The Story Behind the Sunday Original Box

Every product has a starting point. Ours was fairly unglamorous: standing in a kitchen at an hour no reasonable person should be awake, staring at a tray of cookies that were, objectively, not good enough, and refusing to let it go.

The question behind it was simple, and slightly unhinged. What would a genuinely great cookie taste like if you made it the way you actually wanted to eat it, and stopped worrying about how long it could survive on a shelf? Most cookies are quietly engineered to last. We wanted one engineered to disappear.

What followed was a lot of butter. An amount of butter that would give a cardiologist pause. We went through more test batches than we are prepared to admit in writing, and a fair few of them were genuinely bad. There is one we now refer to only as The Incident. Then somewhere in the mess it clicked: real butter, chocolate good enough to eat straight from the packet, a crisp edge, a middle that stays soft, and just enough salt that you reach for a second before you have finished the first.

That became the Sunday Original Box.

Then came the part nobody warns you about, which is packaging. We wanted a box that felt like a gift before it was even open, which turns out to be a deep and slightly ridiculous rabbit hole. We argued about ribbon. We had strong feelings about box weight. At one point there was a proper debate about the exact shade of burgundy, conducted with the seriousness usually reserved for buying a house.

The first batch went out to a small group who agreed to be honest with us. They were honest. They also went quiet for a suspiciously long time, which we have chosen to read as their mouths being full.

That is the whole story, really. One stubborn question, an alarming volume of butter, and a refusal to send out anything we would not happily eat ourselves. The Original Box is where it all started, and it is still the one we are quietly proudest of.