Charlie Armitage, 23, pulled her car up on Wannamaker Drive at Duke University on a breezy Tuesday night. A pale pink, green and blue rosary banged against the dashboard with each turn. “6:25, so we’re perfect. Right on time,” she said, glancing at her watch. “Oh my gosh, I think this is her!” She turned on her hazards and hopped out of the car, grinning from ear to ear. “Hey, would you happen to be Alex?” she called out to the young woman waiting on a bench outside of Keohane dorm.
Armitage is one of two owners, managers, delivery drivers, bakers, and everything-in-betweeners of Ollie’s Great Bakery. Her black Nissan Kick is her home for six hours every day, as she drives from Duke University to UNC-Chapel Hill to North Carolina State University delivering fresh-baked brownies, cupcakes, cookie cakes, and “Ollie’s delights” (brownies with marshmallows, chocolate peanut butter crunch, and peanut butter drizzle) to students, who are the bulk of her customer base.
With the back seat of the car down, there was plenty of room for the evening’s deliveries. Armitage grabbed a box of blue and white frosted cupcakes from the trunk. “Happy Anniversary” toppers were carefully placed on each cupcake. The box sat beside a butterfly-patterned “Happy Anniversary” balloon with a silver tinsel balloon weight. Alex walked back toward her dorm smiling, six cupcakes richer, with the balloon floating in the sky behind her.
Armitage launched Ollie’s Great Bakery in 2021 with her high school sweetheart and now-fiancé Camryn Kellogg, 25. They were both students at UNC at the time. Armitage had transferred from Durham Technical Community College, and Kellogg was a Morehead-Cain scholar.
Ollie’s is named after Kellogg’s late great-grandmother, who taught him how to bake as a kid. She passed away from COVID when she was 97.
“We were on a walk, and we were like, ‘We want to do something that gives back in a way, as Italians, as people who love food, and in honor of her,’” said Armitage. “We were like, ‘We’re gonna start baking for family and friends and see how it goes.’”
Now Ollie’s employs both of them full-time. “It’s 24/7.”
Ollie’s advertises that it brings a “taste of home” to students, friends, and family. Every bakery item is homemade in the pair’s kitchen in Mebane, N.C. They live surrounded by farmland, with only one neighboring home. “There’s not much in Mebane,” Armitage said.
The secret to Ollies’ mouth-watering brownies that is only possible in rural Mebane? Chickens.
“We have 20-something, maybe 30 chickens.”
Armitage and Kellogg consider themselves chicken-raising experts now.
“It’s a whole science,” she said. “Eventually we got a whole incubator. I have videos of them hatching, we went through two different periods of raising them from eggs, watching them. You have to flip them every couple hours for months.”
Yet Armitage insists this work is worth it. “Have you ever had an egg from a chicken farm fresh? They’re so much better. They’re this rich orange color, they’re not neon yellow, and they taste so much richer.”
Armitage said her secret charm is to make sure she’s in a good mood before she goes to work. Yet while she is dedicated to uplifting others, she hasn’t always had a strong support system. Her parents struggled with substance abuse, and she moved out of her childhood home in Wilmington as soon as she turned 18, graduating from high school in December of her senior year.
“I stayed with friends, I was in social services for a while, and then I moved in with Cam in Chapel Hill.” Armitage said she has been embraced by the Kellogg family, who she has known since her freshman year of high school.
As she arrived at the final delivery of the night, she explained that she loves people and wants her customers to have an enjoyable experience.
“Sometimes it puts me in a better mood and gets me through the hard times by being positive for other people,” she said. “You feed off of people’s energy, so if you can bring that positive energy it can make you feel happier too.”
Above: Charlie Armitage, making the delivery rounds for Ollie’s Great Bakery. Photo by Fiona Shuldiner — The 9th Street Journal
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