopify?
Hans Schrei: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: So, we have a Shopify store, sells baked goods. How long ago, when did you start that?
Hans Schrei: Well, actually it’s a long story. We started this brand in my mother’s kitchen like 10 years ago. It was a side business, and this was back in Guatemala. And then we moved to Austin in 2019, basically to start over again, to figure out how to get to work, and this was January 2019, so we started doing farmer’s markets, and frankly eCommerce was not really in our purview at that moment. We were just… We’ll figure it out when we get there. We’re gonna figure out what the best approach is.
So, we did farmer’s markets for a little over a year. It went great.
Kurt Elster: All right, so the initial idea happens in Guatemala, where you’re from, I assume.
Hans Schrei: Yes.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And then you move to Austin. You still don’t really have the brand or business, but you start selling in farmer’s markets.
Hans Schrei: Actually, we had the brand. The brand existed ever since like 10 years ago, and our original idea was… Because in Guatemala we used to make like custom cakes, like wedding cakes, and the whole thing, and pies, and all types of pastry. And when we came here, we had a similar idea of what we wanted to do, but our main goal was to go into retail, and that’s what we were working for. Actually, we’re testing six type of cookie dough every week in the farmer’s markets, and getting samples, and getting feedback, and the whole thing. So, that’s where we were going, like Luis always says that we don’t really have a post office in Guatemala, so it was really not something… You know, it’s like it’s the type of thing that for us, when we came here, like “Oh, you can order Amazon. It’s gonna be here tomorrow.” That was kind of new for us, so eCommerce was not on our radar, and we never even understood, or we didn’t know that even a DTC… that DTC was a thing and that there was a DTC community, and it was such a big thing and so full of people.
So, it took a while, and it was really not our choice to get into eCommerce, but thankfully it worked very well when we did it.
Kurt Elster: So, initially you started in these farmer’s markets. Talk to me about that. My father-in-law has a successful hydroponic microgreens business that started in farmer’s market, so I don’t doubt for a second the legitimacy of a farmer’s market to start a business. But talk me through that experience. What are the pros, in your eyes, of using or getting started in farmer’s markets?
Hans Schrei: You know, when brands grow, the hardest part is to actually make the time to speak to real people and to understand what they actually have to say about your product, and how they introduce you to the routine, so… And that happens particularly in eCommerce brands, but even retail brands, because you go into 5,000 doors, it’s going to be very difficult to talk to people. And frankly, when you grow, to make the time to actually deliberate about it.
So, the way we approached it was this is an opportunity, because we came to Austin and we knew no one, so this is an opportunity to talk to a ton of different people every day, to get them to buy in, to come back with their comments for next week, and to keep going back and forth. And it was… Frankly, I recommend this to everyone who is in the CBG space in any way, to do the farmer’s market. In our case, we actually needed the money. It was a good way to make a living that first week because there’s a big farmer’s market close in Austin, but even if you don’t need the money, to be there day in and day out, talking to people, and then you will find a ton of things, like they’ll give you… This is a silly idea, but people thought that we were selling half dozens. Actually, it was seven cookies, but people thought that we were half dozens, so we ended up doing just half dozens because people were like getting a free cookie out of nothing, and that is the type of thing that you will never learn unless you’re actually doing the sampling yourself.
So, that is, I would say… It is not what will grow your business, but it is what will give you all the insights to grow your business.
Kurt Elster: So, a frequent theme on this show is successful brands talk to their customers, and easier said than done, like until you have put yourself in these shoes, it sounds like this throw… “Oh, I should talk to my customers. Duh, Kurt.” Yeah, until you actually go try to do it and you discover it’s extremely awkward and odd in most situations.
Hans Schrei: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Kurt Elster: Where the farmer’s market setup, brilliant, because it takes all of that away and it’s local. It’s in-person. And so, you see a lot of the same people over and over, so you were able to iterate through versions of your product by just going to the farmer’s market?
Hans Schrei: Absolutely. That is the whole point. And it’s very… Even to understand how it plays, like when you have a portfolio of products, in our case people love that we have these original new flavors and we add weird things to cookies, but they buy the chocolate chip cookie anyway. And that is the type of thing that you can learn and appreciate when they’re saying like, “Oh my God. We had six flavors and we brought 20 of each, and we sold out of all of the chocolate chip. People wanted more. But these super attractive…” It was called lemon wildflower. People love it. People talk about it. People say, “Oh, I would love to give this to my mom. She would love it.” But they are not buying it.
