Christen Capobianco - Founder
Chapter 1: The Inspiration
While financially supporting herself through college at UCLA from 2017 to 2021, our founder Christen Capobianco didn’t have the money to buy her friends and family gifts for birthdays and holidays. Instead, she got creative and used her mom’s ancient hand-held mixer that she brought with her to college to bake chocolate chip cookies as gifts. When her friends started telling their peers about her baking abilities, Christen knew she possessed an extraordinary talent unlike others for crafting the perfect cookies. Since then, she has been on a journey to share her cookies with the world.
Chapter 2: How It Started
After graduating college, Christen spent the Summer of 2021 in Los Angeles perfecting her Chocolate Chip and Fudge Brownie cookie recipes. After weeks of testing various ingredients and concentrations, she was ready to start her business. Christen reached out to Duffl, a student convenience store at UCLA, to bring in free samples for them to try in Early August 2021. They were instantly impressed and offered to buy 20 cookies to test out their first week. In half a day, all the cookies were sold out. Christen’s cookies were an instant success. Within 4 months of starting her business, she added two new cookie flavors and expanded to sell at USC. By the end of October 2021, Christen sold just shy of 300 cookies per week.
Chapter 3: Figuring Out the Next Step
Though Christen’s instant success was evident, she encountered obstacles that forced her to evaluate her life and career goals. The convenience stores were temporary shutdown, which allowed Christen to realize that she did not have a set business model and long-term goal. What started as a side hustle in addition to her full-time job, became a possibility of a career Christen never foresaw. With over a two-year break due to personal reasons after the convenience stores shutdown, Christen restarted her cookie business in September 2023. She has fully dedicated herself to restarting and growing the business as her full time career.
Chapter 4: Goals
Christen’s simplified goals for her cookie business are broken into phases:
Become the BEST cookie business by providing the most delicious cookies at affordable prices using quality ingredients.
Grow her customer base to the point she can rent a commercial kitchen.
Open up a brick-and-mortar store in Los Angeles and eventually more locations all over the country.
Make her cookie stores local favorites and staples in each city a store is located.
If you support my goals of creating my own cookie business, please give feedback on cookie orders by emailing me at firstbitecookiecompany@gmail.com. Please also follow my social media websites (found on the social media icons) on the bottom of each page.
Christen’s Business Journal
