Brooke Vaughn wants to bring Hoosier hospitality to the Centennial state.
The Indiana native is bringing her cookie and coffee shop Please and Thank You to Denver in the coming months. She’ll open the store at the former home of Maggie & Molly’s Bakery at 2908 E. Sixth Ave in Cherry Creek.
“Itap the best version of anything you can have,” she said. “And they are very American classics.”
Vaughn bought Maggie & Molly’s equipment out of auction after the business got seized for back taxes in December. The closed bakery started online in 2005 and opened its first brick-and-mortar store at the Cherry Creek spot in 2010. Please and Thank You signed a 10-year lease for the space a month ago.
Vaughn opened her first store in Louisville, Kentucky, 15 years ago. Back then, she had a full menu with sandwiches and salads along with the sweets. But reviews from Martha Stewart and the Boston Globe about her chocolate chip cookies led it to “accidentally” becoming a cookie-focused outfit.
“In our first 18 months of business, I had to cut the menu just to make space for butter in the fridge because people wanted the cookies,” she said.
In the years after, she expanded to several more stores around the area, and added stadium outposts inside the KFC Yum! Center in Louisville and the Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis for Indiana Pacers and Fever basketball games.
She’s grown the business to $4 million in sales annually, a number thatap steadily risen at least 20% a year.
“We’re Caitlin Clark’s favorite cookie,” Vaughn said of the WNBA star. “We just made her birthday cake last month.”
Five years ago, Vaughn moved to Denver, in part because she wanted to get away from the business and spend more time with her daughters. But now that the oldest is a second-semester senior at East High School, opening the Denver Please and Thank You is a way for her to get back in the game.
She hopes the “southern nostalgic” menu can become the new neighborhood bakery for Cherry Creek and the surrounding area. The shop slings a slew of sweets, including oatmeal and peanut butter cream pies, iced sugar cookies and pumpkin and zucchini loaves. It’ll also have an espresso bar to serve lattes with homemade syrups.
But the stars of the show are the chocolate chip cookies.
The main ingredients in those are Kentucky milled flour, which Vaughn said holds more humidity than Denver flours, and Michigan brown sugar, which is a little darker than the typical sugars due to its higher molasses count. She sources her butter from Europe and chocolate from Belgium.
“If you have time and great ingredients, then you can make something pretty extraordinary out of something normal,” she said.
The business’ name alludes to Vaughn’s expectations for both staff and customers.
“When you’re a barista, you often see your own customers more than you see your own mother. I feel like you should be nice to them, and they should be nice to you,” she said. “And if you name your business something nice, then you’re setting the tone for what you can expect when you open the door.”
Vaughn has also ramped up the wholesale arm of the business, going from 30 to 80 stores in the span of the year to sell tubes of frozen cookie dough. She’s mostly in midsize grocery stores, but locally she’s in Dana Monfortap Town Pump Provisions in Cherry Creek. She also hopes to be in Leevers Locavore and Marczyk Fine Foods at some point this year.
Please and Thank You also sells on Amazon, too, but thatap a much smaller arm of the business, she said.
“I don’t like to push people to that because I feel like the best experience you can get is making them at home or visiting one of our shops and having them fresh,” she said.
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