Most are 20-something females in their activewear, grouped together with their friends and giddy with excitement.

But it’s not a Taylor Swift concert or a new Shein outlet that has their hearts racing.

It’s a bakery.

Brisbane’s Brooki Bakehouse has become a cult phenomenon – catching not only the attention of locals, but the world.

The tiny cookie and cake shop, in the heritage-listed Stewart and Hemmant building, has amassed a whopping almost 3 million followers on social media and YouTube, with fans from as far away as the Dominican Republic, Netherlands, Singapore, the UK and US all obsessed with the sweet store.

Behind the eponymous brand is 32-year-old Brooke Saward, who first learnt to bake while jetsetting around the world as a solo female travel blogger with her blog World of Wanderlust. Obsessed with the sweets she found on her trips, she decided to learn how to make them, signing up to cooking classes in the likes of Paris and teaching herself how to bake from online videos.

In 2016, she returned home to Launceston, Tasmania, where she grew up, and transformed her passion for baking into sweets cafe Charlie’s Dessert House.

The business was an instant hit, with nothing like it in the region, drawing crowds every night for a taste of its macarons, cupcakes, cookies, coffee and shakes.

But Saward and her then-boyfriend, now fiance, Justice Bellamy, who worked as a landscape architect, dreamt of more and in late 2021 decided to move to Brisbane, where they believed the opportunities for growth were bigger, but the city was still small enough for them not to feel overwhelmed.

In May 2022, Saward attempted to recreate the success she’d had in Tasmania with Charlie’s – which is now owned and operated by her parents – and opened Brooki Bakehouse in Brisbane. But with an obscure location, void of foot traffic, and no family and friends in Queensland to help generate word of mouth, the business was only just breaking even.

“There would be days where I would really only just cover the wage of one other person – I wasn’t paying myself anything,” says Saward, who funded the store and its $250,000 build with the profit from selling her Launceston home during the Covid property boom.

“I definitely went home and cried and said to my boyfriend, ‘What have I done? This is so hard’.

“But if nothing else, it really forced me to go, ‘How do I make money from it?’, because it wasn’t working doing the same thing I did in Tasmania (with Charlie’s).”

So when her only staff member had been off sick with Covid for three weeks, she decided to set up a TikTok account and record a video of herself working in the bakery.

With her long, auburn hair pulled into a bun and chef’s whites on, she labelled the video “a day in the life of a bakery owner”, narrating her daily activities with her voice that’s as sweet as her desserts.

The first video attracted a few thousand views, the next more and the next even more, until suddenly she had millions watching her daily activities.

“We have people come in from all over Australia and literally all over the world to visit the bakery – it’s wild,” says Saward, who now sells 1000 cookies in the store alone each day; plus thousands more online.

“Some days (before TikTok) we would do hundreds of dollars (in sales) and now every day it’s thousands of dollars, so it’s a completely different business to what it was in the first six or eight months and that’s truly because of using social media.”

But to credit only social media would beselling the fearless, born-entrepreneur short.

Brooki’s success is also down to Saward’s novel thinking, passion and relentless work ethic. When TikTok first “blew up”, she had seemingly the whole country and the world wanting a taste of her cookies. Instead of hoping people would jump on a plane and travel for up to 24 hours for a visit, she started investigating how to take her cookies to the globe.

With no budget for branded packaging, she bought the smallest postage box from the post office and tested how many of her cookies would fit inside.

“I put three of my mini cookies in a box and I’m like, ‘OK great, here’s my product’,” she says.

She began with orders across Australia and New Zealand, and within a few months, was able to afford her own custom boxes from the sales. Unprecedented demand from the US, Canada and Singapore has now seen her move into those markets too, with sales building daily as word spreads about her baked goods.

But it hasn’t come without a brutal slog.

Saward works in the bakery up to 15 hours a day, six or seven days a week, then goes home and replies to the 300 emails the store receives daily. She wakes up at 4am or 5am to be in the shop half an hour later baking cakes, cookies and brownies. She is lucky to get six hours sleep each night and fuels herself on coffee, mini versions of her signature NYC choc-chip cookie, and a passion for what she is building.

“I genuinely love what I do,” she gushes.

“I know it sounds cliche but, honestly, it’s so true because I love coming into work every day; I love trying new things all the time and I love working with a team.

“I love training people – that to me is very rewarding – and feels to me like we’re creating something bigger than myself.”

And to create something bigger than herself is the goal. The ambitious dreamer, who says she has more ideas than she knows what to do with, wants Brooki to become a global brand synonymous with baking.

She’s already well on her way with her own range of Brooki Bakehouse merchandise, online masterclasses where she actually gives away her recipes, collaborations with some huge brands including Mecca and Warner Brothers, and soon, her very first cookbook, with Penguin Random House, which will be released in October.

“I love baking so much and I want to be in people’s kitchens, whether that’s on a video, on TikTok or giving you the exact recipe and showing you how to do it hands-on so you can copy that at home,” she says.

“I know I have a certain amount of time before I will be wanting to do other things, like have a family, so I think finding a business that I can still run and control and manage while I have a family is really important for my own personal self-esteem because I like being busy.

“I like being successful, I like creating, I like having a community, an audience, I love leading a team.

“Setting up a brand where I can facilitate that long-term is the ultimate goal for me, and showing women that you can have it all.”

This feminist approach to life is also what’s been behind much of her success, with women of all ages idolising her for her achievements and hard work, sending her daily messages of praise and support on her socials.

“For 10 years I was a solo female travel blogger, so my whole MO was showing women that you can go out and do it yourself,” she says.

“If I want to do something, I’m going to find out how to do it.

