Wally Amos, the enthusiastic entrepreneur who turned a $25,000 loan from Marvin Gaye and Helen Reddy into the multimillion-dollar Famous Amos cookie store empire, died Tuesday. He was 88. Amos' children said he died at home in Honolulu of dementia complications, the New York Times reports. Amos started in 1975, opening a store on Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard that drew a crowd of thousands on its first day. Store revenue hit $300,000 in the first year, helped by street parties attended by celebrities. By 1981, as he developed his personal brand, Amos had a $12 million company.
Amos was working as a junior agent at the William Morris talent agency, the first Black person to hold that title there, in New York when he grew frustrated, feeling that racism was blocking career advancement. So he opened his own agency in Los Angeles, where he began perfecting his future product, per the Times. "I began to bake as a hobby; it was a kind of therapy," he later said. "I'd go to meetings with record company or movie people and bring along some cookies, and pretty soon everybody was asking for them."
With natural ingredients and no preservatives, Amos' cookies went against the flavorless retail cookie grain of the era, per People. The bite-size cookies all were handmade in the store. The choices were small chocolate chip with peanut butter, chocolate chip with pecans, and butterscotch chips with pecan. The company struggled as it expanded, and Amos eventually lost it, selling out in 1988 for $3 million. He turned his attention to being an author and speaker, largely providing advice to entrepreneurs. And he became an advocate for childhood literacy. Amos developed other brands that didn't catch on. He called being famous overrated but always took consolation in his ability to "make a cookie that tastes good." In 2007, Amos said, "You can't compare a machine-made cookie with a handmade cookie." (More obituary stories.)
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