Checkout Chats: Maura Duggan, Fancypants

Maura Duggan, founder of the skyrocketing cookie company Fancypants, never set out to build a brand. 

Duggan’s comes from a background in Neuroscience and Education. With a graduate degree in Mind, Brain, and Education from Harvard, she initially pursued a career in research and clinical work. But early into her professional journey, she began questioning her path forward—and found herself drawn back to a lifelong passion for baking, something she had shared with her mother and grandmother growing up. 

What started as a side hustle selling decorated shortbread cookies quickly gained momentum, and within months, Duggan made the leap to full-time baker and entrepreneur. Today, the brand earns upwards of $10M a year and is sold in over 3,000 retail locations across the country, including 57 Costco locations in the Northeast region. 

Most admirably, Duggan has managed to maintain the brand's core values of sustainability and quality while scaling to meet the demands of mass retail.

Sustainability Baked In

From day one, sustainability has been central to the Fancypants ethos. 

Duggan's original shortbread cookies naturally minimized waste—shortbread dough can be worked and reworked without sacrificing quality, so Fancypants never created any waste. And as the business evolved, this commitment to sustainability expanded.

Today, Fancypants incorporates upcycled flour into their products, diverting ingredients that would otherwise go to waste. The company has also partnered with Vanguard Renewables to transform cookie crumbs into renewable energy—a truly circular approach to manufacturing.

Going National

While many CPG startups focus on regional growth before attempting national distribution, Fancypants took a different—but equally strategic—approach. 

Drawing on her previous experience running a bakery business, Duggan recognized that limiting the brand to the Northeast wouldn't allow for the scale and speed of growth she envisioned. “There are only a fixed number of retailers that are a great fit for us in the Northeast,” says Duggan. “And with such long category review cycles, we’d never be able to scale as fast as we want to or are capable of.”

Instead of a purely geographic strategy, Fancypants focused on finding the right retail partners based on customer demographics, regardless of location. This approach allowed them to target consumers with the right profile—those willing to pay a premium for a quality, sustainable product—wherever they might be in the country.

The challenge, of course, was convincing distributors to take a chance on what appeared to be a new brand, despite Duggan's years of experience. Her solution was persistence and education: aggressive outreach to distributors, continuous training, and a clear value proposition.

An essential part of this strategy involved hosting webinars for distributor partners, ensuring that everyone in the distribution chain could effectively tell the Fancypants story. "People might not get it the first time," Duggan acknowledges, "but it's just that they're not you. You have to always be reminding and sharing with them."

Cracking the Costco Code

Most recently, this targeted retail approach led Duggan to Costco, where Fancypants launched in 57 Northeast stores with their Salted Caramel flavor in a special 14-ounce package.

The Costco launch required a complete rethinking of Fancypants' approach to packaging and merchandising. While the brand's typical retail packaging features detailed information suitable for careful shoppers at places like Whole Foods, the Costco environment demanded something entirely different. With pallet displays, you have limited real estate to do something special—but you need to know your customer is going to immediately "get" the product. 

This insight led to a complete reversal of the team's initial packaging plans. After mocking up their original design in a Costco environment, they realized it simply didn't stand out in the brightly lit store with pallet displays. They ended up with something "completely opposite of what we originally planned."

For the pallet display itself, Duggan and her team had to be highly strategic, starting with all their usual callouts and progressively paring back to the essentials. With only a few quick moments to capture someone’s attention in aisle, "it can't be a visual assault," she notes. They highlighted their women-owned status more prominently than on their typical packaging and ensured their distinctive peacock mascot—a whimsical character that appears differently on each product—stood out against the sea of conventional cookie packages.

Diversification as Risk Management

Looking ahead, Duggan sees diversification as key to Fancypants' continued growth and stability. "You never know what's going to stick and what's not," she observes. "Things beyond control can happen; you can lose and gain new accounts for all sorts of reasons."

This philosophy has led Fancypants to explore multiple channels, including specialty retail, club stores, and emerging opportunities in foodservice. They've also found unexpected success in wine and beer stores, where their products make perfect impulse purchases at the register.

​​By spreading their delicious cookie gospel across channels, they've created an ecosystem where each channel reinforces the others. Spot their cookies while grabbing a bottle of wine on Friday, then see them again at Costco on Saturday? That's not coincidence—that's strategy.

The company continues to innovate, with new pack sizes and an entirely new category line on the horizon. 

The Sweet Spot: Lessons from Fancypants' Journey

In a category drowning in earnest craft stories and heritage claims, Fancypants stands out by simply having more fun than everyone else.

The Fancypants formula shows that with the right product, adaptable systems, and a distinctive personality that travels well, a cookie company can successfully play in multiple retail sandboxes without compromising what makes it special.