Five years before Abi Caswell opened her own bakery, she had never made a single cookie.
She now owns two bakeries and has seven-figure sales, she says.
Caswell, 30, is the founder of Batter, a bakery with two locations in Hammond, Louisiana and New Orleans.
Her ultimate goal was always to own her own business, she told CNBC Make It.
“Ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to work for myself,” she says. “I wanted to control my schedule and earn my own money.”
Her interest in sweet treats began as a teenager. Caswell worked at a local cupcake shop from the age of 16 to 20 and “loved everything about cupcakes,” but she wasn’t involved in the baking process.
Caswell moved to Hammond with her husband, Trey, after graduating from Louisiana State University at Alexandria in 2018 with a major in business administration and a minor in marketing.
While working full time as an executive assistant, Caswell began experimenting with baking her own cakes as a hobby.
After making a cake for a friend’s husband, Caswell recalled, “One of our mutual friends said, ‘This is so good. We have to sell this. We don’t have anything like this here.'”
Caswell originally planned to stick to cakes and cupcakes, but with the rise of popular cookie chains like Crumble and Insomnia Cookies (neither of which had a location in Hammond at the time), she says she decided to capitalize on the trend and make cookies the centerpiece of her baking sideline.
From home baker to business owner
In the fall of 2021, Caswell began experimenting with cookie recipes with the help of her husband, Trey, who works as a high school basketball coach. It took Caswell six months to develop what is now her signature recipe for chocolate chip cookies.
“We made a lot of cookies, and they were terrible,” she says. “It was never perfectly accurate because I had no idea what I was doing. So every time I made something, I learned something new about it.”
She started posting her breads online and on social media, and says she quickly developed a strong local customer base.
In the spring of 2022, Caswell quit her full-time executive assistant job to focus on baking.
“I would go to work from 8 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., then come home and bake until about 1 a.m.,” she recalls. “It was too much.”
Around the time Caswell quit her job, she found work at the Hammond Farmers Market. With the help of her husband, she baked 500 cookies every Friday and sold them at the market on Saturdays, which she says always sold out within 30 minutes.
“That’s when we realized we had to go into stores. This is not sustainable. We have to find another way to sell,” Caswell says.
The Batter storefront in Hammond, Louisiana.
Courtesy of Abi Caswell.
Securing a store in Hammond wasn’t easy for Caswell.
Caswell developed a business plan to open a bakery with help from a local small business development center, but she didn’t have any savings at the time and several banks rejected her loan applications.
Finally, a bank representative helped her secure a $40,000 loan. Caswell said he had to use his home as collateral to rent a storefront and install baking equipment.
In November 2022, Caswell officially opened his first Butter Shop in downtown Hammond, leading a team of eight employees (one head baker and seven part-time bakery associates). She had just turned 27.
Expand your business
For the first few months, Caswell was “running on adrenaline,” she said. She worked up to 18 hours a day at the bakery to keep up with demand.
“We couldn’t keep anything in stock,” she says. “I had a great time, but I was very, very nervous.”
Caswell said Batter generated mid-six-figure revenues in its first year of operation and was able to pay off its bank loan in full by May 2023.
Following the success of the Hammond store, Caswell opened another Batter store in New Orleans in December 2024 with the goal of reaching a larger customer base.
The two stores had combined annual sales of seven figures last year, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
Some of Caswell’s cookie creations
Provided by Abi Caswell
Caswell estimates she sells more than 1,000 baked goods each day.
Cookies, cupcakes, cakes, petit fours and pull-a-part breads are staples on Batters’ menu year-round, but she says they also offer seasonal treats, such as king cake-inspired cookies for Mardi Gras. The bakery’s signature chocolate chip cookies cost $3.75 each.
Batter also sells cake balls, croissants and homemade Pop-Tarts that Caswell sources from other local women-owned bakeries, and both locations serve coffee.
Now, Caswell is close to realizing a lifelong dream. The idea is to develop her signature chocolate chip cookie recipe as a wholesale mix.
She said the first 150 bags of cookie mix sold for $14.99 each and quickly sold out online. Her goal is to get the product in grocery stores this year.
“Before we opened Batter, I always said to my husband, ‘One day this is going to be on the shelves,'” she says.
Developing the mix will make her cookies “more accessible” without being tied to a store shelf, Caswell said.
“It’s never really overtime.”
One of the traits Caswell believes is essential to success is adaptability.
“A lot of being a business owner comes down to the level of tolerance you have for changes in plans and for things to happen or go wrong,” she says.
Running both bakeries wasn’t easy. “Every day, something new is happening,” Caswell said.
Caswell currently doesn’t have a cake decorator at her New Orleans store, so she’s filling the position herself until she can hire a new one.
Caswell typically splits her time between both stores, which are an hour’s drive apart, but because the New Orleans store is understaffed, Caswell works there “almost full-time” every day of the week, she said.
That’s “the joy of being a small business owner,” she jokes. “It’s never really down time.”
Caswell carries a bag of her signature chocolate chip cookie mix.
Provided by Abi Caswell
Caswell says online marketing has always been an important part of her business. Online marketing is how she reached many of her early customers, and she credits her social media reach with driving the business to this day.
Caswell currently has about 300,000 followers on her TikTok account, where she posts her daily routine, shares behind-the-scenes videos of her baking and opens up about the challenges of running a bakery.
Caswell’s goal is not just to promote her bread, but to show viewers what it really takes to run a small business.
“I try to be as honest as possible on social media,” she says. “I really think people don’t understand the mental work, but also the time commitment.”
If you own a business, “there’s virtually no downtime,” Caswell says. “Even if I’m on vacation, if the store is open, I’ll be at work.”
Most of the time, she continues, “losing hurts more than the feeling of winning,” but Caswell’s goal this year is to give herself the opportunity to “enjoy what we’ve been doing.”
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