Tate's Bake Shop: Kathleen King

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 16 December 2019

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Kathleen King was 11 years old when she started baking cookies to sell at her family's farm stand on Long Island. After college, she opened a small bake shop, and eventually started selling her cookies to gourmet grocery stores in Manhattan. But after twenty years of running a small business, she wanted more time for herself. She brought in two partners to grow sales, but the partnership was a disaster – and after bitter lawsuits, Kathleen was forced to start over from scratch. 18 years later, Tate's Bake Shop – the second cookie brand that she built out of the crumbs of the first – sold for $500 million. PLUS in our post-script "How You Built That," Thomas Althaus made his wife a bracelet and earrings out of a tin can for their tenth wedding anniversary. What began as a lighthearted gift became Canned Goods—a recycled jewelry company that donates one can of food to charity for each piece sold. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.
0:13.0	As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.
0:17.0	So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.
0:24.0	Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.
0:27.0	They had driven my business $600,000 into debt.
0:34.0	I realized even though I was fired and had no job, I was responsible for one-third of that debt.
0:41.0	And all the money that the company had was gone, and I had to fight them.
0:46.0	I had to be free of them.
0:48.0	I had to get my business back.
0:52.0	The Prime NPR is how I built this.
0:58.0	A show of innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
1:09.0	I'm Guy Roz, and on today's show, how Kathleen King started out selling cookies from her family's farm stamp for $0.59 of bag.
1:18.0	Then spent the next four decades building a brand that eventually sold for half a billion dollars.
1:28.0	It's hard for me to think of a more simple and elegant enterprise than a lemonade stand.
1:34.0	It's kind of like a laboratory where you can test out a whole bunch of hypotheses around marketing, and price structure, and human psychology.
1:43.0	Take for example the experience of my own children.
1:47.0	Their first lemonade stand was just lemonade.
1:50.0	A dollar a glass, and it did fine. They made about 40 bucks.
1:54.0	The second lemonade stand sold lemonade and freshly baked cookies.
1:59.0	Two dollars for a lemonade and a cookie.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Guy Raz | Wondery, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Guy Raz | Wondery and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.