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May 2, 2024
Join us for a compelling look at Shahira Marei's entrepreneurial journey as the founder of the Dirty Cookie. Discover how she overcame significant challenge
Interviewer: That's really fascinating. It was like the landlord that pushed you toward the dessert concept. What were the early days like in terms of iterating and finding the products you wanted to sell? When did the broader Dirty Cookie brand concept crystallize for you?
Shahira: That took a while. It took a few years because in the beginning, I was very naive. I had no idea what I was doing. I just thought it was going to be a milk and cookie shop with no bigger vision than that. But the early days were really tough because I couldn't quit my full-time job at Boeing for about a year and a half while running the storefront and being a mom to a five-month-old baby. So I had three full-time jobs and I was absolutely miserable.
It took me about a year and a half to realize I didn't start a business to feel like this. My whole thing behind starting a business was to achieve freedom, and freedom plays a big part of my life. I felt like a slave to all three of them. One of my advisors told me, "If you're not going to gamble on yourself and take a bet on yourself, who will?" When I asked if I should quit Boeing, I said I wouldn't have money and we weren't profitable yet. He said, "Fine. Just do it." I immediately quit and went all in. I ended up selling my house to keep funding the business. I got myself into a ton of credit card debt in the beginning just to keep going. But I'm really glad I did because I learned a lot, and it eventually all got paid off.
Shahira: One of the best things I did really early on, and I'm still super proud of it, is investing in a branding company. That really set the course and tone and direction of my brand. They took whatever was in my head and put it on paper. I love my logo—I've had that logo for nine years. I really do think branding, marketing, and voice are super important to the story.
It was a big investment. I remember it was $6,000 at the time, nine years ago. I didn't have $16,000. I had this guy in LA who was really amazing, and he just financed it over a year for me because he helps entrepreneurs. I'm very grateful for that.
Shahira: We did the brick and mortar model in Orange County for three years. It was a terrible location—the last location in the mall. I didn't know any better. People would try to find us and couldn't. It was really bad. I had plans to close it and move to a new location in LA, then COVID hit a few months later. Luckily, I didn't sign a new lease.
During COVID, I had to let my entire team go. We were doing a ton of catering and had just started wholesaling to hotels like the Cosmopolitan in Vegas and the Four Seasons. When COVID hit, I laid off my entire team. I was devastated for a week—I laid in bed for a week. Then I thought, "No, we didn't come this far to just end like this. Get up and do something about it."
I'm a big believer in faith—faith in myself and faith in a higher power that we're on this journey for a reason and being guided. When one door closes, something amazing is going to happen on the other side. I'm also a big meditator, and I get clarity in my meditation. During COVID, I saw this little girl decorating a cookie shot in my meditation. I jumped out and thought, "I'm going to go to Walmart, get some sprinkles and chocolates, and do a DIY kit."
It was literally the week after we shut down. I took a picture with my iPhone, put it on the website, called my friend Maria who ran Facebook ads, and said, "Run some ads around this Easter DIY kit. See if it works." Two days later, she called back: "You sold 400 boxes." I had no staff and no product, so I got into the kitchen with my partner Nadia and started making them ourselves.
Shahira: In 2020, we tripled the size of our team. I reached out to Good Morning America and the Today Show and told them what we were going through. They both brought us on TV, which helped explode the brand during COVID. We ended up tripling our team size.
But then in 2021, the iOS update happened. Advertising costs quadrupled for us. It became very difficult to be profitable. We were profitable in 2020, but in 2021, we weren't. I was in denial and made a huge mistake depending on one revenue stream for two years after COVID. I kept saying, "Figure it out," and hired more people. It was working so well—we were spending $30,000 a day on ad space. But when that changed, everything fell apart.
After two years of really suffering and not pivoting quickly enough, I lost about half a million dollars by the end of 2022. I was devastated about not pivoting fast enough and being in denial. I needed to fundraise, so I started pitching for four months straight. It was the worst experience of my life. I was getting "no" after "no" from left and right. Even women funds that said they'd fund women entrepreneurs told me no. People asked me to incorporate some tech element. I'm a cookie company! It was really difficult and started messing with my self-esteem.
