The Cookie Function
“I could not have done this without you.”
- Ellyn Hufford, Owner
There’s a very special place in my heart for this project because it was for my baby sister! Ellyn has always been the baker of the family. She worked at a bakery in high school and has been wowing us with her mad skills ever since (unofficially). She even did my wedding cake when she was still in college!
Ellyn followed the family path and went to my own alma mater, Kettering University, earning a degree in Industrial Engineering and working in the automotive industry. It was never her dream job, but the tuition was free (our mom is a professor there) and she figured she could apply what she learned down the road when she would inevitably start her own baking business.
Fast forward just 6 years, and she is doing exactly that! With a bit of encouragement from her enterprising big sister, along with the promise of a steady part-time income from Marketing Metal, she was able to quit her engineering job in January to follow her dream of starting her own bakery.
We wanted to keep her nerdy engineering nature at the forefront of her brand while also highlighting the incredible flavor and texture she has developed for her gourmet sugar cookies. Oftentimes when you buy those kinds of adorable decorated sugar cookies, they just don’t taste very good. In order to give the full explanation of her brand name, we have to go way back to before either of us started at Kettering when my mom was tutoring some of her calculus students.
One of the wittier among them realized that “Ellyn” is a homophone of a common math term “LN” and began calling her by its full name, Natural Log, as a way to make fun of my mom for being a total math nerd. Later, when LN had been at Kettering for a few years, she got a tattoo of the natural log function, ln(x)=1. So, we thought, if the function of a perfect cookie is charm plus flavor, we could plot these two things on a line graph and put The Cookie Function in the first quadrant to show that both were equally important to her. This became her logo!
We used Ellyn’s favorite deep red as the brand’s anchor color (a color of passion, which is associated with sweet treats) and offset it with a lighter pink and purple for small accents. For fonts, we went with an elegant sans serif as the primary and accented with a cursive font that reminded me of her handwriting.
Since launching her website in February, Ellyn’s business has been blowing up. So much so that she hasn’t had enough bandwidth to help out at Marketing Metal anymore, so I had to replace her, which was exactly my plan. I’m so proud of her for pursuing her dream!