And what I’ve seen, since it’s so immediate and it’s actually in-person, and you get to think, “Next week, okay, so how much product am I gonna bring next week?” You don’t have to wait for your China supplier to build it for you, so it gives you a very realistic idea of what… Basically, what attracts people to what you’re doing and what they actually purchase, which sometimes is different. And a lot of these, what people say, and what they want, and what they actually want are two different things, and a lot of times with founders it’s a bigger problem because you created this amazing new special variety of cookie and people don’t care for it, but you’re obsessed with it, so you try to push it.
So, it’s a very good way, I would say, to be forced to be looking at real data all the time.
Kurt Elster: The phrase we heard on our last or previous podcast episode was you can’t read the label from inside the jar. So, you’re the business owner, you’re making it, it is really easy to get obsessed with like, “Well, this is the thing I’m into.” But also, you’re super into baking, more so than most people.
Hans Schrei: Absolutely.
Kurt Elster: And so, the chocolate chip is pedestrian and boring to you by this point, but to everybody else that’s like the classic, quintessential cookie treat. Thank you, was it Hershey’s or Nestle? Somebody. The chocolate chip recipe in the U.S. was like printed on the back of a chocolate chip bag. Isn’t that where it came from? Or Toll House. I think it’s Toll House?
Hans Schrei: I think all of them do a version of it, even… There was an episode of Friends dedicated to that, do you remember? But yeah, absolutely. I agree. And it took us a while to figure out, and particularly because I started the business in my mom’s kitchen, and then Luis joined later, and having a co-founder that joined it a little bit later, it takes a while to get into that place where you’re comfortable killing your darlings, and we have a lot of them, because… Oh, like the best thing that I have ever baked, it’s a peach basil pie. Amazing. The best thing I ever baked. I never sold a single one because-
Kurt Elster: Because it’s too unusual. They’re not used to it.
Hans Schrei: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s very good but it’s not… We’re a bakery. Maybe this was a dessert that was fit for a restaurant, so you need to learn your channel and learn to question yourself, and actually look at the data, because it’s very easy to look the other way and to say, “Yes. I want this and this. This is my vision for how people should eat cookies.” I think that when you are in that position, you’re doomed. If you are trying to tell customers how they are supposed to live, they are gonna go elsewhere, to who is going to offer them how they want to live.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. You can’t… It’s tough to force them to your vision.
Hans Schrei: Absolutely.
Kurt Elster: On the Wunderkeks website, and what you’ve described to me, your farmer’s market experience, 100% cookies. And it sounds like the brand, the website, started with just cookies. As a baker, though, there’s so much more you could make, like you mentioned the basil peach pie, which frankly sounds amazing. I love basil and exotic uses of basil. Talk to me about saying no to yourself and limiting that catalog, because I could see very easily you could… If I gave you a week, you could balloon this thing to dozens and dozens of different types of product.
Hans Schrei: Oh, yeah. At one point, I think we had 22 flavors of cookies, which was untenable. It was not… Because again, but I love this. We need to remove… Like for instance, the cranberry cookie was one. I love that cookie. We cannot remove that. Yes, but we have the… I think it was hot cocoa, something, something. Yeah, but we love that too. And at the end, okay, let’s go to the data. Let’s pick up what are the top 10 sellers and we’re gonna remove the rest. And that’s gonna be that.
But yes, you know, one of the things that I’ve learned, I am a very creative person. Constraints breeds creativity. And you can see this, for instance, in this… You see like with some of the Marvel movies are a good example. They have infinite money and they do like, “Eh, whatever.” They’re fine. They are I guess what you would expect. And then you see smaller movies with a tighter budget, like I don’t know if you ever see this, Everything Everywhere All at Once, which is an insane-
Kurt Elster: Oh, it’s on my list. It looks so good.
Hans Schrei: You have to. And that is the result of constraints, of having to be extremely creative. So, in our case, the constraints on the one side came from us. Well, the budget, because I’m pretty sure that I can figure out how to ship a wedding cake, but it’s gonna be very expensive, and the other thing is that okay, we need to ship this, so the way to get this done is to ship it. It needs to last a certain time. So, think of like a Venn diagram, and you start removing, and removing, and removing, and removing, and then you find your one little piece of what you get to do, and that allows you to really play with what you’re doing, and to really find this is the very best version of this little thing, because otherwise I can make a decent pie, and I can make a decent cake, and I can make decent a lot of things.
