In 1977, 20-year-old Debbi Fields had no business experience, but she did have a chocolate chip cookie recipe she believed in.
Fields, then a young housewife, opened her first cookie shop in Palo Alto, California, that year. Called Mrs. Fields’ Chocolate Chippery, the store offered something unusual for the time: oversized chocolate chip cookies served soft and warm from the oven.
There was just one rather significant problem. Nobody was buying them. By noon on opening day, Fields hadn’t sold a single cookie.
Years later, Fields recalled to the Los Angeles Times that her husband Randy Fields had predicted she wouldn’t even make $50 in sales that day. As the hours passed without a customer, it looked increasingly likely that he was right.
Instead of waiting behind the counter, Fields loaded up a tray with freshly baked cookies and headed outside. She began giving the cookies away to people on the street, essentially turning free samples into an impromptu marketing campaign.
It worked.
Debbi Fields attends The New York City Fair on June 19, 1983 at Bloomingdale’s in New York City.Ron Galella / Getty Images
People followed Fields back to the store to buy more, and she ended her otherwise disastrous first day with $75 in sales. That modest sum was the beginning of what would become the Mrs. Fields cookie empire.
Fields had been baking since she was a young teenager and had spent years tinkering with chocolate chip cookies. But when she decided to turn that passion into a business, she faced considerable skepticism. According to the University of New Hampshire’s Rosenberg International Franchise Center, Fields approached several banks before securing financing to open her first shop.
Mrs. Fields didn’t stay a one-store operation for long.
By 1986, less than a decade after Fields walked onto the street with that tray of free cookies, the company had 350 stores in 25 states as well as locations in Canada, England, Japan, Australia and Hong Kong. Fields told the Los Angeles Times at the time that the company was expected to do more than $100 million in business that year.
And sampling, the desperate tactic Fields used when no one would buy a cookie on opening day, remained part of the company’s strategy. In a 1987 profile, the Los Angeles Times followed Fields as she visited one of her stores and enthusiastically praised a manager for handing out samples.
What began as a way to salvage a terrible first day had become part of the formula behind one of America’s most recognizable cookie brands.
Nearly 50 years after Fields opened that first shop in Palo Alto, Mrs. Fields remains in business, selling the soft-baked cookies that launched the company in 1977.
Related: Skinny Mixes Launches 3 New Sugar-Free Flavors For the Dirty Soda Craze
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