Shahira: But then I remembered something about myself—nothing in my life ever works the traditional way. I'm an amazing manifester. Everything happens for me in my life, including the business. When I was pregnant, I said I'm starting a business this year, and it just happened. Things would just show up for me. My best friend gave me $50,000 to start when I didn't have money.
I journaled and thought, "I don't want to do this pitching thing. I want the money to come right to me." The financial pressure got really intense. There was one day I remember collapsing in my bedroom on the floor, crying to God: "I can't do this anymore. I'm done. You think I can handle this, but I just can't. I'm telling you right now, I cannot handle this."
Ten days later, I got a text saying money had been wired to my account. I jumped up—there was $1.5 million in my account. A guy named Harold called me. I didn't know who he was. He said, "Hey, Shahira, do you remember me? We met five years ago on a golf course in Mission Viejo. I loved your product and told you I wanted to invest back then, but you said you were too early and didn't want the money. I've been watching you on LinkedIn seeing all the amazing things you're doing. Are you in need of any funding?"
I said, "Yes! I'm fundraising right now." He asked how much I was raising. I said $3 million. He said, "All right, I'll wire you $1.5 tomorrow and the rest when you need it." He never even checked my books till today. He's been my biggest cheerleader and supporter.
Shahira: With that funding, I realized I couldn't depend on one revenue stream. I pivoted into two different markets. First was the corporate gifting market, which was amazing. I work with Google, Netflix, and a bunch of tech companies. I sell them cookies branded with their logos for their employees and clients all over the country.
But I wanted more business, so I looked into B2B food service. I wish I would have known about B2B food service a long time ago. There are different trade shows focused on that. I went to the National Restaurant Association show in Chicago last May, and it was phenomenal. We got picked up by Disneyland, SeaWorld, airports, stadiums, and bunch of different brands, coffee shops. We exploded in Q4 in B2B.
I've stopped investing this year in e-commerce and paid ads. I'm really focusing where there's volume. Disney just placed another order for 30,000 stuffed cookies, and I just signed a deal with a big vending machine company that's going to be taking 60,000 cookies a month. Right now I'm putting 80 percent of my efforts into B2B food service and 20 percent into corporate gifting and e-commerce because for me, it's a volume game.
Shahira: To get corporate accounts, I'm what I call an amazing stalker on LinkedIn. I love stalking people on LinkedIn. I find HR managers, event managers, salespeople, and business development people. I use LinkedIn a lot—it's been the best tool for me personally. If they don't respond to LinkedIn, I use programs that cost about $350 a month where I can pull emails and leads. They're really accurate. So I'll get anybody's email and phone number.
I would get all our emails, run them through a cold email sequence, and include images in the first email. When they see my cookie shot, which is so different, they're like, "What is that?" and I put "Dirty Cookie" in the subject line.
For example, I literally just pulled all the emails for Delaware North, which runs baseball stadiums. I ran them through a six-email cold sequence. The email list cost me about $150, and I made $25,000 from their order. Just from emails. It takes time to collect the emails and figure out who your client is, but once you get their emails and set up a cold email strategy with calls, that's how I've been able to really build the corporate and B2B business.
Interviewer: I'm curious about your direct-to-consumer pricing. How did you think about price discovery? What price worked in terms of conversion and made the business work?
Shahira: I benchmarked all my competitors. I looked at every gourmet cookie company—my top 10—and saw what they were selling at. I looked at my cost of ingredients and labor and calculated that. I wanted to always keep at least 30 to 40 percent margins.
I didn't want to be the cheap one because I know I'm premium, so I wanted to be closer to the expensive one, but not the most expensive. For example, one of my competitors, Last Crumb, sells a dozen for $120. I sell a dozen for around $54. I didn't want to be $10 a cookie. That feels criminal. So I tried to stay at around $50 per cookie for the consumer.
