By Hannah Lazarte & Zoe Tran
Lookie, lookie, lookie, it’s cookies — not the iconic Crumbl’s but Trina Phan’s! With her passion for baking, Phan started her business by creating cakes for families and friends. Slowly, she found her love in baking batches of cookies for her friends’ birthdays.
“I think I started baking around COVID … but I really started honing in on cookies about two years ago,” Phan said.
When Phan doesn’t sell cookies, she tests recipes and does polls on her Instagram, showcasing a variety of flavors. Through the responses she receives, she chooses the flavors for the month.
During school, Trina Phan delivers cookies with her cousin, Adeline Phan and Trina Phan’s friends April Huynh and Sophia Nguyen. With their help, Phan has sold plenty of fresh and unique cookies that many enjoy.
Along with her family, Trina Phan asks Huynh and Nguyen to taste-test her cookies. Not only do Huynh and Nguyen do taste tests, but they also help with the social media account (@theteasp00n), packaging and delivering the cookies.
Depending on the flavor, cookies are priced at one dollar for chocolate chip cookies and two dollars for special flavors. Some special flavors include, but are not limited to ‘Strawberry Cheesecake’ and ‘Spooky Cookies & Cream.’
“Personally, I don’t eat any of my cookies because I have a lot of allergies. So that’s kind of why I started too because I couldn’t eat them, so I wanted other people to enjoy them,” Trina Phan said.
With a goal of people enjoying the baked goods, Trina Phan doesn’t focus on the funds her business gives her. To her, all that matters is that others are happy the same way she is happy when she bakes.
Even though Trina Phan would love to do more with her business in the future, as a senior, it isn’t her top priority. She manages her time by planning and prioritizing her academic schedule and baking on weekends when she is free.
“Even though baking is one of my passions and I love doing it, I’ll always put my education before anything. For example, I have . . . college [applications] and all the classes I’m taking. So even though I would love to be baking all the time, personally for me, I prioritize my education,” Trina Phan said. “I would love [ to expand the business] because I always do orders for my family, birthday parties and everything. So I would love to expand that into my business as well. But right now I think I’m a little busy with college [applications] and everything.”
Besides baking, Trina Phan is also co-president of an organization called SEALE (South East Asians Learning English). She has been part of this program since freshman year, where she, and other high school students, teach English to kids every Friday.
To those who would like to become business owners, Trina Phan believes that as long as you have a support system, “there’s no harm in trying.”
One of Trina Phan’s biggest support systems is her family, who helps clean after the process of creating all the cookies.
“When I’m baking, it’s a really long process. And on the day that I bake the cookies, sometimes it’s an eight to 12-hour process to get through all those cookies. And sometimes I make a mess in the kitchen. And so my family really helps out with them,” Trina Phan said.
Through Trina Phan’s business, she learned a lot about human interaction and marketing.
“I think it taught me a lot about human interaction, how to market, how to boost and how to attract people because a lot of the people that buy my cookies, I don’t know them personally. So to jump-start my business, I had to reach out to a lot of people, try to get them interested and see what works and see what doesn’t. So my customer feedback is really important,” Trina Phan said.
By putting a lot of effort and dedication into her small business through spending endless hours baking and perfecting her recipes, Trina Phan hopes to inspire others to do what they are passionate about.