But by really being focused on one thing, we get to do a very good version of that within the constraints, because one of the things that’s like, “Oh, we should put frosting on cookies.” And, “Yes, but we cannot ship a cookie with frosting.” We have seen competitors try it and it’s an absolute disaster.
So, you learn. You learn. You learn to stop fighting against the constraints and embrace them. That’s how we build everything that we do. It’s like there’s this healthy balance between, “Okay, these are the limitations that we have,” and, “This is what we want to build,” so let’s figure out what’s the middle ground. So, do we need this piece of equipment? Okay, fine. We can get that piece of equipment. But maybe that piece of equipment is a million dollars. Okay, so probably that’s a later, down the line type of thing. But in the end, it’s just about learning to work with what you have and what is available.
So, in our case, for instance, we are limited to a certain type of cookie, because otherwise they wouldn’t travel well, and so that’s allowed us to keep iterating on the same type of cookie once, and again, and again, and again.
Kurt Elster: I love this concept that you embrace those constraints. Working within your sandbox, within your constraints, as opposed to fighting against it, life gets easier. And it forces you to… When you start getting into that Bear Grylls mindset of like improvise, adapt, overcome, suddenly you’re coming up with very creative solutions that you may not have otherwise, especially in a scenario where it’s like, “Well, I could just spend my way out of it. I could just throw money at a problem.” When you can’t do that, there’s a lot of advantage to coming up with alternative solutions, workarounds, and it changes your thinking and how you go about it.
I love the idea. And this is a tough question. Do you have any practical examples of working within your constraints in your business?
Hans Schrei: I have an example of how we made it work against the constraints, because when we first… The reason we ended up in eCommerce was that… Well, we’re doing the farmer’s markets, and we had a big opportunity to do a popup store for South by Southwest, and that was gonna be like the little jars of cookies. I think it was three cookies each. Something like that. And at that time, it was just me and Luis. We had our kitchen that we rented by the hour, and we had a freezer full of 25,000 cookies. And then we all know what happened in 2020 with South by Southwest and the rest of everything that was happening, so it got canceled, and we’re stuck. I think we owed $14,000 on a credit card from that and the cookies, we needed to figure out what to do.
And the farmer’s markets were about to close, and the stores were not placing any more orders, so it was like, “Okay, what do we do?” And we started doing this… People were very nice to us. People in Austin are like the real… Texas is very friendly in that regard. People really embrace you and people were like, “Oh, yeah. This is nice. I’m gonna get four containers. I’m gonna give them to my neighbors. Oh, thank you.” So, instead of spending her usual $15, this lady was spending $60. Thank you so much. We really appreciate that.
And then she came back like, “I would love to send some to my mom.” Oh, yeah. We can do that. So, we had a Squarespace website back then which has some eCommerce functionality. It has an eCommerce functionality, but it’s not really built for eCommerce in so many ways. And we figure, “Oh yeah, we can do that. We can put them on the site. Awesome.” And we put them on the site, which was great, and we had 40 orders. We had never shipped anything. We didn’t have boxes to ship it and frankly we didn’t know if our containers were gonna ship it. They kind of did, thank God.
And then it was nothing, it was like 40 orders you can handle, even if you even had to write the labels by hand. You can figure it out. And then what happened is that we went to bed on Sunday and on Monday, we wake up to 700 orders. Again, I’m guessing every listener here is a Shopify person, so this was on a Squarespace website. Let me make this very, very clear. 700 orders because Busy Philipps, who has two million followers on Twitter, retweeted our thing about… Basically, we were doing #screwed, so it was the screw emoji with a pink background. Retweeted that, ordered herself like $500 worth of cookies, so she did cookie content the whole week, tagged Chrissy Teigen, tagged [inaudible name] and we went viral.
And it kept going-
Kurt Elster: Busy Phillips, the actress?
Hans Schrei: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Wow. Okay. And that was organic? You didn’t know?
Hans Schrei: No, I didn’t know. We were like, “Okay. Hey, people, help us. This small business is going under because South by got canceled.” And South by was the first thing, the first big thing to get canceled because of the pandemic, so no, it was absolutely organic, and it kept going, and next thing we know we have a reporter from The Wall Street Journal calling, and then we have a reporter from Vanity Fair calling, and then we got Fox, and it kept going. It was insane. And we got rid of the 25,000 cookies and then some, like I think we had 35,000 cookies, and that’s how we started in eCommerce.
