We recently connected with Katherine Reed and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Katherine, thanks for joining us today. Often outsiders look at a successful business and think it became a success overnight. Even media and especially movies love to gloss over nitty, gritty details that went into that middle phase of your business – after you started but before you got to where you are today. In our experience, overnight success is usually the result of years of hard work laying the foundation for success, but unfortunately, it’s exactly this part of the story that most of the media ignores. Can you talk to us about your scaling up story – what are some of the nitty, gritty details folks should know about?

Texas Hand Pie Co. has humble beginnings, starting in a toaster oven in a 300 square foot tiny home selling at a Farmers Market. I vividly remember making a batch of 30 hand pies and thinking to myself “this is going to be a lot of pie for me and my family to eat, there is no way I will sell this much.” To my absolute shock, I sold out in 30 minutes flat. That’s when I realized that I had something special.

We have now gone from batches of 30 hand pies to batches of 3,000. That kind of growth was exhilarating and terrifying as it often felt like I was just treading water to keep the machine alive. From 2020 to 2021, we grew 800% in sales and production, and that growth wasn’t always pretty.

We had to understand where we needed to let certain things go versus hanging on to the aspects of the company that made us a Texas Hand Pie. It made us look deeply into the company and figure out who we are, what our business is about, how we do things, and how to portray that to our customers.

My favorite example of learning to let go of something I loved but wasn’t scalable was our packaging. When we were doing 30-150 hand pies a week, I used to hand tie a bow on every single package. They looked adorable and I was so convinced that people were buying them because of the bow! I dug my heels in hard when it came to deleting that part of our packaging and just stubbornly refused, even when we were producing as many as 300 hand pies a week. But one fateful night, that bow broke me! I was up all night long after selling pies all weekend long, then baking more all day long. I saw the mountain of pies that needed bows and I remember just crying like a baby. My husband (who has the patience of a Saint) gently pressed me yet again to delete the bow, and between my exhausted sobs, I finally agreed.

All the pies sold in the same amount of time, and not one person mentioned the deleted bow.

My biggest lesson learned as we scaled this hobby into a successful running business is to really examine what makes your product special. For Texas Hand Pie Co, it’s about bringing hand made, quality hand pies that remind you of your favorite hand pies that your Grandma used to make you in her kitchen. It’s about giving our customers an emotional connection and leading them down memory lane with our hand pies.

It’s not about the bow at all.

Katherine, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Texas Hand Pie Co. specializes in making gourmet hand pies using real butter, real cane sugar, and non-gmo fruits.

You can find us in several events every weekend all over the country, or order pies online anytime on our online store:

Www.texashandpieco.com
@TexasHandPieCo on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok

Have you ever had to pivot?

How didn’t have to pivot during the pandemic in order to stay alive as a business?

In January of 2020, we finished construction on our commercial kitchen.

In February of 2020, we purchased our food trailer.

Then the world shut down, and the high attendance festivals we rely so heavily on stopped in its tracks.

We then decided to build an online store to ship our shelf stable hand pies, and to our surprise, we had a better year in 2020 than in 2019! Our pivot from food service to food manufacturing is what kept us alive during 2020, and is responsible for our massive growth in the proceeding months.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I sold pies at the Farmers Market for the first time in July of 2018 after suddenly losing a dear friend and my brother in law. Instead of saying to myself “I’d like to be a baker someday,” I decided to just try it. The following Spring in April of 2019, my mom suddenly passed away from a pulmonary embolism. Six months after her death, I was diagnosed multiple sclerosis after losing my vision while selling at a market. If that wasn’t enough, I fractured my back in two places in June of 2020 and had to undergo a six hour spinal reconstruction surgery!

During the incredible times of grief, loss, and depression, I poured everything into the company. The loss of my loved ones fueled me to keep going to make them proud, and the physical pain and complications forced me to take a step back from certain aspects of the business and let others help. Breaking my back ultimately got me out of the production side of this business because I physically couldn’t do the work anymore. It seemed like such a curse at the time, but it was the best thing I could have possibly done. It made me create and rely on a team. Texas Hand Pie Co. would be nothing without the silent workers behind the scenes!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://texashandpieco.com/
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/texashandpieco
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/texashandpieco