Student-Run Sunday Bagels Sells 200 Bagels in 18 Minutes at Oxford Market

Sunday Bagels cleared 200 hand-made sourdough bagels in 18 minutes at the Oxford Community Market's Old Armory Pavilion on March 24, a sell-out pace that would have been unimaginable just four months ago when co-founder Lizzy Lamarche was leaving an online order form open for days at a time.

The seven-month-old business is run by Andrew Vallone, a 2025 University of Mississippi entrepreneurship graduate, and Lamarche, a UM senior majoring in communication sciences and disorders. Every bagel the pair sells is made by hand using recipes Vallone developed himself.

The March 24 rush was not a fluke. Sunday Bagels had debuted at the Oxford Community Market just one week earlier, on March 17, and sold out that booth within 30 minutes. Before either market appearance, Vallone and Lamarche were running the operation entirely out of Vallone's apartment, filling Sunday orders through a form that often stayed open for days before it closed out.

"In the beginning, it was not selling out by any means," Lamarche said. "Most times, the order form would be open for a couple days."

The turning point arrived on Feb. 22, when Gracen Rinaudo, a senior integrated marketing communications major at Ole Miss, posted a TikTok review of Sunday Bagels. The video accumulated more than 21,000 views and 1,377 likes. Vallone put the number slightly higher, recalling it as roughly 25,000 views, and described the effect bluntly: "One girl made a TikTok about us that got like 25,000 views, and it just blew us up. The next week we posted the link, we sold out in four minutes."

The viral moment forced a venue change. "We decided we needed to find somewhere a little bigger to sell out of that wasn't my apartment, so we came to the market," Vallone said.

The growth nearly never happened. Vallone had considered walking away from Sunday Bagels entirely when early sales failed to turn a profit. "I didn't really think it was worth it because we weren't turning a profit at the end of each week," he said. "Then, it just kind of started to flip, and we started selling out."

The momentum also rewrote Vallone's post-graduation plans. He had not intended to stay in Oxford after finishing his entrepreneurship degree in May 2025, but the business's trajectory kept him here. The Oxford Community Market at the Old Armory Pavilion is now Sunday Bagels' primary sales channel, with small catering orders handled separately on Sundays.