And the thing is that in our case, what has worked for us has been to say, “Okay. Stop. Calm down. Figure it out.” And not overcommit but really get to work. It’s something that we have learned, and I don’t know what has happened to us that we are very calm in the times of crisis, because I think we were very calm when the first… When they canceled South by, we were very calm. When the 700 orders showed up, we never… I had never shipped through UPS. Five orders maybe, or five something. But I didn’t know how to handle. The cookies needed to be baked and we were not prepared to bake that insane amount of cookies so fast, so it was an absolute nightmare.
But then we were like, “Okay, we can either…” We were like, “We can either stop it, get them off the website and not take advantage of this opportunity that’s presenting itself, and just get rid of the 700 orders and stop,” which was an option, “or we can figure it out and figure out what’s the best way to approach it.” So, I guess instead of panicking, you say, “Okay, we have a product. People are wanting it. So, we’re gonna ship it and then we’re gonna figure out what the next step is,” but at the end of the day those 35,000 cookies was a lot of money that we couldn’t afford not to have at that point, so that’s how we work all the time. Actually, have bootstrapped the business thus far, and a lot of it has been about being choiceful and saying no to opportunities.
There was an airline that wanted the cookies in their planes, like that is not a profitable business at all, but it is great for acquisition. And we had to say no. And we’ve learned to say no. And learning to say no and to just say, “Maybe later at some point,” has been the biggest blessing for us.
Kurt Elster: Your mindset and your approach are tremendous. I mean, really quite beneficial in that you don’t panic, you’re working within these constraints, and ultimately what that leads to is you get everything you can out of everything you have access to. And that is absolutely the way to go about a successful business, especially bootstrapped, but also not a terrible way to live life, either.
So, I found Busy Phillips’ tweet. You tweeted. You said, “Wanna help a small business survive #sxswcancelled? Here’s your chance! Get our “we are so screwed pack” and send it to someone who needs some ATX love!” She retweets it and adds, “Hi! This small business thought they were making 25K cookies for SXSW. Then SXSW was cancelled. They have 25 thousand cookies to unload! Let’s all buy some! Who doesn’t love cookies?” And it goes, tags Chrissy Teigen. Wow. This is incredible. And this was on March 7th, 2020. That was like early, COVID’s coming, pandemic started, what are we gonna do?
Hans Schrei: Super early. Yep. Super early. This was when there was no toilet paper, and we were all going to the grocery stores wearing gloves but no mask. Remember that time?
Kurt Elster: Right. Yeah. They were like, “Masks? You don’t need masks. Gloves are a thing.”
Hans Schrei: Absolutely. Yeah. You know what? What has really informed that way of approaching things, we took the jump and we decided to come to the U.S., it’s a long story, but basically because we couldn’t get married in Guatemala. And we were like, “We want to be married.” Because you know what happens when you live in a place like that? You normalize all the things that you can have. You normalize the violence. You normalize the discrimination. And then you go outside and say, “Hey, this is not okay.” So, that’s how we ended up here.
So, in our way, we had already, because we sold everything that we had, and we came with our four dogs and two suitcases, and we sold everything. I think the first month we had an air mattress, and for a long time our dining table was our farmer’s market table. So, we would disassemble it and take it to the farmer’s market, and so I guess we already had taken the jump, the big jump, so everything that came afterwards was just… We just need to power through this.
Even now, actually right now we’re fundraising because we’re trying to get to go to retail, and it’s just a jump. Just another jump. And it’s super difficult and we probably chose the worst possible quarter to fundraise, but it’s just… We already took the plunge. What is the other option? Do we go back to Guatemala, which is decidedly not something that we want to do? So, no. Okay, so we keep fighting.
Kurt Elster: I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to sell everything, move to a different country, with a different language, makes things harder. Just tremendously terrifying. More than I think I would be able to do.
But at the beginning of this episode, at the top of the show, I said that you collaborated with the lead singer of Imagine Dragons.
Hans Schrei: Oh, yeah.
Kurt Elster: And I know nothing more. I want to hear the story.