Shahira: Everything is storytelling. Everything. If you can storytell around the value that your brand is giving them, people will pay.
I met Seth Godin at the Tory Burch Foundation in 2019. He told me something I've carried with me ever since: "If you figure out how to elevate people's status with your brand, you can charge whatever you want and you'll be very successful." He explained that all people really care about is elevating their status. When you get in an Uber, you're subconsciously getting your status elevated—someone else is driving you. That's what we need to figure out in our branding, marketing, and communication.
I invested again in branding six or seven years after I started. The first time was $16,000, but the second time was $50,000. That was with the intention of really elevating our status and our brand. Our packaging, our branding, everything—I'm in love with it. In the gifting space especially, it matters a lot because the gifter wants to give a good gift and doesn't want it to feel cheap.
Shahira: I'll be honest—if it wasn't for this business, I would have never gone on a very deep personal healing journey six years ago, which has completely transformed my life. We all have self-limiting beliefs. I know they come from a lot of childhood trauma, and if we don't work on that, we continue running negative self-talk.
My father lost his first son in an accident—he was shot. I came after that, and all my dad wanted was to replace my brother. He wanted a boy more than anything in the world, and he was extremely disappointed when he got me. Then he got four more girls, so he got super angry with the birth of every daughter. It was really tough growing up because he made us feel like we weren't good enough. I struggled a lot with confidence issues because if my own father didn't love me or want me, how could I show up in the world as a powerful woman?
I spent about six years really healing from all that and telling myself, "I am enough. I can be this successful. I can do all of this. I don't need to prove anything to anyone." I was always on this mission to prove to my father that I'd be successful no matter what, and that drove a lot of my bad decisions.
Shahira: Someone told me about a class called Landmark. It's a three-day program—Friday, Saturday, Sunday, running until 10 p.m. They really help you see your blind spots. It was a really powerful class for me. It made me realize I'd been blind to how people were seeing and viewing me.
From there, I learned about more healing mechanisms like breathwork. Shamanic breathwork is something I'm a huge fan of. I do it once a quarter for an hour, and it literally releases trauma from the body. You have trauma trapped in your body from whatever happened to you at a younger age, and breathwork will physically release it. I'll do a breathwork session and end up bawling and crying, with memories of something that happened to me as a kid being released. It's so powerful.
One of my favorites is Dr. Joe Dispenza. He's a big meditator who does meditation retreats all over the country. I've made a commitment to go at least once a year. I did twice last year, and those were super healing and super powerful. He incorporates breathwork into the meditation, and while you're meditating, you really start feeling your energy move. He'll have you think about abundance, and 2,000 people are all meditating on abundance together. I believe we're all energy, so when 2,000 people are thinking of abundance, it just shows up in our lives.
Shahira: I used to have ADD and was diagnosed with it—I couldn't sit still for two minutes. A mentor told me she had four businesses, two kids, and was happily married. I asked her why she was so happy all the time, and she said, "Meditation. Meditate every single day."
I tried it and didn't like it the first week, but I stuck with it because I trusted her so much. After a month, everybody around me started saying something was different about me, and I didn't even notice it. My employees noticed it. My husband noticed it. Meditation is like going to the gym—you don't see the progress right away, but over time in a year, you're like, "Wow, I look amazing." It's exactly the same way with your mind.
I've been meditating for six years now. The longest I've meditated at one time was about five hours straight. I went from not being able to sit still for two minutes to now being able to do a five-hour meditation and it feels like 10 minutes. I believe my meditation helps me so much with my manifestation because while I'm in my meditation, I really call in what I want to create, and it just ends up happening.
Shahira: The outline for my book is going to start with the impact of not healing from trauma and how that runs our behavior in our lives. You don't even notice it, but the way you're behaving in a certain way has something to do with something that happened to you in the past, and most of the time it's a negative thing.
