30-year-old quit her job to open a bake shop—now her 2 storefronts bring in 7 figures yearly

Five years before Abi Caswell opened her own bakery, she hadn’t baked a single cookie.

Today, he says he owns and manages two bakeries with seven-figure sales.

Caswell, 30, is the founder. PastryHammond is a bakery with two storefronts in Louisiana and New Orleans.

He told CNBC Make It that his ultimate goal was always to own his own business.

“Since I was a kid, I always knew I wanted to work for myself,” he says. “I wanted to be able to control my schedule and earn my own money.”

Her interest in sweet treats began in her youth: Caswell worked at a local cupcake shop from the ages of 16 to 20, and although she wasn’t involved in the baking process, she “loved everything about it”.

Caswell moved to Hammond with her husband, Trey, after graduating from Louisiana State University of Alexandria in 2018 with a major in business administration and a minor in marketing.

While working full-time as an administrative assistant, Caswell began experimenting with baking her own cakes as a hobby.

After making a cake for a friend’s husband, “One of our mutual friends said, ‘This is beautiful. You should sell these. We don’t have anything like it around here,'” Caswell recalls.

Caswell says she initially planned to stick to brownies and cupcakes, but with the rise of popular cookie chains like Crumbl and Insomnia Cookies — neither of which had storefronts in Hammond at the time, Caswell says — she decided to capitalize on the craze and make cookies the focus of her baking business.

From home baker to business owner

Caswell began experimenting with cookie recipes in the fall of 2021 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 a lot of cookies and they were terrible,” she says. “They would never be quite right because I had no idea what I was doing. So every time I did it, I learned something new about it.”

She began sharing the cakes she made online and on social media and said she quickly attracted a strong local customer base.

Caswell quit her full-time administrative assistant job in spring 2022 to focus on her baking business.

“I would work from 8 a.m. to 5:30 [p.m.]and then I’d come home and cook until 1 a.m.,” she recalls. “It was just too much.”

Around the time Caswell quit his job, he found a spot at the farmers market in Hammond. Every Friday, she says, with her husband’s help, she bakes 500 cookies to sell at the market on Saturday, and they regularly sell out within 30 minutes.

“That’s when I realized we had to go to a store. Like, this isn’t sustainable. We have to find another way to sell,” Caswell says.

It wasn’t easy for Caswell to find a storefront in Hammond.

Caswell developed a business plan to open a bakery with the help of his local partner small business development centerHowever, he had no money saved at the time and many banks rejected his loan request.

Eventually, a bank representative helped him get a $40,000 loan; Caswell said he had to put up his house as collateral, rent a storefront and install cooking appliances.

In November 2022, Caswell officially opened the first Batter store in downtown Hammond with a team of eight employees, including a head baker and seven part-time bakery counters. He had just turned 27.

Scaling the business

He says Caswell was “on an adrenaline rush” in the first few months. He worked up to 18 hours a day at the bakery to keep up with demand.

“We couldn’t keep anything in stock,” he says. “We had a great time, but it was very, very stressful.”

According to Caswell, Batter generated revenue in the mid-six figures in its first year of operation and was able to pay off its bank loan in full by May 2023.

Following the success of the Hammond location, Caswell opened another Batter location in New Orleans in December 2024 with the goal of reaching a broader customer base.

The two locations totaled seven figures in annual sales last year, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

Caswell estimates she sells over a thousand baked goods every day.

Cookies, cupcakes, brownies, petit pies, and pullable loaves are staples on Batter’s menu year-round, but she says they also offer seasonal treats like king cake-inspired cookies for Mardi Gras. The bakery’s signature chocolate chip cookies are $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.

Now Caswell is close to realizing his longtime dream: turning his signature chocolate chip cookie recipe into a wholesale mix.

He says the first sale of the 150 bags of cookie mix, which he sold for $14.99 each, sold out quickly online and his goal is to deliver the product to markets this year.

“Before I opened Batter, I always told my wife, ‘One day we’ll be on these shelves,'” he says.

Caswell says developing a mix will make his cookies “more accessible” rather than being tied to a storefront.

‘Never off the clock’

One trait that Caswell believes is crucial to his success is adaptability.

“A big part of owning a business is what your tolerance level is for plans changing, things popping up and things going wrong,” he says.

Operating both bakeries was not easy; “Something new happens every day,” says Caswell.

Caswell doesn’t currently have a cake decorator for the New Orleans store, so she’s filling the position herself until she can hire a new decorator.

Caswell usually splits his time between the two stores, which are an hour’s drive apart, but because the New Orleans store is understaffed, Caswell works at the location “pretty much full time” every day of the week, he said.

That’s “the joy of owning a small business,” he jokes: “You’re never off the clock.”

Caswell says online marketing has always been a key element of his business: It’s how he reached many of his early customers, and he credits his social media reach with growing his business to this day.

Caswell currently has almost 300,000 followers on his TikTok account; Here she shares about her daily routine, shares behind-the-scenes cooking videos, and explains the challenges of running her bakeries.

Beyond promoting her cakes, Caswell’s goal is to show her audience what it really takes to run a small business.

“I try to be as honest as possible on social media,” he says. “I think people don’t understand the time commitment as well as the mental responsibility.”

When you own a business, “there’s no real disruption,” Caswell says. “Even when I’m on vacation, if the stores are open, I’m on duty.”

Most of the time, he continues, “losses hurt more than wins feel good,” but Caswell’s goal this year is to give himself a chance to “enjoy what we do.”

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