Hans Schrei: Oh, this is actually… It’s super funny. And Dan, we met him, we talked to him and everything before, but we actually met him in person on the LoveLoud Fest in May, and I think he’s my favorite straight man. He is a just delightful person. He’s so nice. But how that happened is that he ordered cookies off our ad. He saw our ads and ordered cookies, and this was not super early. This was when we were actually just really getting our stride. And he ordered cookies, and you know, at that time, Luis and I and another guy who was working with us, we would fulfill the orders ourselves. There was no one else to do it.
And we would make fun because you see, “Oh, Pamela Anderson ordered cookies,” and it was Pamela Anderson from Oklahoma, so maybe it’s not the Pamela Anderson. Britney Spears from Mississippi, so it’s not the Britney Spears. And then there was Dan Reynolds. I’m like, “Oh, this is going to-“ I think it was Las Vegas. This is probably him. So, we emailed him, and we asked him, “Hey, are you the Dan Reynolds?” And he replied super-fast, “Yeah, I’m the Dan Reynolds.” Oh. Luis kept chatting with him and it turns out, and just by chance we had seen the documentary about LoveLoud a few days earlier on Amazon. It was absolutely unrelated and about how he’s on a mission to help LGBTQ youth. He’s straight, but has-
Kurt Elster: LoveLoud being his charity.
Hans Schrei: LoveLoud is a charity. Yes. What they do is that they build a festival that they do every year in Utah and to raise funds, and they support organizations that provide safe houses for LGBTQ youth. Because in Utah particularly, there’s a ton of… It’s a very religious part of the country, so it’s tough.
So, that was kind of, “Oh, well, we should talk.” We sent him the cookies, and we followed up, and we should talk, and he was like… We told him our story, how we came, and why we decided to come to the U.S., and he was like, “Oh, I love this. I almost cried. And we should do something together.” So, we decided on doing something for Pride, and Pride is one of those things that if… It’s very easy to dismiss as something that is not longer necessary, no longer important, but we figured out maybe we need to stop being so cynical. Let’s do something for Pride.
And what we did was that we’re gonna give a portion of the proceeds to LoveLoud. We made special boxes with a Guatemalan artist. It was a whole thing. And when we launched that, we launched that… We never hid our identity as gay men, but we had never explicitly spoke about it, like our kitchen has a disco ball. If you’ve seen the boxes, they are pink, and loud, and we have a dinosaur with a tutu for a mascot, for God’s sake. We are a very queer brand.
But we never talked about it, really, deliberately speaking about our own plight. So, we sent an email on March 29th, I think it was. We sent an email to all our 100,000 or so subscriber list and telling about what we’re doing, telling our story, and telling about the collaboration, and within the hour we started getting, “I hope you die.”
Kurt Elster: Oh, no.
Hans Schrei: Oh yeah. “Had I known that you were gay, I would have never purchased your cookies. I hope you die of AIDS. These cookies are gonna give you AIDS.” And every iteration of that.
Kurt Elster: Holy shit.
Hans Schrei: Yeah. We were absolutely shocked because in our idea, and this is what planted the seed of what we’re doing now, we’re in the United States. And in Austin, of course, none of this came from Austin, and those are things that people are very willing… You have their address, their phone number, their email, and they’re very willing to sign with their own name on all of those things. I don’t know if people unsubscribed at that point, as well. A long story.
But we were shocked because oh my God, this doesn’t happen in the U.S. I expected it in Guatemala, but I didn’t expect it here. And the thing is that we’re in Austin and Austin is like the liberal dot in Texas. So, we had forgotten, if you will, like how important it was and how privileged we were to be in a place that allowed us to be free the way we were, because the same way that you normalize the bad things, you normalize the good things.
So, that was a shock, and we really considered pulling the plug on the whole thing, but we said like, “Okay, no. Screw it. We’re already here. We already did it.” And that was the first couple weeks, and we got a lot of hate at first, but then later in the month we started getting emails from parents who say, “Hey, thank you for doing that thing about the Pride box. I think that my kid may be queer but I’m not sure how to approach it and I don’t think he’s ready to approach it with me, so I just wanted to give him some gesture so that he knew that I’m okay with it and that I’m here.” And that’s what planted the seed of our idea of building safe spaces, which is at some point we peel the layers of the onion and where we landed was on building safe spaces as a brand, but it was planted with that collaboration. And actually, when we went to the… It took a while to develop, but when we went to the LoveLoud Festival this year, because they didn’t have it in 2021, we went this year and we met Dan, and we met everyone, and we were in awe that the place… This was in the arena where the Utah Jazz play and we’re in awe that, “Oh, this is the physical manifestation of the safe spaces that we keep talking about. Every single person here is respectful of others, respectful of others’ identity, comfortable expressing their own identity,” and it was a very special place that I’ve never felt like that anywhere.
