Twenty Years of Sweet Success

A job scooping ice cream while attending Tufts led Amy Simmons to Austin, Texas, where her popular ice cream chain celebrates 20 years of business.

Medford/Somerville, Mass. [11.8.04] With a recipe that combines two helpings of tastiness with one helping of irreverence and a sprinkling of savvy, Tufts graduate Amy Simmons has turned a college job scooping ice cream into a multi-million dollar enterprise in the hip, high-tech enclave of Austin, Texas.

"Austin is so incredibly supportive," she told the University of Texas-Austin’s Daily Texan. "For a town that's almost a million people, it's a tight little community."

And it’s a community that loves its ice cream. “Amy’s Ice Creams” – which employs 133 people at eight stores in Austin, two in Houston, and one in San Antonio – went from selling 125,000 servings of ice cream in 1984 to 1,125,000 last year, earning gross sales of $4.5 million, the Austin American-Statesman reported.

This month, Amy’s Ice Creams celebrated its 20-year anniversary with hundreds of former employees returning for a weekend full of fun, food, raffles, and dancing. Amy’s also gave out free ice cream to customers on November 1.

"It's like a high school reunion as you'd want it to be, but never is," Simmons told the Daily Texan.

For Simmons, a career revolving around 14 percent butterfat ice cream didn’t seem in the cards while a pre-med major at Tufts.

From 1979 to 1984, the Michigan native scooped ice cream at Steve’s Ice Cream in Somerville and helped expand the franchise to Florida and Manhattan. But after the company was bought out, she soured to corporate culture and decided to open her own store.

Plans of eventually attending medical school quickly melted.

After a disappointing experience in London, Simmons and her business partner at the time, Scott Shaw, came to Austin after reading about the town in a magazine article. They quickly decided to set up shop in the college town – writing a hot check for the first month’s rent.

"In the third year, I thought: 'Hey I'm supposed to grow up and go to medical school now,'" Simmons told the American-Statesman, but compared to a doctor’s life, she called running an ice cream chain “paradise.”

Though Simmons got her MBA from UT-Austin, her management style is far from corporate. She purposely seeks employees that don’t fit into a button-down mold.

"Back in the beginning, a lot of the employees were drama students," former employee Andrew Dugas told the Daily Texan. "Amy allowed for creative craziness to go on as long as it didn't override professionalism. If it could be done, we were doing it."

Simmons actively seeks out dynamic workers, using something she calls the “paper bag test” – applicants are given a white paper bag and told to bring it back with information about them.

Employees have met the challenge by transforming the bag into a makeshift jack-in-the-box or returning it to Simmons via helium balloon.

"It was not an 'a-ha' moment at the time, but we just decided to keep doing it," Simmons explained to the American-Statesman.

Some of the chain’s irreverence also manifests itself through wacky theme nights and acrobatic scooping techniques, flourishes that entertain customers and workers alike.

Despite her success, Simmons told the American-Statesman that she doesn’t envision expanding the chain beyond Texas.

"We want to be a strong regional company, not something you can get in New York or Boston but can come to Texas and can get this fabulous ice cream store," she said.

Her husband, Steve – no connection to Simmons’s former employer – pitches in as director of business development. They have three children.

As for how a college job as an ice cream scooper snowballed into being a successful business owner, Simmons herself seems to find it hard to believe.

"It was just kind of momentum," she told the American-Statesman.