A Bid of Comfort: How Two Founders Built a Community-Centered Cookie Business From Survival

Running a business in this day and age is heavy. My shoulders are tired from carrying the weight of learning things like executive functioning, communication skills, and how to build systems that support me as an individual while navigating the world of business.

Before I can talk about today, I need to paint a picture for you.

One little girl. Twelve years old. Early 2000s.
She was dealt the fate of being the daughter of an addict, a middle child, the eldest daughter. A mother who was physically absent. A father who was emotionally absent. Her parents, in turn, were dealt their own difficult hands - poverty, mothers abused by men in front of them, fathers who were adulterous. Not one single functional relationship rooted in respect, love, or stability.

This little girl learned early how to survive systems that were never designed to nurture her. She learned how to read rooms, how to stay small, how to shoulder responsibility before she ever had language for it.

At sixteen, she entered a fundamentalist Christian faith. She traveled to Thailand, Panama, and Mexico in pursuit of spreading the gospel, searching for meaning, belonging, and structure. She did this through a company (no longer in existence - I’d suggest you research why and form your own opinion) called Global Expeditions, a branch of a larger corporation known as Teen Mania.

At eighteen, she married another youth from the church. By nineteen, she held the first baby she had ever held - her own child.

And honestly, this has been a story for millennia. Women married off. Taught to submit to their husbands with very little understanding of what that expectation of “submission” even meant. Survival dressed up as virtue.

By twenty-five, she was divorced and working four jobs as a single mother. She was pursuing a career as a firefighter. She spent seven years in EMS and crisis work - from serving on crisis response units for the Phoenix Fire Department to taking EMT contracts on wildland fires. In those roles, she witnessed what happens when systems fail people, and also what happens when someone shows up anyway.

She was on a second-round interview with a department when she experienced a near-death ectopic pregnancy.

At the time, she barely knew her partner of three months, who is now her husband and the co-founder of The Scheming Cookie.

She is me.

Now I want you to imagine a scared teenage boy.

Seventeen years old.
Growing up watching his friends flirt with crime because survival sometimes looks like rebellion when no one is offering another option. Born the son of an addict. Never given stability. No consistent meals. No reliable roof. No soft place to land.

So, he joined the army. Not out of patriotism alone, but out of necessity. Because when the system gives you no safety net, you find the strongest structure available and you hold on.

You will not hear this man speak a word of regret for his service. You also wouldn’t be able to see most of the burdens and disabilities he carried with him after his honorable discharge, like so many other veterans. The cost was real, even if the choice was necessary.

What is visible is what he built next.

He built a stable life for his two kids and his mother. The very thing he was never provided. He became a homeowner. A reliable presence. A man who showed up. He paid into the economy, into his community, into systems that once only took from him, taxed federally, by the state, and through employment contributions, and still chose to build something steady.

The point I’m making is this: a boy raised in chaos, within systems many people rely on and others exploit, was able, with some soft supports, opportunity, and a lot of grit, to become a middle-class single father who poured directly back into his family and community.

And that matters.

He is the co-founder of The Scheming Cookie.

They both grew up in fear. And I think we can agree - especially given the state of the world - fear is generational. I’d even argue it’s genetic in some ways.

When basic needs aren’t met, when people are stressed, unsupported, and constantly bracing for impact, they sometimes do wild things. Harmful things. Desperate things.

But when good people are given soft support, safety, community, opportunity, room to breathe - they tend to grow. And when they grow, they do good things in the world.

With that picture painted, these two children grew up in a system that handed them no favors. They are us.

Brad and I built this business out of an outburst, a need for comfort in the midst of an immense amount of grief and anger. Not only from what we directly lost in our pregnancy loss, but also from the way that near-death experience interrupted our ability to continue providing stability for our children. We were battling uphill at every turn.

As business owners, we are given a different kind of freedom, not just economic freedom, but the freedom to decide where our cash flow and resources go, and how responsibly we steward them. We are deeply aware that not everyone gets that choice, and we don’t take it lightly.

And with all the fear and uncertainty in this country right now, with racists getting away with murder and calling it “duty,” with politicians repeating the same battle cries and lies we’ve heard since the beginning, with media rage-baiting our nervous systems and keeping us constantly on edge - I want to be clear about how we choose to move through this.

We will do everything in our power to keep our resources flowing into the hands of people who love people. This isn’t about left or right. This is about humans. The fearful and the hopeful.

We will continue to partner with and show up for our community in ways that help, not harm. We have aspirations to continue building on our annual fundraiser. Last year, we donated $1,800 from our May virtual 5K to the Wildland Firefighter Foundation, and we intentionally gave business to local companies to source our shirts and medals.

Could we have chosen a third-party printing company and had everything made in a factory? Yes. But we chose to keep those resources in our direct community, supporting families you might actually live next door to, run into at a gas station or see at the same grocery store.

We source our ingredients locally whenever possible, working with artisans like Ty Wears from Wears Market. If you’re looking for The Scheming Cookie’s secret ingredient, it’s his vanilla, hands down.

What I’m getting at in this little coffee read is this:

When you indulge in a cookie from us, it’s not a money grab... though we do appreciate those resources so we can continue to operate. It’s a bid of comfort. A small, intentional offer of soft support.

With added protein, so you stay jacked out there.
Because you never know when you’ll need to put those muscles to use (hopefully to wreck the humans who stand against humans).

And because when good people are supported, even just a little, they tend to turn around and support others.

That’s the kind of world we’re trying to build, with you, one cookie at a time.