It may seem odd that someone who makes cookies for a living doesn’t always enjoy baking, but that’s the way Deborah Tuggle, president of Friday’s Cookies in Tacoma, feels.
Gathering the ingredients, putting them together to make the dough and actually baking hundreds – even thousands – of cookies a week is a lot of hard work, she pointed out.
But it’s all worth it, she said, because of the joy she receives from the public’s reaction to her gourmet cookies.
“I feel I need to share it (the cookies) with everybody,” Tuggle said. “Cookies make people happy.”
The local response – and beyond – to her gourmet cookies seems to bear that out.
At last month’s opening ceremony for the Alberta J. Canada Building – where Friday’s Cookies is located (1116 South 11th Street, 253/779-4242) – officials and members of the public on hand for the ceremony got to taste some free samples of her cookies, and there were raves all around.
According to Tuggle, about a year ago, she was approached by Martin Luther King Housing Development Association Executive Director Felix Flannigan about leasing space in the building for her business.
“So here I am,” she said.
Tuggle didn’t set out to bake cookies for a living, instead going to school and then working in the legal field for about five years.
“I had an agenda,” she said. “I wanted to be a court reporter.”
While going to school, she baked on Friday – hence the name – and sold them to help pay for tuition.
At that time many people told Tuggle her cookies were very good and that she should consider going into business for herself.
While she continued to work as a court reporter, she kept on with her informal cookie business, making cookie baskets for clients of her cousin who worked at First Option Mortgage and attending a food and gift show in the Tacoma Dome in 1997, where her cookies sold out.
Somewhere along the line she decided she wanted to work for herself, so she quit her job, and with the support and help of family and friends, she did just that.
“It was kind of scary,” Tuggle said of quitting her job to pursue her dream full time.
She credits her mom, Ider Reed, with helping her to succeed.
“My mother has been wonderful,” Tuggle said. “Without her, I wouldn’t have made it.”
Even some of her competitors in the cookie business have been supportive.
“I was surprised how wonderful people in the same business were,” she noted, specifically citing Casey Cantwell of The Bite Me Cookie Co. in Seattle.
“Her (Cantwell) advice has always been right on target,” Tuggle said. “She’s a really incredible woman.”
Prior to setting up shop in the Alberta J. Canada Building, where her mother helps out and she employs a couple of part-time workers, Tuggle said she baked her cookies at various community centers in Tacoma.
Currently, Tuggle is concentrating on wholesale accounts, because “that’s where the money is.”
Some of Friday’s Cookies clients include Aramark (a catering service for Boeing employees), Pepsi – one of her first accounts – and Safeco Insurance Group in Seattle.
Tuggle is considering subleasing part of her area into a storefront that would sell her products, among other, to customers.
“People should be able to do that,” she said, referring to smaller, non-wholesale orders.
Friday’s Cookies offers eight flavors, including Friday’s Original (chocolate chips, pecans, white chocolate), Cascade (oatmeal, raisins, white chocolate), chocolate chip, molasses, snickerdoodle, peanut butter, oatmeal raisin and an as-yet-unnamed cookie made up of oatmeal, coconut, dried cranberries and white chocolate.
“For me right now, it’s a lot of making and getting the product out to people,” Tuggle said. “The product speaks for itself.”