High-tech way to sell Girl Scout cookies

“These are some of the brightest, best girls we have,” said Alice McDonough, Katie Genari’s mother, about four local Girl Scouts who took the initiative to create a video to promote their world-famous cookies. “We’ve got the crème de la crème here.”

Katie and her friends from Girl Scout Media Girls, Kavita Gera, Carlie Mendoza and Christina Mendoza, now call themselves the Cookie Chicks. Where did the idea develop? At a cookie booth sale, of course.

“We were at the mall selling cooking for the first day of the kickoff . . . and we decided to just make a little video for ourselves,” said Carlie. “We were introducing ourselves as superheroes and Kavita said, ‘We’re yummy and we know it.’” This would become the chorus to their cookie song.

Katie sat down at her kitchen table the next day and started to write lyrics to the tune of LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It.” After some tweaks by the other Cookie Chicks, the girls were ready for their first show and filmed their live Green Acres Mall performance on Jan. 28.

“People were coming up to us in the mall after and asking us to sing a couple lines,” remembers Kavita. “They were asking for an encore,” added Kavita’s mother, Sejal Gera. That’s when the Chicks knew it was time to make the music video.

Carmel Mendoza, Christina and Carlie’s mother, filmed clips for the video at Speno Park in East Meadow, on the Long Beach boardwalk, at the mall and in a kitchen, but the Cookie Chicks had sole creative direction. “I’m just holding the camera and they’re telling me what to do,” said Mendoza.

The winter was mild, but in the true fashion of Murphy’s Law, everything that could go wrong, did. It was snowing when the Cookie Chicks were at the beach and raining when they were at the park. And, after Carlie and Christina edited the video from home, it needed to be converted into a different format before it could be posted to social-networking sites.

There were bumps along the way, but the music video came together in less than two month.

“I’m very proud of them,” said Carmel Mendoza. “They were very respectful of each others idea [and] you don’t see that one is the star. All four have equal ownership.”