To know Jenny Lampion is to know laughter, understand considerate living, and to experience true creativity. She lives and works out of her home in Southwest Florida creating delicious, meticulously designed custom-cut sugar cookies with royal icing. She is – as those in this vein of baking call themselves – a cookier. I recently sat down with Jenny and talked her about her burgeoning home business, Made with Love in the 239: how it started, how she manages growth, and how she balances her passion with the demands of production.
Tell us about your family. My son, Max, is in third grade, and my daughter, Linnea, is in pre-K 4. My husband, Carlos, works for Hertz in the IT department. I’m a Naples native. My mother was a popular gospel singer who traveled the world with the Billy Graham team, and my dad was a singer/songwriter/pastor from Sweden who immigrated in 1979. They moved to Naples in 1986. I’m from a very musical family; there were always many instruments, recording equipment, and daily impromptu singalongs around during my childhood. Throughout my education, I continued to play various instruments and sing. I graduated from Florida Gulf Coast University and became a teacher in 2006.
What led you into creating cookies? After Max was born, I struggled physically and emotionally. Pregnancy seemed to send my thyroid into a tailspin, and I struggled with my new norm. I know a lot of other first-time moms can relate to that struggle. My mom bought me a Kitchen-Aid and encouraged me to “bake it out.” My son was nearing his first birthday, and I saw a picture of super hero cookies on the internet, and I decided to try making a set for his party. They looked and tasted terrible! But I fell in love with cookies right then and there. Cookie-ing became my therapy – it was a way out of myself.
Tell us about your health journey. When my son was a toddler, I had a breakthrough in my health; I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s autoimmune thyroid condition. I began working with a great doctor in Miami who continues to help me even now, and I started feeling much better. I was able to think clearly again, and I began to feel so much better. It’s still up and down with my health, but through it all, I love my family, and I love cookie-ing.
How did your passion for cookie-ing turn into a business? For the next few years while my son was preschool age, I created cookie sets for friends, showers, gifts, and events as a hobby without considering making money or the business aspect of what I was doing. As my hobby
started to grow, my husband told me that I either needed to create a business to make money, or that I needed to stop giving cookies away and spending resources on my hobby. So, we decided together that I would continue to pursue my passion and create a business out of it; thus, Made with Love in the 239 was born in November 2017.
I’m a small home business, but I’ve gotten to the point where I’m at capacity. The business has grown so much; I’m in awe. I’ve gotten so much support from the community around me.
What are some of the challenges of running a home business? Setting boundaries has been a learning curve for me. When I first went live with my business, I was getting messages at all hours, and I would start answering them, or I would research various cookie cutters and design cookies. I wasn’t sleeping. Now, I get back to people the next morning if they contact me after dinner. I don’t go on my business page during the evening hours. My house is 1,600 square feet – I have a beautiful kitchen and a large island, but my house is small. So, I only do small batch work. It still gets to be cookie overload because every cookie needs to be laid out flat, which is a challenge.
What are some of the joys of running a home business? I can stay home with my kids! I can go to all the class parties and volunteer easily. Sometimes I struggle to separate my business from my parenting. Frustration spills out because I’m constantly preparing for baking, baking, decorating, or cleaning. My kitchen is always extremely clean, but the rest of my house isn’t cleaned up. It’s the most fun job in the world, but sometimes it doesn’t feel like that.
How do you cultivate personal creativity and manage the expectations of your clients? There are two sides of my business, and I constantly seek to balance them. I need to keep myself engaged, inspired, and growing in skills and technological developments (colors, ingredients, techniques, etc.) and I need to keep getting paid enough to sustain and grow the business. Sometimes what you see on my page is not what I’m getting paid to produce. I still create cookie sets for myself. I believe in the art of it. I love to decorate cookies.
I’ve recently done a few “My Life in Cookie” sets for people. I design and create eight or nine cookies that represent their lives, passions, interests, and experiences. There’s nothing you can’t do in cookies. Cookies have infinite possibilities. You can be inspired by anything and put anything on a cookie!
What’s your vision for your business; how do you want it to grow? Right now, any growth is on hold until my daughter is in school fulltime. I have a million ideas, but I’m going to proceed with caution. I try to remind people that my business is not a bakery, and I can’t take on large, extensive projects. Being a mom is still my full-time gig; my kids are my number one priority. They don’t need expensive, fancy stuff. They need me at this time.
And, it’s important to me to be engaged in the process of parenting. The benefit of separating from my home business in order to parent is that it helps me to even more fully engage with my business during those set times. Yes, I’m itching to take on new work. I love it. But I’ve chosen to be a stay-at-home mom first.
I get asked a lot how I started this business and how I got into cookie-ing. I’m self-taught, and a lot of sweat, tears, and discovery went into this business in order to get it to where it is today. There’s no way I could have started the actual business (taking orders, designing, baking, decorating, deliveries, etc.) as a new mom with a 6-month-old baby.
What are some unexpected blessings of your business? This business has connected me to my community in new ways. I get to talk to adults (my clients) in Southwest Florida on a daily basis. I also am blessed to have a wonderful community of other cookiers in this area. We all support each other, and I talk to them on a daily basis. I love my girl cookie gang!
I also have had opportunities to give back to my community by designing and creating custom sets of cookies for non-profit events. It is such a blessing to give in a way that connects my passion to the needs of our community.
Jenny Lampion can be found on Instagram @ madeinthe239.