How Brand Partnerships More Perfect Than Buttercream Frosting Lead To Success For Magnolia Bakery
Magnolia Bakery’s sweet treats might just be more exciting than Paris Fashion Week, but they aren’t the only thing keeping the brand beloved and in business. Here’s how e-commerce and brand partnerships have led to 30 years of success while so many others in the food industry have shut their doors.
Following the massive success of a well-timed, 20-year reboot of Mean Girls in 2024, The Devil Wears Prada was revived for a sequel this spring. Both films are timeless cult classics, and while people tend to hate franchise culture in the movie industry, this is the one everyone has been asking for.
In one of the original The Devil Wears Prada film's most iconic scenes, there’s a significant shout-out you might miss if you don’t have a brand-level of discernment: As Emily battles a cold and an eating disorder ahead of Paris Fashion Week, Andy (played by Anne Hathaway) rushes out of work to buy Magnolia Bakery’s iconic banana pudding for her boyfriend, Nate, for his birthday.
“I need to get to Magnolia Bakery before it closes”.
The moment says a lot about Magnolia Bakery’s brand status. One, it’s a quintessential New York City hot spot. Two, it might just be more exciting than Paris Fashion Week.
But this wasn’t the first time a piece of pop culture focusing on the fashionable lives of New York women mentioned the chain.
While the wildly successful bakery was founded in 1996, the brand became iconic in 2001 when Carrie and Miranda ate pink cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery in Sex and the City. To this day, you can still order a 6-pack of treats named after this moment on their website.
Still from Sex And The City, Season 3, Episode 5
While their revenue numbers in the early 2000s are still a mystery because the brand was, and still is, privately owned, we do know that one mention was enough to catapult it into massive success. Apparently, after its appearance on Sex and the City in July 2000, the NYC West Village location featured on the show went from a cozy bakery to a tourist destination drawing lines around the block.
And really, can we actually say this and the brand’s subsequent mention in The Devil Wears Prada have no connection to its first major acquisition in 2006? No.
I first became familiar with the brand back in 2021 when one of my friend’s roommates became the manager of their West Hollywood location. If you haven’t had the chance to experience it for yourself, I’m here to say even the leftover banana pudding she’d sometimes bring me at the end of the day is well worth the hype.
After listening to a Sky Society podcast appearance by Sara Gramling, their Head of Brand + Community, I was reminded of my brand affinity and felt like doing a little deep dive into all things Magnolia Bakery.
Here’s what I found and learned:
The Positive Side of COVID-19
While the bakery began with a singular NYC location, they’ve since expanded to 50+ locations. Interestingly enough, only 10 of them are located in the United States as of early 2026.
I already mentioned that exact figures are hard to pin down, but according to a February 2026 QSR Magazine report, Magnolia’s revenue has doubled over the past five years. Given the 2011 findings from Crain’s New York and Entrepreneur magazine indicating the brand pulled in $20-$23 million that year from 7 company-owned stores, each averaging $3 million in revenue, we can project their annual revenue to be upwards of $40 million at this point.
Assuming all numbers are correct, well, Magnolia Bakery is doing quite well for itself even if you’ve never heard of them.
I think there are two major reasons for why and how this brand with almost no physical presence in the U.S. is doing so well. One, because of the internet. Two, COVID-19 wasn’t bad for every industry.
Image courtesy of @jerica.feasts on Instagram
As the world closed its doors, Magnolia Bakery doubled down on its 2011 addition of e-commerce to their business portfolio.
In an interview with Sky Society, Sara Gramling, Magnolia Bakery’s Head of Brand + Community, talked about how Magnolia’s created a silver lining to a terrible shared situation by allowing for both local and nationwide delivery. The ideology behind that? People still had birthdays, anniversaries, and major events worth celebrating from home with a great cake even if they couldn’t go outside.
In one Facebook post made a week after most of America went into lockdown, the brand literally says, “Birthdays won’t stop for quarantine!”
And the well-timed campaign led to massive success. According to the Wall Street Journal, the brand’s online sales tripled in 2020. E-commerce consultant group Growth By Sabir claims to have helped the brand generate $10 million in nationwide delivery revenue in 11 months.
More recent data suggests the bakery made $1.27M in online sales in December 2025. Given that December is likely their annual sales peak due to holiday events and gifting, and with a lack of publicly verifiable revenue data, we can guess that $10-$15M of Magnolia’s sales come through e-commerce.
After reading all that, you might just assume the brand’s legacy success is just due to good product, unpredictable events like a global pandemic, and luck on the sets of The Devil Wears Prada and Sex and the City. But you’d also be wrong. There were so many other smart decisions that led to the brand’s current status — as well as major areas for improvement.
Let’s start with the good stuff.
Combos More Perfect Than Buttercream Frosting
Boy Smells x Magnolia Bakery Collab Courtesy of Late Checkout
While we’ve all seen brand collaborations before, like when Doritos and Taco Bell teamed up to create the Doritos Locos Tacos. But I recently learned why brands work together.
It’s not just to make money, according to a course from The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on Global Marketing for Iconic Brands, though increasing revenue is almost always the end goal of any major corporation.
When brands team up, it’s usually to build cultural equity for everyone in the partnership by introducing new culturally symbolic products in iconic categories or aligning themselves with other iconic brands.
And a great brand partnership, like many great relationships, is based on goodness of fit, mutual benefit, and a shared vision.
It’s not enough to just bring two logos together and stick them on a label. For these brand collaborations to be successful, they need to make sense and be culturally congruent — or skeptical consumers won’t spend a dime and each brand’s reputation will be tarnished.
One thing Magnolia Bakery does well is brand partnerships. Let’s explore a few, but not all, because they’ve got range.
