Turning Rejection Into Triumph: How Sarah Michelle Gellar and Her Co-Founders Built a New Baking Brand
"I need to make a decision on this,” says Sarah Michelle Gellar.
Her two co-founders, Galit Laibow and Greg Fleishman, stop chatting and join in. It’s mid-November, and they’re standing in the center of their Los Angeles startup office: a converted garage half a block from a pot dispensary, with two rows of desks in the back, a shared office-slash-conference room for the co-founders up front and the words what’s up batches?! towering above a kitchen in the middle. This is Foodstirs, their baking-mix company, and in a week’s time, Gellar is going to be on Harry Connick Jr.’s show, Harry, promoting their products by baking…something. But what? That’s the decision.
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The next minute is rapid-fire: The trio seem to seek consensus largely by talking over each other, excitedly and animatedly, as if advancing a collective thought.
Gellar: “I think we have to do gingerbread --”
Fleishman: “It’s the presell into Christmas --”
Laibow: “So gingerbread and --”
OK; go ahead and say it: Celebrity-endorsed baking mixes? This is a company worth taking seriously? It wouldn’t be the first time people dismissed or insulted Foodstirs -- even to the founders’ faces. Foodstirs was dissed by countless investors. Retailers. Suppliers. Gellar found that some industry types pooh-poohed the company because of her involvement in it. (In case her identity needs explaining: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Cruel Intentions. Ask anyone alive in the ’90s.) “If we took no for an answer, this company wouldn’t have existed,” says Laibow, the company’s CEO. “They’d say, ‘Cute little baking brand! Oh, that’s great. Not for us.’ ”
Then her tone turns stern, as if admonishing an investor still in the room: “No. It’s a big idea.”
The big idea is this: There’s a hole in the $26.8 billion baking-mix and prepared-foods category, and it can be filled by a product that uses high-quality ingredients but sells at a mass-market price, and focuses as much on the food as on the family-fun experience of making it. It’s a concept that Fleishman, who’s spent his career in retail, from Kashi to Coca-Cola, calls “an, placed product in more than 7,500 stores (plus, starting in April, a special “one-minute mug cake” in 8,000 Starbucks) and honed a story and a message that’s won over investors. The cute little baking brand is, in fact, a story of keen strategy and .
