There’s a business cliché that goes, “Your network is your net worth.” For the Theater District’s Schmackary’s team, it has proven to be true.
The perfect storm brewed when the cookie company, through the help of their Broadway industry connections, scored a lucrative product placement deal on Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building, which boasted a star-studded cast including the likes of Selena Gomez, Steve Martin and Martin Short. Around the same time as the season aired, the company announced on its 12th anniversary that it was launching its franchise business. At the rate it’s growing, its team members believe it’s on the way to becoming the next big thing.
“Honestly, it was a very kismet thing that happened,” its founder Zachary Schmahl tells What Now New York. “All the signs pointed that we were in the right place at the right time.”
The company was born over a decade ago when the Nebraska-born actor moved to the city that never sleeps in hopes of getting his big break on Broadway. While trying to get his foot in the door, he started experimenting with baking cookies out of his small studio apartment.
Within months, his side hustle became a full-time production. Zachary launched his flagship brick-and-mortar in a 750-square-foot space at 362 West 45th Street in the Theater District, where its operations have been based ever since.
Schamakary’s bills itself as a community-focused bakery that offers home baked goods that are “familiar yet original,” while also serving up some good ole’ Midwestern hospitality. It offers over 100 unique cookie flavors from the classic chocolate cookie and peanut butter cup to unique movie and Broadway-themed concepts like Elphaba’s cookies and cream and Rosemary’s Baby.
Now, the company is in the process of launching its franchise, with five stores expected to pop up in the Manhattan and Brooklyn area as soon as this summer. The team is also launching their first out-of-state operation in Englewood, New Jersey, this spring.
Their first-ever franchisee, Alex Larceny, a New Yorker with a padded entrepreneurial resume, told What Now New York that he had been eagerly looking for about a year to invest in a franchise before landing on Schmackary’s.
“I didn’t want to own a Subway or McDonalds,” Alex explains. “I wanted to be a part of something that was already established in New York City with really big growth potential and big ambition.”
However, it wasn’t until he visited the store with his then-four-year-old son and met the owner duo that he knew he found something special.
“I really thought walking into a Schmackary’s, when I brought my child, my four-year-old boy, it’s really like walking into someone’s living room,” Alex said. “It’s not just a quick in-and-out transactional experience. People like being around the store, [which] is very important to me.”
He adds that he thinks Schamakary’s is “right on the doorstep, with only one store, of becoming a household name” akin to local competitors who came before it including Levain Bakery – which similarly got a special Hollywood shoutout on Jenny Han’s book-to-film adaptation of To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before: Always and Forever on Netflix – and Crumbl Cookies, which blew on social media, particularly TikTok.
The team contributes its success to its commitment to building strong ties to its local community.
Zachary explains that while building up his company, he intentionally sought out to foster a relationship with his first love, Broadway, where he already had friends through his first career iteration. He did so by sending cookies for show openings, which led to the company being crowned “the official cookie of Broadway.”
“Everyone is going for something that’s Instagrammable and looks good in pictures, but they are forgetting the emotional attachment behind what the product is and what it means, so we are here to bridge that gap,” said Jonny Polizzi, Zachary’s husband and business partner.
The success of their business model is reflected in their sales. The team shared that it is making over $2 million annually, which Jonny says is “unheard of among their competition.”
In fact, their relationship with Broadway is what helped the team score the Hulu deal.
It all began when Zachary got a call from a friend, who was a former Broadway star, that was on the writing team for Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building.
“He called me and was like, ‘Hey, man, would you like to be on a TV show?’ and I was like, ‘C’mon, man, of course,’’” the actor-turned baker said.
His friend explained that the writing team was planning a plot line around putting a play on Broadway and wanted to plant “easter eggs” for fans.
“Everyone from Los Angeles was like, ‘What the f**k is Schmackary’s?’” Zachary jokes.
However, the writing team quickly realized that it was the perfect fit for making a real-life reference to the theater industry, but, still, the former actor didn’t want to get his hopes up.
“They told me about it, and I was like ‘Yeah, yeah, it sounds great, obviously we want to be involved, it sounds so much fun, but, you know, so much of this stuff ends up on the cutting room floor,” he says. “We didn’t know exactly how big it was going to be.”
It wasn’t until the season was released that the Scmackary’s team found out just how instrumental their brand was going to be in the show.
“After I signed the NDAs with Disney and all that stuff, they were able to tell me what was going on, and [his friend] said, ‘This is going to change your company.’”
Jonny added: “We knew we would have an appearance on maybe one or two episodes, but we didn’t realize that we are going to be strung along throughout the whole season.”