So, that’s what really galvanized us to go fully full steam ahead with the idea of building safe spaces.
Kurt Elster: So, you saw it, you experienced it, you felt it in that both when you revealed your relationship… I saw your about page. You have your wedding photos on here. So, it’s like you said to your list in that initial newsletter, and you had this horrible reaction, and then you started to see it go the other way where people were saying, “Hey, thank you.” And then you start… You experienced and saw for yourself the need for safe spaces. That then leads to this brand having this extraordinary brand mission?
Hans Schrei: You know, brands, when they are built authentically, they kind of come fully formed, like a baby, and then they start growing and showing their personality. You can influence just in a way, but the brand kind of starts revealing itself to you, and at first it was like previous versions of this were specifically about the queer identity, and at first, like the very first iteration of it was, “Oh, we want you to feel like a kid again.” And that was like down the line, that evolved into the idea of safe spaces, but at the end everything… The way we see how to treat a brand is if you expect a brand to come fully formed, it won’t. It just won’t. Fully formed in a way that you actually fully understand it from the beginning, it won’t.
You need to be very clear on what your values are and then what… The events keep shaping it, if you will. So, these things happen and then it’s like you have this aha moment that everything that we’ve been building so far, and for 10 years now, everything that we’ve been building comes down to this. Because one of the things that is not really something that we talk about that much, but at the very beginning, Wunderkeks, we had a little store, and it was like a garage that we converted. Wunderkeks was built as a safe space. We didn’t have the vocabulary to call it that, but it was an expression of my own identity. It was, “Oh, this guy who…” I mean, yeah, of course I was gay. I was kind of out. But this guy, instead of going into a finance job or something, he's making cakes out of a pink box. And it was very gay. Let me tell you. It had a bubble machine outside, so the street had bubbles all the time, and it was a little pink box. But we didn’t have a way to express that. We didn’t know. We didn’t have the words for a safe space, but it was a safe space.
And it was the same thing, the reason that we came to Austin with the brand was to get ourselves a safe space, and again, we never discussed, “Oh, we’re looking for a safe space.” Now, in retrospect, we get to say, “Oh, that’s what we were doing.” And I think in many ways mission-driven brands really help… Forget about whether you need it or not, because people probably intuitively know, but this really helps to bring into your vocabulary all of these ideas that you kind of understand. That yes, if you are a person who is discriminated against, you’re looking for where or how to find a community where you’re not discriminated. That is a safe space. You may not have the words.
And when we build on the language, and we actually have the words, then we can communicate to each other and say, “This is what I’m looking for. Oh, this is what I’m providing. This is amazing.” So, that’s how you do it, but you keep building, building, and building, kind of like… The best example I have is like… I don’t know, like a marble sculpture starts as a block, and you need to start removing, and removing, and removing, until you find what… I think it was Michelangelo who took that approach saying, “I see it and I’m just liberating it.”
Kurt Elster: Right.
Hans Schrei: So, that’s our approach.
Kurt Elster: I’m scrolling through your website. I got to the about page, which I dearly love. I think about pages are so important. And you tell your story both you and the brand and the mission all interwoven into one story with photos, and then framed in just phenomenal, fun, bold, adorable branding. It’s like a Lisa Frank notebook, which speaks right to me. I love this aesthetic.
Hans Schrei: Oh. I love it. That is exactly what we’re going for. Actually, our dream is to have a collaboration with Lisa Frank, which-
Kurt Elster: I believe in you. I think it’s plausible. I mean, you got Busy Phillips retweeting you. The Imagine Dragons guy with you. And one of your advisors is from Ben & Jerry’s.
Hans Schrei: Oh, yeah. Yeah. He’s been instrumental to shaping this, you know.
Kurt Elster: It’s quite incredible. Tell me about the branding. You’ve mentioned that you’ve got loud packaging. The phrase pink has come up multiple times here and we’re talking like that hot fuchsia pink. I have shoes in this color that I love. Tell me about it.
