Dough and Drive: She Has the Recipe for Cookie Shop Dream

Connie Bass wants to be “the next cookie rage,” a new Mrs. Fields, more famous than Amos.

To her neighbors and customers on the Watts-Willowbrook border, she’s already pretty important. “Teacher, inspiration, role model” is how one friend put it, watching Bass dispense fresh cookies and a little entrepreneurial know-how from her unusual gourmet baked-goods store, Connie’s Cookies, at the Kenneth Hahn Plaza.

About a year and a half ago, Bass rounded up friends and family members to help raise the $100,000 she needed to open the place. A dozen in all, they are now limited partners. The Drew Economic Development Corp., a nonprofit organization that promotes black business, contributed some money and its expertise.

‘Effort of Love’

“It was an effort of love by people who saw the need to have something like this in the community,” Bass said. “Black people are often viewed as not working together, not trusting each other. I wanted to show that we can.”

Bass sells 400 cookies a day over the counter, in varieties that range from chocolate chip to a combination of butterscotch-chunk and macadamia nut called Connie’s Potpourri. The cookies retail for $6.50 a dozen. She also distributes another 50 dozen wholesale to supermarkets and gourmet shops citywide.

But the numbers do not include the countless cookies she gives away. The other day, a person known to Bass only as “the man who sleeps under the bridge” stopped by for his daily half-dozen.

“You’re looking good . . . cleaned up,” she said as she handed him a package with her red and white store logo, no questions asked.

Then Bass let a few neighborhood kids take a free sample of their favorite.

“If a child comes in without money, we give them a cookie anyway,” she said. “Because then the child will come back when he has money. He’ll be very proud to say, ‘Here’s a dollar, keep the change.’ It’s happened a few times.”

Bass donates all leftover cookies to area hospitals, churches and homeless shelters and occasionally gives to bake-offs and soul-food festivals. During the school year, she invites local students to the store and talks about what it’s like to run a company.

“Black children need to be more business conscious . . .” she said.

“Black people have to come together and correct our ills. This is my contribution.”

On Saturday morning, a group from an area youth center gathered for an informal baking lesson--and an opportunity to taste some cookie batter.

“Take control,” Bass instructed 9-year-old Jemesha Reece as she struggled with a steel dough scooper. “Take control.”

The girl tried again, and a perfect dome of dough tumbled onto a sheet of waxed paper.

Ran Catering Business

Control is Bass’ byword, she said. A former deputy sheriff who raised three daughters and a grandchild on her own in Los Angeles, she claimed that a conscious choice to “take control” of her life enabled her to build a business out of a dream.

For the last eight years, she has also run a successful catering company in Inglewood.

Twice married, twice divorced, Bass at 49 described herself as a workaholic.

“I work 28 hours a day,” Bass said enthusiastically.

“In my sleep, I’m thinking about the business.”

At her retail store she takes in an average of $250-$300 a day, including income from homemade sandwiches and beverages. She has a staff of five, including two of her three daughters. Bass admitted that she needs to net about double that to break even and that the location may be a problem, but said she has every intention of succeeding.

People were skeptical when she chose to open in Watts, she said.

“My friends said I was crazy. I told them, ‘Beverly Hills is flooded with gourmet shops of all kinds, and everybody there is on diets. Black people love rich food. Let’s go to a place where there aren’t any gourmet shops for them.’ ”

Timing may be another challenge for Bass--and other upstarts in the hotly competitive gourmet cookie business.

According to Ken Frydman, food editor of Nation’s Restaurant News, a trade journal, “It’s not like the old days when Amos, Debby (Fields) and David (of David’s Cookies) started. In those days, you could open a store on a shoestring budget and just give away your product. Now to succeed, you have to demonstrate you can build a national corporation, not just a ma and pa.”

But one exception to this may be gourmet cookie shops that open in “transitional areas,” Frydman said. He said stores in these areas can grow with the business in the community.

Skip Cooper, past president of the Black Business Assn. of Los Angeles, of which Bass is a member, said she exemplifies a trend by black women to start their own businesses.

“I think black women are spreading their wings entrepreneurial-wise all over the country,” Cooper said, and added: “I think she is going to be a total success.”