LSU mom Marcia Barton doesn’t think a box of cookies can fix everything, but she believes wholeheartedly in the power of encouragement.
This is what she thought for three years, before her impromptu cake pop delivery service bloomed into a full-fledged campus delivery service.
“It’s really a parent’s business,” Barton said of her new company, Love in a Box, which delivers homemade sweets and just about anything else a parent can suggest. “They named it. They were the ones who set the prices. I just happen to be the minion who is doing it.”
Barton, an LSU alumna and former University Laboratory School teacher, sold cake pops for parties and events for several years before a Facebook post by a mom of a lonely student prompted her to make a campus delivery.
Three years — and several deliveries — later, that mom decided to post a picture of the gift on the LSU Parents Facebook page.
“On the parents page on Sept. 19, someone posted a picture of the gift she sent her daughter, and everybody was like, ‘Wait a minute. How do I get in on this?’” Barton said.
Thus, Love in a Box was born.
Barton has two children at LSU — a senior and a freshman — who sometimes help her with sales and deliveries. Barton said she can relate to parents who want to do something special for their children’s birthdays or during exams.
It was Barton’s daughter who suggested the Birthday Box — a cake box filled with a parent’s order, as well as several other goodies to help a student “feel eight years old again.”
“It’s a lot of fun for me because now I have an empty nest,” Barton said. “It has been just wonderful to talk to parents and try to make a difference.”
But more than anything, Barton said she tries to emphasize the personalization of each delivery, whether that’s brainstorming ideas with parents over the phone or scanning their handwriting onto a birthday card.
“It’s a lot of fun to get a recipe from somebody who says, ‘These are my son’s favorite cookies. Can you take him a dozen?’” Barton said. “Anything they want.”
As a cottage industry, the bakery is run entirely from Barton’s home and must follow a list of state regulations dictating what she can and cannot cook and sell.
But that has not stopped her from catering to each parent’s specific order, including picking up sandwiches from a local deli.
“It’s very personal,” she said. “It’s almost like a concierge mom.”
Love in a Box has a Facebook page, and Barton is setting up a website. But to keep each order special, she said she would not be adding an “Order Now” button.
She said she doesn’t want to lose the interaction with each parent because of the website.
“Part of it is about ministering to parents, to say, ‘Tell me about your kid. Tell me what this is to them,’” Barton said. “I think it does the parent good to say it, and I also think it makes the gift a whole lot more personal.”

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Courtesy of Love in a Box