She couldn’t find a perfect cookie, so she baked some in her South Boston kitchen. Then people started to line up.

She first caught the baking bug in elementary school, after her family moved from Quebec to Marlborough, and spent the last decade and a half perfecting her cookie recipe and looking for a bakery that matched it. to his liking, namely one that makes big, gooey cookies.

“There’s never been anywhere to find cookies like this,” Gagnon said. “I’m always the one making them.”

When Gagnon moved to South Boston in September 2020, the search for the perfectly thick cookie continued. In the meantime, she cooked her own. In January 2021, Gagnon began posting photos on Instagram of the cookies she was baking in the small kitchen of her East Broadway apartment.

His DMs exploded.

“It’s even hard for me to believe that people were willing to line up outside a random girl’s apartment to buy her cookies,” Gagnon said. “I was just like, ‘What are these. Does anyone really want them?’”

They did it. Massively.

She filled about eight orders a week, all arranged through Instagram messaging. A year later, shortly after moving to another apartment on East Sixth Street, demand surged, with customer cars lining his neighborhood on distribution days. Gagnon, a 2019 graduate of the University of Massachusetts Lowell with a bachelor’s degree in business administration, saw the signs.

“I decided that I had to enjoy making this dream come true,” said Gagnon.

She created a website and partnered with Food rEvolution, a shared commercial kitchen in Stoneham focused on helping food startups, where she started cooking twice a week after work. Gagnon logged on to the In Good Company gift shop on East Broadway – which displays a sign that reads ‘quit your day job, not your dream job’ – to see if they would let her cookie drives take place there down, instead of leaving his apartment. A year into his Food rEvolution debut, Gagnon did exactly what that sign encouraged, quitting his day job for his dream job.

“It was so hard to say out loud,” Gagnon said. “But it was the best decision ever.”

She spends Monday through Thursday in the kitchen, preparing her basic menu: classic chocolate chips, dark chocolate peanut butter and cookie milkshake – a vanilla brown sugar batter with Oreos, golden Oreos and mixed chocolate chips – and spins in a new flavor of the month. (The very first flavor of the month was “Party Animal,” a chocolate chip cookie with white chocolate chips, frosted animal crackers and sprinkles.) Gagnon, who recently moved to Somerville to be closer to the kitchen, is also working to develop new flavors of fan-favorite stuffed cookies, like Red Velvet Oreo Cheesecake.

“People are going crazy for these stuffed animals,” Gagnon said.

Southie Cookie’s cookies are free of preservatives or anything “fishy” as stated on the company’s website.

Securing a Southie Cookie is no easy task: the quest starts at 5:00 p.m. every Sunday. Customers place orders on southiecookie.com while supplies last. It takes less than 15 minutes to use up the stock of 400 cookies. Lucky customers who order online pick up their cookies every Friday at In Good Company from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. Southie Cookie customers get 15% off in-store products.

“It was cool to see the progression of her Southie Cookie community,” said Kait Radkowski, owner of In Good Company. “It’s nice to hear people talking about your business.”

But it might be a little easier to score some of these high-demand cookies: Deja Brew, a cafe on East Broadway, now offers a special oatmeal chocolate chip cookie from Southie Cookie every week. Arrive early, though. They tend to sell out within 90 minutes of their 7am Friday morning delivery, and people are lining up for them.

There is no shipping or delivery available yet, although Southie Cookie does host weddings and baby showers.

When South Boston’s Sky Hooper walked out of In Good Company on a recent Friday afternoon, he was all smiles.

“They’re a great combination of a tough exterior and a gooey interior,” said Hooper, whose wife discovered Southie Cookie on Instagram a few months ago and has been picking up cookies every week since.

Southie Cookie is a one-woman operation for now. Gagnon’s parents and boyfriend help out when they can, but Gagnon hopes to hire help in the near future. She plans to stick with the online store model rather than a physical location to get the most out of her business.

A month into his full-time career on Southie Cookie, Gagnon’s morale is “the best it’s ever been.”

“There were definitely tough times where I doubted or questioned myself, but in the end there were signs that made me happy and proved that working full time was the right decision,” he said. she declared.