Sour rhetoric leads to sweet treats

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A cookie cutter designer in Hungary makes “HUGE’ profits in the United States

By Alexandra Meeks

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Small businesses and entrepreneurs worldwide are capitalizing on voters’ emotions across the electoral spectrum. Fanni Pataricza, who lives in Budapest, spends her days selling cookie cutters of Trump’s and Clinton’s faces to Americans. She has mastered the art of accurately producing the curves and lines of Trump’s and Clinton’s facial features in plastic cookie cutters. Pataricza has recognized the growing demand for political products in the United States, piggy-backing on a global consumer trend.

Pataricza began selling custom 3-D printed cookie cutters of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in January 2016 on Etsy, an online store for homemade goods. Almost 500 orders later, with each order averaging $30, her business, CopyPastry, is expanding. Pataricza didn’t plan on CopyPastry developing into a huge venture. She developed the idea with two friends and basically turned a joke among them into a money-maker. “We do not sell other political products or faces of any other politicians around the world,” Pataricza said in a telephone interview. “We are not that much into politics either. This is just fun for us."

Now, over 90 percent of CopyPastry’s customers live thousands of miles away from her hometown in Budapest. Distance doesn't stop her from noticing the political tension between the current U.S. presidential candidates. "With the Hillary and Trump cookie cutters, we can say almost everyone that is ordering them are from the USA. They care a lot about what’s happening and want something to show it.” Pataricza monitors the social trends of political actors and voters in the United States and uses this to learn how to appeal to voters’ hatred or admiration. “I am European and feel like the U.S. election is a show, more than any other country,” Pataricza said. “We looked for famous U.S. people who are interesting and from there it was easy to come up with Trump and Hillary.”

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I am European and feel like the U.S. election is a show, more than any other country.

— Fanni Pataricza, Budapest-based vendor

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The small CopyPastry team, manned by Pataricza and her two co-founders, expects sales to go up as November nears. They predict the tension and harsh rhetoric among Democrats and Republicans won’t ease up anytime soon, so they have created Trump and Hillary cookie cutters with angrier facial expressions to represent the increasing bitterness that they see from Hungary. As a group of young friends who consider themselves far removed from the details of American politics, they are focusing on business over politics to build a possible cookie cutter empire. Still, they still find ways to poke fun at the dangers of a Trump presidency. “Anyone that likes cookies must be a good man,” Pataricza says. “But at least cookie Trumps are harmless.”