Sarah King juggles baking sweet treats alongside criminal casework 🍪
A furloughed solicitor has turned her lifelong love for baking into a successful cookie business.
Sarah King, 32, founded ‘The Cookie Mail’ when having been furloughed in March, she found herself with a lot more time on her hands. The criminal defence solicitor turned to baking and began sending the sweet treats in letter-box sized packages to family and friends as a way to cheer them up during the period of social distancing and isolation.
“The idea was born out of lockdown and took off so quickly”, said King, who gave up her full-time position, once reinstated, to work flexibly as a consultant with Kingsbury Ellis, a criminal defence firm in North London, so she could juggle baking with briefs.
In the six months since she launched she’s set up her own website to deliver the freshly baked goods across the country. She’s sent out around 1,200 orders so far and says her cookies have gone down a treat with colleagues and clients.
The company also runs a subscription service to get a monthly delivery of cookies to your door, and takes bespoke orders. King told Legal Cheek that she’s received requests from corporate clients wanting to send their staff a selection of cookies in the run-up to virtual Christmas parties. Hodge Jones & Allen placed an order with her last month for an awards ceremony while another law firm has been in touch to bulk-buy cookie boxes.
She splits her working week between lawyering and baking which sometimes means she has to wake up as early as 4:30am to fit everything in, but remote-working has made this easier. “Some weeks it’s 50/50, some weeks it’s more cookies than law and on others, it’s very little sleep,” she says. “It just depends. Mondays are super busy because that’s when I prepare the orders that come in over the weekend.”
But the criminal solicitor of over ten years says she plans to continue juggling baking cookies alongside her criminal caseload for the time being. “I’m not ready to leave the law completely,” she says. “I’d like to manage both for as long as I can.”
She continued:
“I’ve been a criminal defence solicitor for over ten years and it’s all I ever wanted to do since I was 13-years-old. I would like to establish my business to a point where I can take on staff but also to offer internships to young people that have been caught up in crime.”
