Brooklyn teen aims for 1,000 sales during 100th year of Girl Scout Cookies

To honor the 100th anniversary of the Girl Scout Cookie,one of thecountry’s top cookie sellers has set her sales goal at 1,000 boxes — crushing her 2014 record of over 700 boxes.

“My entire living room gets flooded with Girl Scout Cookies. I put little thank you notes on each box,”15-year-old Jeovanna DeShong-Connertold Metro. “You have to be organized. You have to be networking — finding connections for people who are want to take the [order forms] to their jobs.”

The Brooklyn teen gets her foot in the door early where people tend to gather and are in charitable moods, such as her godmother’s church choir rehearsal. She also engages in passive promotion by simply wearing her Girl Scout sweatshirt to school in at Poly Prep Country Day School in Bay Ridge.

“A lot of people want to buy cookies just from that,” she said.

The century-old tradition to raise money for the troop activities and suppliesbegan in 1917 with their first recorded bake sale, just five years after the first meeting of the Girl Guide troop in Savannah, Georgia. Operation cookie went coast-to-coast in 1937, contracting bakers from around the country to produce for the Girl Scout Cookie boxed brand.

Now only two bakers share the cookie production — both coming up with their own version of the new S’mores cookie for 2017.

In 2015, the Girl Scouts of America made $800 million in cookie sales. Scouts sold 1.274 million boxes of cookies in the Greater New York area alone, said Meridith Maskara, who runs the cookie program as chief operating officer of Girl Scouts of New York. She added that Samoas and Thin Mints remain all-time favorites.

A big driver is the two-year-old Digital Cookie platformthat allows girls to set up their own online sales portals.

“These girls learn the language of business, and by the time they are in high school, or when they go for that first job they have an advantage over other applicants. They don’t have to be trained in customer service — they already have those people skills, money skills, business ethics,” Maskara said.

“The girls on the executive committee are the brightest and have original methods, like scheduling appointments to do a sales pitch to a board room, and sell very confidently to the people who would make some of us adults pass out,” she said.

DeShong-Connor is a member of thatExecutive Cookie Committee, a roundtable of the country’s top saleswomen. She said her intention this year goes beyond moving cookies to focus more on the girls behind the boxes.

Together with another committee member, DeShong-Connerwants to initiate the Growing Up In Cookies program, which focuses on the transition from sales as a Brownie (grades 2-3) to Cadets (grades 6-8).

“It’s easy to sell as a little girl because all you have to do is look cute and smile. For me the change that comes from being a younger Girl Scout to an older Junior was a little different,” she said.

“At 13, girls are already a little insecure, maybe their friends don’t think it’s cool, and that’s where we see lower sales. That’s something we can target.”

DeShong-Conner sees her cookieexperience leading to owning her own publishing company someday.

“I have seen so many generations of girls who have gone on to do big things and I really want to live up to that.”