There's a bit about my father's story and how I had to overcome that, and a lot of faith in yourself. Faith has been the biggest driver for me through this business and these last 10 years. Faith in myself, faith in a higher power that we're being guided and have a purpose. Even if it doesn't work out, I surrender and think, "Someone is taking care of me in this world. If this isn't working out, then I'm meant to do something else or go in another direction. I'm okay with it."
I've learned to surrender. I used to be a control freak and couldn't surrender. I surrender to whatever comes. I want people to believe they are creators. We're all creators. We have the power to create any kind of life we want to live. The issue is people don't believe that they are creators, and they're stuck in self-limiting beliefs. Once you get past all of that, you can have a vision for yourself, and it will happen exactly the way you want it to.
I've created this amazing life where I live between Egypt and the U.S., and I love it because I don't want to stay in one place for long. I didn't think that was possible, but I've been doing it for three years now.
Shahira: What has been most rewarding in building Dirty Cookie is the network and the people I've met along the journey. I can't tell you how valuable my network is. I'm just so blessed.
EO—Entrepreneurs Organization—has changed my life in every way possible, both personally and in business. It's like AA for entrepreneurs. We cry to each other, talk about our challenges. There's an accelerator program in EO for companies making less than a million dollars in revenue. I started with that accelerator, and it was so much learning. You actually take time to work on your business, not in your business.
I don't make any decision alone anymore. For example, tomorrow I have a call with 1-800 Flowers, and I have the previous CEO of Mrs. Fields Cookies on the call with me because he has 30 years of experience. I'm not getting on that call alone. Back in the day, I used to try to do everything on my own, and people would take advantage of me because I didn't have experience. I lost a lot of money that way. Now I bring on my mentors and advisors to get on the call with me and tell them the intention and what I want. They help me lead the conversation. Just surrounding yourself with people who've done it before is the biggest thing. They can crack the code so easily because they've made the mistakes and know who to talk to.
Shahira: I've always wanted to build a global brand. I didn't want to just keep Dirty Cookie in the U.S. We have a ton of interest from Canada, but I haven't been able to open that door yet because I don't have the right people or infrastructure in place.
Right now, I'm looking for a strategic partner to come in and be my operator in the U.S.—someone with a lot of food and beverage experience. I'm talking to really big brands. I have meetings set up every day with companies like 1-800 Flowers with people who know how to operate and scale into billion-dollar brands. I'm talking to a bunch of them over the next two weeks.
I'm a visionary, and it's been almost 10 years of running Dirty Cookie. I feel like I've set up the foundation. I've done the hard part. I've built the brand, the name, the story, the foundation. I think the first 10 years are the hardest in entrepreneurship, but if you get to that level, it's time to bring in the big boys to play and take it to the next level in their ecosystem. They already have the stores and e-commerce. It's a plug-and-play model for them.
Bringing on a big partner this year will free me up a lot to do what I'm really passionate about. I love consulting. My sweet spot is the first seven years of business. I love figuring things out and really getting there. So I want to grow my consulting part and focus on franchising in the Middle East. We have a lot of opportunity with Saudi Arabia and Dubai. And I want to get all my lessons learned into a book for people so they can read them.
Shahira: Being an entrepreneur requires a little bit of crazy in us because it is really challenging, but it's also the most rewarding thing I've ever done. The freedom that I've been able to build for me and my family through it—even with the challenges—is incredible. I have flexibility and can work from anywhere in the world. I'm virtual. I don't need to be anywhere.
Ask for help. Reach out to people. Don't be shy. The more "nos" you get, the closer you are to a "yes." I've been on a mission to collect "nos" every day. I'm like collecting five "nos" a day. I'll call anybody: "Hey, do you want to give me half a million-dollar loan?" No. "Okay, cool. Next." I've become so numb to the word "no" that it doesn't mean anything to me anymore. And that was a word that really scared me back in the day. Collect your "nos" because they'll get you one step closer to "yes." Don't be shy and ask.