Five years before Abi Caswell opened her own bakery, she had never made a single cookie.
Today, she owns and manages two bake shops that bring in seven figures in sales, she says.
Caswell, 30, is the founder of Batter, a bakery with two storefronts in Hammond, Louisiana and in New Orleans.
Her ultimate goal has always been to own her own business, she tells CNBC Make It.
“Since I was a kid, I always knew I wanted to work for myself,” she says. “I wanted to be able to control my schedule, and I wanted to make my own money.”
Her interest in sweet treats began as a teenager: Caswell worked at a local cupcake shop from ages 16 to 20 and “loved everything about it,” though she wasn’t involved in the baking process.
After graduating from Louisiana State University of Alexandria in 2018 with a major in business administration and a minor in marketing, Caswell moved to Hammond with her husband Trey.
While working full-time as an executive assistant, Caswell started experimenting with baking her own cakes as a hobby.
After she made a cake for a friend’s husband, “one of our mutual friends was like, ‘This is so good. You’ve got to sell these. We have nothing like this here,'” Caswell recalls.
Caswell initially planned to stick to cakes and cupcakes, she says, but with the rise of popular cookie chains like Crumbl and Insomnia Cookies — neither of which had storefronts in Hammond at the time, Caswell notes — she decided to capitalize on the craze and make cookies the focus of her baking side hustle.
From home baker to business owner
In fall 2021, Caswell started 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 her now-signature chocolate chip cookie recipe.
“We made so many batches of cookies that were terrible,” she says. “They would just never be quite right because I had no clue what I was doing. So every time I made one, I just learned something new about it.”
She began posting her bakes online and on social media, and says she quickly attracted a strong local customer base.
In spring 2022, Caswell left her full-time executive assistant job to focus on baking.
“I was going to work from 8 to 5:30 [p.m.], and then I was coming home and baking till like 1 a.m.,” she recalls. “It was just too much.”
Around the time Caswell left her job, she landed a spot at the farmer’s market in Hammond. Every Friday, she baked 500 cookies with her husband’s help to sell at the market on Saturday, and they regularly sold out within 30 minutes, she says.
“That was when I realized, we’ve got to get in a store. Like, this is not sustainable. We have to find another way to sell,” Caswell says.
The Batter storefront in Hammond, LA.
Courtesy of Abi Caswell.
It wasn’t easy for Caswell to secure a storefront in Hammond.
Caswell developed a business plan to open a bakery with the help of her local small business development center, but she had no money saved at the time and several banks rejected her request for a loan.
Finally, a bank representative helped her secure a $40,000 loan, for which Caswell says she had to put up her house as collateral, to rent a storefront and install baking appliances.
In November 2022, Caswell officially opened her first Batter shop in downtown Hammond with a team of eight employees — a head baker and seven part-time bakery clerks. She had just turned 27 years old.
Scaling the business
Caswell was “running off adrenaline” for the first few months, she says. She spent up to 18 hours a day working at the bakery to keep up with demand.
“We couldn’t keep anything in stock,” she says. “We had an amazing time, but it was very, very stressful.”
Batter brought in mid-six figures in its first year of operation, according to Caswell, and she was able to pay off her bank loan entirely by May 2023.
After the success of the Hammond location, Caswell opened another Batter location in New Orleans in December 2024 with the goal of reaching a larger customer base.
Last year, the two locations collectively brought in seven figures in yearly sales, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
Some of Caswell’s cookie creations
Courtesy of Abi Caswell
Caswell estimates that she sells over a thousand baked goods each day.
Cookies, cupcakes, cakes, petit fours and pull-apart loaves are staples on Batter’s menu year-round, she says, but they also offer seasonal treats like a king cake-inspired cookie 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.
Right now, Caswell is close to achieving a longtime dream: developing her signature chocolate chip cookie recipe into a wholesale mix.
She says her first drop of 150 bags of cookie mix, which she sells for $14.99 each, quickly sold out online, and her goal is to get the product into grocery stores this year.
“Before I ever opened Batter, I always said to my husband, ‘We’re going to be on these shelves one day,'” she says.
Developing a mix will make her cookies “more accessible,” rather than being tied to a storefront, Caswell says.
‘Never truly off the clock’
One trait that Caswell believes is crucial to her success is adaptability.
“A lot of being a business owner is what your tolerance level is for your plans to change, for things to pop up and things to go wrong,” she says.
Running both bakeries hasn’t been easy – “every day there’s something new going on,” Caswell says.
Caswell currently doesn’t have a cake decorator for the New Orleans store, so she’s filling the position herself until she can hire a new decorator.
Caswell typically splits her time between both stores, which are an hour’s drive apart, but since her New Orleans store is understaffed, Caswell has been working at that location “pretty much full-time” every day of the week, she says.
That’s the “joy of being a small business owner,” she jokes: you’re “never truly off the clock.”
Caswell holds a bag of her signature chocolate chip cookie mix.
Courtesy of Abi Caswell
Online marketing has always been a key element of her business, Caswell says: it’s how she reached many of her early customers, and she credits her social media reach for boosting her business to this day.
Caswell currently has almost 300,000 followers on her TikTok account, where she posts about her daily routine, shares behind-the-scenes baking videos and opens up about the challenges of running her bakeries.
Beyond promoting her bakes, Caswell’s goal is to show her audience what it really takes to run a small business.
“I try to be as honest as I can be on social media,” she says. “I really think that people don’t understand the mental undertaking, but also the time commitment.”
When you own a business, “there is no real downtime,” Caswell says. “Even when I’m on vacation, if the stores are open, I’m on the clock.”
Most of the time, “the losses hurt more than the wins feel good,” she continues, but Caswell’s goal for this year is to give herself a chance “to relish what we’ve done.”
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