“I bought a townhouse and Googled how to rip up carpet and then I ripped up the carpet; and then how to sand floors and I sanded the floors. There are Bunnings videos you can watch for all of this and I have the same approach when it comes to business.

“It’s the same with why I want to share that knowledge online … because why shouldn’t you be able to access that information?”

This learn-as-you-go approach has largely served her well, but it hasn’t been totally without its failures.

“We’ve launched products that don’t sell. Some of the cake design styles haven’t worked, but you don’t have to be successful at everything,” she says.

“I don’t have a lot of shame in things not working out. It’s a lesson and you can kind of figure it out as you go.”

She says she developed this unabashed attitude from her parents, Kent and Tania, who worked in battery sales and motel management, respectively, before buying Charlie’s.

“I seem to have no fear when it comes to business and trying new things and I think that’s because my parents always said to me since I was small, ‘You can pump gas at the gas station if you want, whatever makes you happy’,” Saward says.

“There was no encouragement to go to university, there was no encouragement to open a business. They didn’t own a business; nobody in my family had a small business. There’s no one entrepreneurial that I’m taking after. But they gave me that freedom to do whatever I wanted. So I think that, in a nonsensical way, has pushed me into what I’m doing because they didn’t push me into anything.”

Her parents are also behind her cautious approach to finances, something that has ensured the growth of Brooki Bakehouse – even though rapid – has been sustainable.

“My parents have always said, ‘If you want it, you have to earn the money for it’,” she says.

“It’s the same with everything in the shop. If I want the packaging then I’m going to wait until I have $30,000 in the bank to pay for packaging. I’m not going to get a business loan, I’m not going to pay it and then hope that I earn the money.

“For everything, I have to physically have the money in my bank account before I buy it. I am the budget girly.”

She says not having any form of business loan also takes the pressure off having to succeed and allows her to simply focus on pleasing her customers and adapting to their wants. In fact, it’s the reason she switched her original business plan from focusing on cakes to cookies.

“Coming to Brisbane, we’ve got Agnes, Sprout, Jocelyn’s – so many great bakeries, so if you’re going to join the scene, you’ve got to be different and do something different, so I always wanted to focus on the cakes – and celebrations was my main goal,” Saward says.

“Then the cookies started selling really well. I never planned on selling cookies – only the NYC – that’s the only cookie I planned on selling, and that’s the only one we started selling initially, but then they just took off.”

She now offers a rotating roster of about 10 cookie flavours in store each day, with new mixes always being developed; while her online orders feature her bestsellers, such as red velvet, white chocolate macadamia, Nutella milk choc chip, and the NYC choc-chip walnut, in mini or chunky. A 1kg whopper can be bought in store (and ordered online for pick-up). She also sells brownies, slices, macarons, cupcakes and those aforementioned celebration cakes, of which the bakery makes about 50 each day.

With orders flooding in for all her sweets, Saward quickly outgrew the 41sq m shop’s tiny kitchen and she opened an additional production kitchen last year in Mt Gravatt. But within a year, she outgrew that too, and has just moved into a sizeable 406sq m facility in inner-city Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley, where she hopes her ever-expanding team can finally meet the demand from those around the world. It will also help facilitate her next big move – a second Brisbane store, and perhaps a Gold Coast shop.

“We’re just too busy (in store) with pick ups and customers, we’ve outgrown the space,” she says. With wait times of up to 45 minutes on some days just to enter the Valley bakery, she hopes the extra locations will help alleviate some of the queues at the Marshall St site.

“The first time I had a line was Good Friday in 2023,” she recalls, her face beaming with pride.

“The social media was getting big but we weren’t seeing it as much in store, it was more online.

“But on Good Friday, because it’s so expensive to pay people on public holidays, I was like, ‘I’ll just work by myself’, and I opened the door and there was a line to the corner.

“I hadn’t baked enough cookies. The oven is beeping. I’m about to vomit on the next person because I’m so nervous, and to every single person, with tears in my eyes, I was like, ‘Thank you so much for waiting’.”

While the line has not stopped since, with customers still queuing for freshly baked cookies straight out of the oven, you won’t find Saward taking this for granted.

“Every single morning I want to know how many people are waiting outside and I always ask if there’s a line before I say, ‘how many people’ because I genuinely don’t know when it’s going to stop or if it’s going to stop. I never think it’s a given,” she says.

It’s this humility and her genuine love for her customers (as well as the delicious baked goods) that keeps patrons coming back, with Saward spending hours each week chatting to fans on her social media. Communicating with her followers from behind a screen is also where the self-confessed extroverted introvert feels most comfortable.

“Connecting to people online is my level of connection,” she says.

“People say, ‘Can you film a-day-in-your-life on a day off?’, and I literally sit on the couch like a sloth. I don’t even talk to my partner (who has now joined the business as operations manager).

“I’m watching Real Housewives of somewhere, not doing anything. But I need to recharge my social battery after talking to people all week. So I guess being on the internet, it’s connecting with people in a way that’s manageable for me as an individual.”

That said, she insists nothing brings her more joy than meeting customers in real life, with many asking to have their photo taken with her like she’s a celebrity.

“That’s the funny thing about the internet, you’re putting so much of yourself out there and people are consuming it but you don’t get a lot of the interaction back,” she says.

“So when they come in store, it’s my favourite thing in the world because I get to meet the people who have made it happen.”

Her humility, gratitude, tenacity, passion and enduring hard work have also made it happen.

And with dreams of having her baking mixes in supermarkets, more cookbooks after her first this year, and additional stores, life is certainly looking pretty sweet for this cookie queen. ■