By Brandon Love, founder of Crumble Co and Bewilderment
If you knew us as Crumble Co and wondered where we went: hi. It’s still us. In 2023, I brought our fragrance business under the Bewilderment name. The change came after years of customer confusion, exhausting attempts to resolve it, and a period of loss that left very little room for another fight.
This is my account of that experience. It was expensive, painful, and a lot less glamorous than “we felt inspired to refresh the logo.”
We made fragrance. Our inbox thought we made cookies.
When Crumbl Cookies appeared, the similarities caught my attention: the name, the pink branding, and a rotating lineup of creations. From where I stood, it felt uncomfortably close to the identity we’d built for Crumble Co.
I can’t say whether anyone used us as inspiration or arrived at similar ideas independently. What I can describe is the confusion our team dealt with.
As the cookie chain grew, people started contacting us about cookie orders, refunds, and deliveries. Some days, we received more than a hundred messages meant for a company in an entirely different industry.
Imagine opening your fragrance company’s inbox and finding yourself doing unpaid customer support for cookies you have never baked.
We wanted to help our own customers. Instead, we were spending time explaining that we couldn’t locate someone’s missing dozen. Funny once. Less funny when it becomes part of the workday.
Trying to get the confusion addressed
We reached out to the cookie company. My experience was a cycle of assurances, continued confusion, and increasing frustration. I did not feel we were getting a workable resolution.
As the exchange became more strained, I felt warned away rather than helped. We sought legal advice, but pursuing a dispute meant committing resources and energy we didn’t have to spare.
I’m including the correspondence screenshots shared with the original post so readers can see the exchanges alongside my recollection.
There was a whole life happening behind the business
During that period, I lost four family members within months, including two who had worked alongside me. My mother became ill, and I moved a thousand miles to be closer to a hospital.
It all sucked. There isn’t a prettier sentence that makes it more accurate.
Grief, the upheaval of the pandemic, and the strain on the business left me with very little capacity for a prolonged fight over our name. What might look straightforward from the outside was happening inside a family that was already hurting.
We kept trying to make Crumble Co work. But the confusion continued, and some people even began calling us the copycats. Watching a name I’d built with my family become harder for our own customers to find was heartbreaking.
Why Bewilderment?
I already had a side project called Bewilderment, a gift shop. In 2023, I decided to bring everything together under that name and give the business room to move forward.
A rebrand sounds tidy until you’re the person paying for it, changing things over, and helping customers recognize you again. It was stupidly costly. It was also a way out of a situation that had become exhausting.
Crumble Co was part of my family’s history. Letting go of the name did not mean that history stopped mattering. It meant choosing where to put the energy we had left.
We are not going back to the old name. Bewilderment is who we are now, and I love what we’re building here.
What I want people to understand
My frustration is about the confusion we experienced, the time it consumed, and how it felt to ask a much larger company for help without getting the outcome we needed.
I don’t know what the business might have become if things had unfolded differently. That is one of the painful parts. But I can tell our story without pretending to know somebody else’s intentions.
I wish the experience had been handled with more care. I wish our small team had not carried so much of the burden. And I wish I’d had more strength to deal with it at the time. Looking back, I also know I was grieving and doing what I could.
Still us. More room to be ourselves.
To everyone who followed us through the change: thank you. And if you lost track of us, I’m glad you found your way back.
We’re still queer-owned, still colorful, still opinionated, and still drawn to the artists, makers, and wonderfully strange ideas that make this work worth doing.
The difficult chapter belongs in our history. It does not get to write every chapter after it.
With love,
Brandon Love
Founder of the original Crumble Co & Bewilderment