Glossier x Magnolia Bakery Collab
Glossier’s Balm Dotcom is, essentially, a well-branded and well-marketed $16 flavored vaseline in a tube. It’s a novelty, just like getting a pint of banana pudding. Neither are essentials, and that’s what makes having them oh so sweet. Nonetheless, somehow both luxuries are accessible enough to the average person that they’ve become cult favorites.
Glosser x Magnolia Bakery Lip Balm Collaboration
It’s cute, it’s fun, it helps make a special-occasion dessert — and Magnolia Bakery — a part of your everyday life with minimal effort.
Monos x Magnolia Bakery Luggage Collaboration
While most fashion and food brand collabs end up erring on the costume side of ‘camp’, this one was tastefully done.
The brands partnered to create a decadent collection of luggage and bags inspired by much-loved desserts. All pieces featured a high-gloss finish and came in one of two limited-edition colourways that pay homage to Magnolia Bakery’s world-famous Banana Pudding and rich buttercream Purple Icing.
Monos x Magnolia Bakery Luggage and Bag Collection
This product collaboration was a great example of quiet luxury.
Each piece of luggage costs between $320 and $395 dollars despite having almost no recognizable logos. The only way you’d know it’s expensive is because the quality of the product is that good, you’ve heard of this niche luggage brand, or you’re a superfan of Magnolia Bakery.
And considering the bakery has limited U.S. locations and sells the $55 version of the $17 vanilla cake you can find at your local grocery store, even knowing what Magnolia Bakery is is a wealth signal. One that is backed up by the brand being a talking point and culture nod in the two series I mentioned earlier.
Venturing into the travel space alone was a natural fit for the bakery. As Adweek mentioned, “Magnolia Bakery has had such a presence in popular culture over the past couple of decades that it has inspired actual trips to the Big Apple just for a taste of its famed treats.” The bakery has no physical presence in 99% of the US, but they’ve got a LaGuardia International Airport location if that tells you anything.
Incredibles x Magnolia Bakery Edible Cannabis Collaboration
This is the most shocking collab they’ve ever done, and yet it just works.
Magnolia Bakery partnered with the cannabis brand incredibles (a subsidiary of Green Thumb Industries) to release a line of THC-infused chocolate bars. The product collaboration featured two different chocolate bars meant to taste just like their red velvet and famous banana pudding — and at first you could only buy it at dispensaries in Illinois, Nevada, and Massachusetts. Considering they don’t even have a storefront in Nevada, that’s noteworthy.
incredibles x Magnolia Bakery Edible Cannabis Collection
This move helped family-friendly brand Magnolia Bakery reach a more controversial market that happens to be their perfect customer base. They’re not just selling chocolate bars, they’re selling them to a segment of American consumers with the luxury to buy top-shelf, brand-name cannabis without any stigma or punishment at all. You also can’t ignore obvious stereotypes like cannabis users love food.
The results went beyond profit, netting Magnolia Bakery millions in media exposure without doing anything but licensing their flavors. It was a genius idea for everyone involved.
How Brand Partnerships Lead To Brand Longevity For Magnolia Bakery
As cool as it is that Magnolia’s has partnered with so many excellent brands to develop themed products they don’t even sell in their own stores, they didn’t do it just to be cool. They didn’t collaborate with Glossier just because they think the world needs more lip gloss.
They did it to increase revenue while maintaining brand integrity.
A bakery like Magnolia’s can only have success within limits if it wants to stay authentic. Quality and consistency are essential features of the business.
Magnolia Bakery CEO Steve Abrams said, “We want to have the same look, the same taste, et cetera. It’s very hard to do. That’s why we don’t feel we could be 5,000 stores. So when we found we could find partners like that, that are willing to do it, then we could do this properly. But maybe it’ll be 150, 200 stores worldwide. We don’t want to cannibalize our own sales and we want to keep the exclusivity.”
So for Magnolia’s, the point isn’t to sell as many cupcakes as possible. It’s not to open a storefront in every mid-tier suburb like they’re Nothing Bundt Cakes.
And if you can’t sell more sweets, you can sell really tastefully done candles and suitcases with other brands your loyal customers also love. They already buy lip gloss and more for themselves or as gifts for the people serving Magnolia Bakery treats at their housewarming party or Galentine’s Day.
While we don’t know for sure, it’s safe to guess a significant portion of the bakery’s revenue must come from these brand partnerships. But more important than just being good for business, these collaborations were so well done that they make people happy. That’s what actually makes any product worth something at the end of the day and why these were successful launches.
It’s the fact that Magnolia Bakery can consistently whip up perfect sweet treats and even sweeter collaborations that has kept them beloved, well-respected, and in business 30 years later as so many others in the food industry have shut their doors.
Chamberlain Coffee x Magnolia Bakery: The Collaboration The World Needs
And while they need no help from me, I couldn’t help but come up with the Magnolia Bakery collaboration of my dreams.
Magnolia Bakery has a Los Angeles storefront, and Chamberlain Coffee just launched their first brick-and-mortar cafe in West LA in May 2026.
It should be clear based on the recurring theme in all these partnerships that the bakery’s claim to fame is their banana pudding. I think more people than just me would love to see the brands team up to release a matcha banana pudding flavor.
Image (and accompanying recipe) from Jaja Bakes
I don’t live in Los Angeles anymore, but the idea is so unique I’d be jealous of anyone who got to try this.
This collaboration would make strategic sense for both brands as Magnolia looks to maintain local authority in Los Angeles and Chamberlain Coffee begins to capitalize on its online cultural authority. It would also just be delicious, and isn’t that enough when it comes to selling food?
Regardless, whatever partnership Magnolia Bakery does next will be worth paying attention to based on their excellent track record.