Hans Schrei: The pink is super declarative. And yeah, pink is important. Pink was our color from the very, very, very beginning. And it’s so declarative, so loud, so disruptive, so we don’t want to be… If we’re having these hard conversations, and they are hard, and because they’re hard, people really don’t want to have it. We try to run away from the hard conversations. So, we’re kind of in a place where, “Oh, we’re not gonna give you the option. We’re gonna have this super crazy, loud packaging.” Because the idea is this. Yes, we want it to be seen from space, but think of this. If you have a kid and kids… A lot of parents have this idea, like kind of tell that kids are different in many ways. Not only because they’re queer, but I’m guessing… I don’t have kids, but I can see how it can be very scary to send your kids to say someone else, someone you don’t know, like someone else’s house that you don’t know, because they’re having a play date with their friends.
So, think of this. You see the pink, loud box, and we invest a ton of money in that box so that people will keep it, and they fill it with candy or whatever after the fact, but if you see that box, you say, “Oh, so this person is consuming this brand that is all about, very loudly about these things, so they are probably all right. They’ll probably understand my concerns. This is the safe space that I need for my kid.”
And what that says, because brands, the brands we consume, this is our main thesis. The brands we consume tell our story. We use them to tell our story. We use them as external signifiers. Whether you’re a Coke person or a Pepsi person, those are two different type of people.
So, same here. If you have a Wunderkeks box of cookies on your counter, you have… You have to read our packaging, so you have had to heard about this, so you have had these conversations, and we have found people who are kind of repulsed by what we’re saying, we have a lady sending us an email a few months back saying, “I love the cookies but I’m never buying from you again because the box is pink and my husband is very uncomfortable about having-“
Kurt Elster: What an idiot.
Hans Schrei: Oh, you’d be surprised how many of those there are. This was maybe the most extreme one, but, “My husband is not comfortable having a pink box sitting on the counter.” I wouldn’t bring this to me. I think it’s a problem that your husband should bring to a professional. Not to me as a brand. And by the same token, we have gotten a request from people to, “Oh, I love your cookies, but I need something more toned down.” Oh, perfect. I can give you a list of competitors that do toned down branding. We are not the toned down version of anything. We are loud by design.
Kurt Elster: So, there’s people out there that are just offended by the color of the packaging? Utterly inane. If that’s your issue and you’re emailing someone about it, you need better problems in your life.
Hans Schrei: That’s also true, but the way I see it, of course, that is the sassy answer, and it’s also true. It’s like definitely they need to find better things to do with their time. But at the end of the day, the way we see it, it is indicative of the problem we’re talking about. And this is where the safe spaces has been kind of hard to convey, at times, because think of… You find it to be the stupidest thing ever. I find it to be the stupidest thing ever. If I send cookies to your typical white girl who grew up in L.A., she finds it to be the stupidest thing ever. She doesn’t really grab her… So, are people homophobic? But I know gay people. I’ve known gay people all the time. I know people of all backgrounds and I have not a problem with all of them. They’re just people. Which is what you hope. But that’s the problem. It’s very easy to forget how privileged you are that you are in an environment when you get to freely say that.
Because Texas is a good example. We’re in Austin. Yes, go Beto. And move 50 miles from where I’m at and it’s a completely different story. Actually, we were living in a town, like not far, like a suburb of Austin, and we’ve never experienced any sort of discrimination or violence or anything, but this place is very white, like crazy, uncomfortably white, like that movie. You know, what was the name of that movie? Get Out?
Kurt Elster: Get Out. Yeah.
Hans Schrei: Yeah. This place is very uncomfortably white, and we’re used to the diversity because we’re in Austin, and when we moved 20 miles from here, it’s a completely different story. So, I have absolutely no problem, like no one is looking at me because I… I mean, I’m from Guatemala, but I pass as white. But if you’re a Black person, oh, you’re a Black person, or even ourselves, like I wouldn’t dare hold my husband’s hand in that place. Whereas in Austin, I feel absolutely comfortable doing so. So, but the thing is that it’s very easy for us to forget the privilege that we have, and those are the people that we’re talking to.
