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These married founders fled to Austin from Guatemala to find a home for their upstart brand. They still had miles to go.

- By Hans Schrei and Luis Gramajo

Leaving our home country of Guatemala as gay men three years ago meant escaping life in a hyper-conservative, developing country. We wanted to live freely as a family, so the decision to leave wasn't tough. The hard part came after we landed in Austin.

A condition of our visa required us to start a substantial business. And while Hans had founded an earlier iteration of our sweets brand, Wunderkeks, in Guatemala in 2012, U.S. consumers. had never heard of us. We needed to effectively start from scratch. Farmers' markets were a perfect entry point, because we didn't need an expensive storefront, and by 2020, we had landed the opportunity to host a pop-up at South by Southwest. Of course, we all know what happened next: The pandemic hit and the festival got canceled. That left us with 25,000 cookies to unload-fast. Lucky for us, Busy Philipps, an actress with more than two million social media followers, saw a tweet about our plight and retweeted it. In two hours, we sold 700 orders. We awoke to an e-commerce business that we never thought we would have; we hadn't even had a post office box back in Guatemala.