Wally Amos, a tireless entrepreneur who in 1975 borrowed $25,000 from some friends in Hollywood to start Famous Amos, one of the first brands to sell high-quality cookies in its own stores and one of the world’s most recognized names in baked goods, died Tuesday at his home in Honolulu. He was 88.
His children Shawn and Sarah Amos said the cause was complications from dementia.
At a time when tasteless, preservative-laden cookies were the only thing available to consumers who didn’t have a baker in the family, Mr. Amos’s confections stood out. Made from a recipe he learned from his aunt, they contained real ingredients, no dyes or chemicals. He kept them as close to handmade as possible, even as his company experienced an explosion in nationwide distribution in the early 1980s.
What began as a single store in Los Angeles that generated $300,000 in sales in its first year has, by 1981, become a $12 million (about $42 million in today’s money) company with dozens of Famous Amos stores across the country and packaged products also sold in supermarkets and department stores such as Bloomingdale’s.
His cookies were small—bite-sized for most mouths—and came in three flavors: chocolate chip with peanut butter, chocolate chip with pecans, and butterscotch chip with pecans. All were made by hand in the store.
“You can’t compare machine-made cookies to handmade cookies,” Mr. Amos told MSNBC in 2007. “It’s like comparing a Rolls-Royce to a Volkswagen.”
The cookies were widely hailed as delicious, but the big attraction was Mr. Amos himself. He was an energetic, ever-smiling salesman, known for his Panama hat and colorful Indian gauze shirts. He loved the hustle and bustle of building a brand and would spend weeks on end touring to promote it. (Today, both his hat and one of his shirts are held by the Smithsonian Institution.)
His first store, on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, became an attraction in itself. Opening day drew thousands, and he often had the city close off the block in front for street parties, where he made sure many celebrities gathered there.
Mr. Amos, a former talent agent, treated his cookies like any other customer — there was a star on the door to the shop’s kitchen, just like an actor’s trailer — and he understood the importance of building a personal brand decades before it became practically mandatory.
Within a few years, he was a household name across much of the United States. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine and guest starred in the TV sitcoms The Jeffersons and Taxi. Much later, he also appeared on The Office.
But like many entrepreneurs, his passionate creativity was not matched by business acumen, and he struggled to maintain profits as the company expanded. He sold shares in the 1980s and in 1988 sold the rest to a private equity firm, the Shansby Group, for $3 million (about $8 million today).
Mr. Amos stayed with the company for a year as a paid speaker before leaving in frustration. By that time, he had already built a second career as an author and speaker, entertaining readers and listeners with his rags-to-riches story and tips for entrepreneurial success.
He was also committed to literacy among children. His mother had never learned to read and he himself had not learned to read until late in life. He worked closely with the Literacy Volunteers of America group and hosted his own public access cable television program, Learn to Read, in 1987.
Years later, when he got back into the cookie business with a small shop near his home in Honolulu, he set up an adjoining room with children’s books. Every Saturday, he would sit in a rocking chair surrounded by children and read to them for hours.
Wallace Amos Jr. was born on July 1, 1936, in Tallahassee, Florida. His father worked for the local power company and his mother, Ruby (Hall) Amos, was a domestic servant and later helped run Mr. Amos’ first business.
When he was 12, his parents divorced and Wally moved to Harlem to live with his aunt, a baking expert named Della Bryant. He was fascinated by her skill in the oven and decided to pursue a career as a chef. He attended the Food Trades Vocational High School in Manhattan and trained in the kitchen of the chic Essex House Hotel.
But after being repeatedly passed over for promotions in favor of white students, he dropped out of college and joined the Air Force, spending most of his four-year service in Hawaii.
Mr. Amos then returned to New York, trained as a secretary, and eventually worked in the mailroom of the William Morris talent agency. By 1961, he had worked his way up to junior agent – the first black person to hold that position at the agency and one of the first in the country.
In this job, he organized package tours for Motown acts, including Marvin Gaye and the Temptations. But once again his career was hampered by racism, and when the opportunity arose to move to Los Angeles and open his own agency, he seized it.
For nearly a decade, he scraped by by filling in for second-rate actors and musicians. To relieve stress, he baked cookies at night and then handed them out at pitch meetings and film shoots.
Eventually a friend suggested he go into the bakery business himself. With an investment of $25,000 from Mr. Gaye, the singer Helen Reddy and a few others, he leased a building on Sunset Boulevard. Famous Amos was born.
Mr. Amos has always spoken openly about the difficulties he faced in growing his brand and the decisions that led to him losing control of it.
“I had really lost the company because I stopped listening to people as much because I was Famous Amos,” he told the Times in 1999. “For the first few years after I left Famous Amos, I didn’t even bake cookies anymore, even though I had always made them at home. I didn’t even want to talk about chocolate chip cookies, really. I shaved my beard and stopped wearing hats.”
In 1991, he started a new cookie company, Wally Amos Presents, but the owners of Famous Amos sued him for trademark infringement. Frustrated, he changed the company name to Uncle Noname. After two years of litigation, they agreed that he could use the Uncle Wally name as long as he didn’t sell cookies – so he sold muffins instead.
The Uncle Wally brand was successful, although not quite as successful as Famous Amos, eventually being found in about 5,000 retail stores, although Mr. Amos eventually sold his interest.
He was married five times, most recently to Carol Williams, who survives him. In addition to his son Shawn and daughter Sarah, he leaves behind two other sons, Michael and Gregory, seven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
Mr. Amos developed other brands over the past two decades, including Cookie Kahuna and Aunt Della’s, but none of them became big hits. In 2016, he appeared on the business reality TV series “Shark Tank” and offered a 20 percent stake in Cookie Kahuna for a $50,000 investment, but the panel of investors – the “Sharks” – all turned him down.
Mr. Amos never seemed to mind that he had built and lost a famous brand. In the end, he was just happy baking cookies.
“Being famous is highly – very, very, very highly – overrated,” he told Honolulu Magazine in 2014. “I’m lucky that despite all the difficulties, all the ups and downs that I’ve experienced, I’m still baking cookies that taste good.”