I mean, they are just cookies. At the end of the day, you have to be very aware that you’re not curing cancer. You’re not solving racism. You’re selling cookies and that it’s important to kind of stay in your lane, if you will. But the people that we need to talk is the white girl in L.A. who doesn’t… who has a lot of trouble wrapping her head around homophobia and racism and all the isms in the world, because she needs to be aware of her privilege and she needs to be aware of her power, so that’s the conversation we’re having. You need to be aware of your power and you need to be aware that you get, and you should be extending the safe spaces that you enjoy, because you’re privileged as a white woman. And this is not playing the oppression Olympics, because we all have our cross to bear, but these people… This is a very privileged person, so she needs to be aware. I get to extend this privilege to others, and I need to be vocal because some people are suffering, and some people are not comfortable around me, are not comfortable around certain communities, because we are so enamored with our own privilege to say, “Oh, this life is perfect. There is no… Racism is solved.” And a lot of people think that way.
Kurt Elster: I was so skeptical about the idea of cookies with a mission. Certainly, I knew, like you could sell stuff and donate and make donations, and that’s impactful. You can speak to it and that’s impactful. But the genuine authenticity and meaningful potential impact of attaching a mission to a cookie, a brownie, a box that’s pink, I was skeptical. And now, hearing you talk about it, and having gone through this with you, I am so impressed, and I am in utter… I am an absolute believer in your mission, in what you’re saying. I think you’re absolutely right. And obviously, I’m gonna include Wunderkeks in the show notes, but I’m also gonna include a link directly to the about page, which I think is such a great example of storytelling, of an about page, of a brand knowing its purpose. I love it. You did such a great job.
Hans Schrei: Thank you. Actually, we’re updating it just a bit, but I have… We are about to print the new version of what goes into the packaging, and I would love to read it, because I think it does a very good distinction. It’s a little card that we send out. But can I read it to you?
Kurt Elster: This is a pack-in?
Hans Schrei: It’s a card that comes with everything else, but I think it really captures what we’re doing, because all of this that we’ve been talking about is the result of a lot of thought, and a lot of evolution, and a lot of questioning things. So, I think we finally landed on the exact way to express it, but let me… It’s super quick, but this comes with every box of cookies.
It says, with a very cool cartoon of Luis and I, we built Wunderkeks from our belief that foods we share help tell the story of who we are, and that buy openly, fearlessly telling our stories, we create the safe spaces others may need to tell theirs. Think of a birthday cake, of going for ice cream on a Sunday afternoon, of baking cookies with grandma. The rituals we’ve built around sweets are all about the condition of an acceptance. They all bring us back to when we were very little, when the world was all light, and no one had ever made us feel that there was something wrong with us. A few years ago, we left our home country of Guatemala for Austin, Texas, looking for our very own safe space. We found it and our outlook in life was forever changed. Ever since, we made it our mission to share the joy we found.
Our hope is that you will share this box of cookies along with your willingness to listen. That this loud, pink box will become for you and yours a symbol of allyship and a marker of a safe space. We hope you will join us building a joyful, creative world. XOXO, Luis and Hans.
And I’m reading because we’re very excited about this. We did it a few days ago and it’s like we’re so excited about finally distilling the message.
Kurt Elster: And that’s harder than it sounds, to try and come up with a… To make a story, and make a mission, both concise and still impactful, and you totally nailed it there. All right, I’m sold. I want the cookies. I want to join the community. Where do I go? Where should I follow you? Where do I get the cookies? Tell me.
Hans Schrei: Well, you can get the cookies at wunderkeks.com. You can follow us on Instagram, and Facebook, and we have a little group called I heart Wunderkeks on Facebook. You can join our mailing list on our website. And the most meaningful way you can join this, we are about to launch of our equity crowdfunding round, so you can own a little piece of Wunderkeks if you want. We’re raising a million dollars on Republic and that should allow us to go to supermarkets.
Kurt Elster: And how do I find out about that, I just join the newsletter?
Hans Schrei: You can join the newsletter and when it’s launched, it will be there, or you can go to republic.com/wunderkeks.
Kurt Elster: Republic.com/wunderkeks. I will include that.
Hans Schrei: Awesome. Yeah, it’s all about what we’re doing, what we’re building, what our goals are, because at the end of the day, the way we see it, a successful business is a vehicle for this mission. So, it needs to be a successful business and it needs to grow. This is not like, “Oh, we have the cutesy corner store.” We are aiming to conquer the world.
Kurt Elster: I love it. Hans Schrei, Wunderkeks, thank you so much.
Sound Board Clip:
Hans Schrei: Awesome. Thank you for having me.