Shane Quillin

Shane Quillin decided to start a gourmet cookie company in a New York bar in December 2019, having never baked a day in his life.

Quillin came into the studio with a box of cookies and a story Brad had already heard part of before the cameras rolled. The two brands circle the same orbit in Atlanta: Georgia Hemp, whose Delta 8 cookies Sugar Shane's used to make, had been on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast already, and its founders opened a shop two doors down from the Kennesaw store. By the end of the hour they had sketched out a co-branded shirt.

He had gone to New York for a concert and the college football playoff, did a self guided pizza tour of eight spots on the Friday, then heard about the thick New York style cookie and hit eight more the next morning before the games. Watching Joe Burrow take Oklahoma apart, he turned to a friend and announced the plan. Back in Atlanta he made a batch by hand, hated the labor, borrowed his mother's mixer at Christmas, bought his own in January and launched a dessert catering company on March 1, 2020. He runs the place off a memo he writes every week: safety first, unparalleled customer service, gourmet quality, agile management, ready for inspection.

COVID hit eleven days after launch. The St. Patrick's Day order he had landed, four hundred cookies, got postponed and never came back. He opened for shipping on April 1 and got three orders. So he read that Supreme had faked sellouts and did the same thing every week for two months, offering nothing but pickup slots at his own townhouse until the HOA made him stop. He delivered from South Bankhead to North Sandy Springs for five dollars and lost money on every run. All of it happened around a full time job at Amazon: up at four, workout, half an hour of email, three hours of baking, a shift, three more hours of baking. Later came pulling up floors, cutting out mold, drywall, paint and plumbing, and doing the dishes himself at the Sandy Springs anniversary party when they were short a person.

He has never taken a dollar of outside money and still owns all of it. He tells people not to quit their nine to five, and he tells his staff that the perfect hire is the worse hire, because the perfect hire knows from one report why an idea will not work. The data said cakes would not sell. They sell tons of cakes. The mentor he talks to most is a cookie baker in Maui he has never once met in person. His mother is working the Chattanooga farmers market on Sunday, which is the biggest one in the Southeast, and she is not willing to sit in the back.