In 2018, Kerstyn Lott was working at a mortgage company in Dallas. One day, she found herself lying in bed so sick that all she could do was watch reruns of the Christmas Cookie Challenge on the Food Network as she tried to recover. The show sparked childhood memories of baking cookies with her mother around the holidays, and she had an epiphany.
“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I could totally do that.’ I guess it’s my ego. I felt like I could figure it out on my own,” she says.
Lott left her corporate job in 2018 to pursue her at-home bakery business full time. She named it Confetti Yeti. “I did walk away from more money to do this, and I didn’t know how much money I was going to be able to make doing cookies,” she says. “But it was more interesting to me.”
Lott is one of the many so-called sugar cookie artists around the country who have opened bakeries out of their homes in recent years. The vast majority of these bakers are women with families. They sell custom sets of cookies decorated with royal icing or buttercream, and without any professional training as pastry chefs.
Think of it as the non-scammy version of an MLM for women who want to leave the traditional workforce. There is no pyramid scheme, nobody to recruit. All the profits go directly into their pockets. It’s a creative outlet that lets them work flexible hours while contributing to the family income and staying home with their kids.
With no other employees, they bake all the cookies and mix all the icing by hand in their own kitchens, operating under cottage food laws according to the state where they are based. In some states, there is a cap on how much income the bakers can generate through the sale of their baked goods, which makes it difficult to make a living on cookies alone. Sometimes these laws also prohibit shipping, which means that the bakers can only sell within their local communities (but many won’t ship anyway because the cookies would be destroyed in transit).
These restrictions haven’t stopped these cookies from becoming a genuine phenomenon, though. There are 5.9 million photos posted under #sugarcookies on Instagram—intricately designed baby onesies, Champagne glasses, rainbow unicorns that can be seen on dessert tables at birthday parties and baby showers.
Lott can make around 120 cookies in an 18-hour day, but there can be as many as 500 cookies in a single order. When she started, she was charging $24 for a dozen cookies; now she charges $72.
Since she started Confetti Yeti, Lott’s husband has been laid off twice, and her family leaned on her income to support themselves. Her kids are young adults now, and Lott’s income from Confetti Yeti was one of the main sources of their college tuition.
Working women face an uphill battle when they choose to become mothers. The United States has some of the most expensive child care costs in the world—and with no free universal pre-K. It often doesn’t make financial sense for women to stay at a job where their salary goes directly back into paying for a nanny or day care center, so they stop working altogether. The U.S. is also one of the only countries without guaranteed paid parental leave.
A 2019 Florida State University study found that the so-called motherhood penalty often forces women out of their jobs as soon as they get pregnant. Their salaries take a dip, and they experience less encouragement from co-workers to advance in their careers. Men, meanwhile, experience the exact opposite, known as the fatherhood bonus. They make more money than childless men, and take on more hours.
In 2020, the March of Dimes reported that 30 percent of mothers without access to paid leave drop out of the workforce—and many of them don’t return for another decade. It makes it easy to see why some mothers prefer to opt out altogether, forging a career path of their own design.
When Jessica Lutovsky launched Must Love Frosting in 2019, she had just had a baby, and was working part time. She enjoyed making cookies as a hobby, but when her job stopped offering health benefits to part-time employees, she saw a way out of an unfilling career.
“It took a while to get my husband on board,” she recalls. But then, she booked an order for 2,000 cookies from Amazon, and joined local community Facebook pages where she advertised her cookies, and her business spread mostly by word-of-mouth.
It was a low-maintenance strategy that worked, although social media has also given these bakers a useful platform to promote their work. Both Lutovsky and Lott have more than 20,000 followers on Instagram—some of their peers have upward of 100,000 followers. Sugar cookie artists figured out how to leverage social media without having to become influencers, thanks to marketable skills that actually appeal to and serve a purpose for people in the real world.
These days, Lutovsky is typically fully booked out with orders at least two months in advance. The week before Christmas of 2022, she made 55 dozen cookies in one week—on her own. She estimates that she has to turn away 40 percent of people who request custom cookies.
Still, Lutovsky has no plans to open a storefront, which would allow her to take on more orders and even ship cookies. Running the bakery out of her home is what makes the job appealing: Must Love Frosting is an artistic pursuit that allows Lutovsky the freedom to take on parenting duties like picking her kids up from school.
In this way, the women behind these at-home bakeries are a kind of hybrid worker, both the only employee of their own business and a stay-at-home mom—and that means taking on the responsibility of both titles. Lutovsky’s daughter was a high-maintenance toddler, and she recalls struggling to find time to make cookies as she managed her care. To make her business work, she put her kids to bed and stayed up late into the night making cookies while everyone was asleep.
“Sometimes it’s tiring, and I want to give up,” she says. “But I really like what I do. I get to stay home all day in my pajamas. It’s lovely.”