How a metro Detroit finance consultant built a cookie company
How did a successful financial adviser from metro Detroit who never baked a cookie in her life end up starting a gourmet cookie company that just celebrated its fifth anniversary and is doing business globally?
Most entrepreneurs have interesting stories of how they started. Rebecca Abel Buick, founder and CEO of D’VINE Cookies, is no different. Her journey began with a dream of becoming an entrepreneur. She found her calling during a business trip to New York City in early 2017.
Abel Buick, an independent financial adviser/planner to 100 families — a job she had been doing for 22 years and continues to do today (her consulting company is known as The Strategic Financial Alliance) — started feeling the itch years ago to become an entrepreneur with a product.
Only, she didn’t have a clue as to what that product would be.
Her financial consulting work took her to New York where she noticed specialty cookie stores popping up and saw them growing.
It was an epiphany of sorts: She would launch a gourmet cookie company. She would name it D’VINE Cookies (taken from "divine intuition"), which launched in late 2017.
“I had always had a dream of starting a big company and had a strong intuition that cookies were how I would do it,” she said. “I went for it!”
She started in a church basement
What made her decision particularly intriguing was she didn’t bake (though she loved desserts) and didn’t even own a cookie baking sheet at the time.
Abel Buick’s background was in math and science, skills she used as the foundation to learn about the craft of cookie making at home. Her husband, Joe Buick, co-owner of the company, serves as project manager (he has a full-time job in the commercial insurance industry).
Abel Buick started off producing several flavors of gourmet stuffed and traditional cookies, which she sold at the Rust Belt Market in Ferndale.
She rented kitchen space in the basement of a local church and began producing large quantities of her cookies. She bought a food truck to help sell them, and today has two trucks.
Along the way, she partnered with a local ice cream manufacturer and opened a dessert café in Ferndale called Treat Dreams Dessert Emporium. The store took off but the pandemic caused it to close down for sit-down service in March 2020. She left it in April 2020 when the then-owner wanted to change its focus to a grocery store.
Amid the challenges, she pivoted as she converted her business into a boutique manufacturing company for cookies. She found wholesale customers to buy her gourmet cookies to sell to their clients. Some of this business was (and still is) private label, meaning the D’VINE Cookies name does not appear.
She continues to grow and moved to larger manufacturing space in Taylor where she is renting 16,000 square feet in an industrial building. There she has 20 employees that make up to 30,000 cookies per day.
Her cookies can be found at Beyond Juice, Sugarwish, Detroit Wing, Viviano Florists, on some Delta flights and some direct mailing companies. About 30% of her business is done under the D’VINE Cookie name. She said that mix would grow to be 50-50 within a year because of some major contracts she recently signed.
She also looks to grow online. She sells products from her website (dvinecookies.com) and from another website (faire.com), which sells wholesale products to hotels and small businesses (type in D’VINE cookies from that page).
“That’s where some of my international business is coming from,” she said of the websites.
Help along the way
In successfully navigating the evolving landscape, Abel Buick gave credit to Jim Hiller, who previously ran Hiller’s Market, another entrepreneur who has pivoted a few times. He serves as her mentor.
Hiller started and built a law firm decades ago before deciding to leave it behind to run his family’s upscale grocery company. Hiller’s Market did about $10 million in annual sales when he first joined. By the time he sold it in 2015 to Kroger, it had grown to $200 million a year in sales.
“I saw the writing on the wall about competition from online sales and knew that brick and mortar stores, particularly high end, would have a hard time in the years ahead,” Hiller said.
After selling the grocery business, Hiller was approached by executives who sought his advice in running companies and start-ups. It led to banks reaching out to him, too, for help with customers.
Abel Buick was introduced to Hiller by someone vetting her to have them co-package cookies for them. Abel Buick was impressed with him and his background and asked him to be her mentor. He agreed.
“We talk almost every day,” she said.
It’s been a four-year relationship that has proven fruitful.
“She’s very multifaceted,” Hiller said of Abel Buick. “She’s successful as a wealth manager. And she broke out of clutter (of other cookie makers) by making stuffed cookies. With her energy and creativity, the company has taken off like a meteor.”
“Have there been steps backward along the way? Sure,” he said. “But she has that entrepreneurial spirit and won’t take ‘no’ for an answer.”
How she grew the company
Abel Buick could write a book about juggling. She’s mom of two boys, Elliot, 16, and Ari, 14, as she runs her cookie company and financial consulting business. Here are more insights she shared about her journey (her answers edited for length).
QUESTION: How did you figure out how to make great cookies?
ANSWER: I focused all my initial research on baking and coming up with a great product.
Q: Tell me about the growth of your cookie company?
A: My goal was to build a big company so I wanted to be ready for that with a production space that could handle high volume. Space has always been the biggest challenge in growing. In July, we moved to our fifth manufacturing space since starting. This time I took a huge risk and rented a space that gave me room to grow 20 times bigger. It was a scary thing to do to take on this expense but I decided I was ready to go all in and make this happen.
Q: How are you able to run a cookie company and a financial planning company?
A: I have been doing (financial planning) for over 22 years and have an amazing assistant, Angie, that runs the day to day operations as I continue to see my clients a few times a year and do all of the investment research. I try to structure my schedule so I’ll only work on one of the businesses on a given day. What helps me the most is staying focused and avoiding distractions and delegating the things I don’t like to do or that I’m not good at. I try and stay off of social media, email and texting and only look at these things once or twice a day.
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Q: How about work/life balance and family?
A: It’s a struggle that I wouldn’t say I’ve mastered. My kids are seeing what it takes to start a business and it’s a big sacrifice at times. They have been there with me building boxes and making cookies when staff has been out.
Q: As an entrepreneur, who do you admire or want to emulate?
A: I aspire to be like Sara Blakely of Spanx. I love how she set out from the beginning with a huge goal and did what it took to make it happen.
Q: As you look to the future, what do you see?
A: I’m ready to expand D’VINE Cookies to become the company I saw in my dreams. For the last five years I’ve been learning about the food industry and how to run this type of business, and now I’m ready to take things to the next level.
Contact Carol Cain: 248-355-7126 or clcain@cbs.com. She is senior producer/host of “Michigan Matters,” which airs 8 a.m. Sundays on CBS Detroit. See former Gov. Rick Snyder, PNC’s Michael Bickers, Gina Coleman and Marshalynn Odneal on this Sunday’s show.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Rebecca Abel Buick, CEO of D'VINE Cookies shares path to success
