Last Crumb sells $120 boxes of a dozen cookies that once sold out in seconds—no paid ads required. Founder Derek Jaeger manufactured that demand by borrowing a playbook from streetwear: weekly drops, fixed inventory, and the simple thrill of having something other people couldn’t get. Before the cookies, Derek spent years running a paid-ads agency, where he watched product after product disappear the moment the spend stopped. He wanted the opposite—a brand people would talk about on their own. Here, Derek breaks down how he turned fashion drops into cookies, why he spent a full year building the brand before selling a single box, and when he decided to walk away from the scarcity model that made Last Crumb famous.
On why he refused to build another brand that depended on paid ads:
Before Last Crumb, we ran an agency doing affiliate ads for a plethora of products—skincare, nutrition, anything. This was the early days of Facebook, the Wild West. Clicks were one cent, two cents. As long as your copy was creative, you could build a substantial business out of almost nothing. We were the middleman, selling everybody else’s products, and we did that for six or seven years.
But here’s the thing I couldn’t unsee: If you turned off the ads, there’d be no brand left. These products would just disappear into thin air. Sure, if you’re spending 10 or 20 grand a day, they’re going to do well—but that’s not a brand. That’s a faucet.
I wanted the opposite. Something people actually cared about, could talk about, were excited to be a part of. That’s really what started the idea for Last Crumb.
On spending a year building the brand before selling a single box:
I was confident in the product—I’d been toying with these recipes for 10 to 15 years. The question was, how do we show people this is something completely different?
So we spent a year building the brand—and I don’t just mean the copy and the visuals. I mean everything. How do you make people feel when they get a Last Crumb box? We spent a year on photography alone. We tested 20 different boxes. We tested the angle of the cookie, the way the cookie looked at you when you opened the lid, how it felt to open the package. Every little detail.
There wasn’t a stone left unturned. By the time we launched, it was so polished that it just came out of nowhere. People went from never hearing of us to seeing us everywhere, going, “What is this cookie brand that costs two times every other brand out there?”
On turning fashion drops into cookies:
The drops were the idea from the very beginning: How do we grow this brand and build some clout without paid ads?
Our initial thinking was, build something like Supreme or Kith around these fashion drops. But how do we turn fashion drops into cookies? What are the value pillars people associate with those clothing brands? A lot of it comes down to one thing: I got something you didn’t.
We hadn’t really seen that in food. To me it’s the same feeling as a Michelin-star restaurant—the reservation’s hard to get, and you feel good about eating there. I wanted to bring that online.
On the exact mechanics of a weekly drop:
It was a very limited drop window every week—Monday, 12 o’clock. A hundred boxes, 200 boxes, 500 boxes. That was it. People were enamored with seeing that for the first time in a food brand.
In the beginning we were in a tiny kitchen out in LA, so we’d have maybe 50 or 100 boxes, and they’d sell out in a couple hours. We deliberately kept the inventory low so we’d have that clout every single week. The goal was to fulfill just a percentage of the demand—never all of it. The scarcity was the whole point.
On the organic breakout that snowballed:
Around week six, we started getting traction from celebrities. Chrissy Teigen got her hands on a box really early and posted it organically. That’s something we pride ourselves on—we’ve always had organic influence for the brand. And that blew us up. It was a very quick snowball effect, and after that we were selling out within seconds for a good part of a year.
There was intention behind it, too. We were in LA for a reason—it’s Hollywood, it’s celebrities, it’s people who can get your product in front of the world fast. I wouldn’t say we were chasing any one person, but with the drops, we knew we had a shot at getting in front of the right people. She happened to grab a box, she had a food show, and the timing just worked for both of us.
On why the hype outran the product at first:
There was so much clout around the box. People wanted [it] badly.
But then they’d open it and get a product they weren’t really expecting: 12 different cookies, all flavors nobody had seen before, shipped perfectly. On top of that, it was an Instagrammable moment, a TikTok moment. It checked all the boxes. So the celebrity backing helped, but the organic posting afterward is what took us to that cult-like effect.
On killing the weekly drop in 2023:
After our first raise in 2022, we had an interesting cap table, and there was a lot of chatter—internal investors, people who wanted to build the brand quicker and open up availability to everybody at a faster pace.
And they had a point. One of your main value pillars can’t just be scarcity all the time. So in 2023 we moved to an evergreen model, with the goal of testing retail and brick-and-mortar.
You have to evolve. Scarcity is great for getting attention, but if you want a brand that lasts, at some point it has to become something bigger than the thing that made it famous.
Hear Derek’s full conversation on Shopify Masters for how Last Crumb quietly became a gifting business, the retail surprise waiting for him in Brooklyn, and why he thinks the GLP-1 era might actually work in his favor.
