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Always famous
Wally Amos returns to his
cookie-baking origins with
a new Kailua store
After 30 years of wanderings through fame and failure and false starts, Wally Amos is going back to his roots.
The founder of Famous Amos cookies, which started as a high-end Hollywood cookie shop and grew into a national gourmet brand before slipping to new owners and declining into fodder for vending machines, will open a new cookie store in Kailua this month.
Amos said his new Chip & Cookie store is putting him back where he started: selling gourmet cookies to customers he can get to know.
"I always wanted to have another cookie store," Amos said. "So 30 years later, we have another cookie store."
And as Amos tells it, with the infectious energy that helped make him famous, Chip & Cookie won't be the typical shopping-mall cookie stand. Instead, to use the retail jargon, Amos has created a kid-friendly concept shop.
In addition to the requisite Chip & Cookie merchandise, including plush, cookie-shaped dolls based on two Chip and Cookie characters created by Amos' wife, Christine, the shop will have a reading corner with a library of kids' books, where parents can read to their kids over milk and cookies. Maintaining the literary theme, Amos is publishing children's books featuring the Chip and Cookie characters.
"There's going to be so much stuff to look at, it's just going to blow your mind," he said.
The shop's parent company, Chip & Cookie LLC, will donate 10 percent of its profits to the Chip & Cookie Read Aloud Foundation, created to promote literacy in children.
"Wally Amos and his team have created a wonderful new concept that includes not just energy around the cookies, but also education of children and reading," said Mitch D'Olier, chief executive of Kaneohe Ranch Co., landlord of the Kailua Town shopping center where Chip & Cookie will be located. "We're gratified by the amount of interest that we're getting in the center, and Wally's only going to increase that."
On Sunday from 1-3 p.m., Amos will hold a grand opening for Chip & Cookie. The shop plans to begin selling cookies, cookie dough and merchandise on Aug. 31. Cookies will sell for $9.89 for a one-pound bag with 60 to 65 of the bite-size cookies, while two-and-a-half-pound containers of cookie dough will sell for $17.
The opening marks the end of a long journey for Amos. At its peak under his ownership in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Famous Amos was generating sales of $10 million to $15 million, which amounts to about $30 million to $50 million in today's dollars.
At that time, the cookies were high-end products with generous helpings of chocolate chips and pecans. Amos became, well, famous, as the charismatic pitchman for the cookies.
But along the way, Amos said, he became infatuated with his own celebrity and quit listening to people in his company.
"I wasn't listening because I was Famous Amos," he said. "It just kind of seeped into my character and I wasn't listening to people and I just got zapped."
Getting zapped meant losing control of the company to the Bass brothers of Dallas. After that, Amos said, his equity in the company kept getting driven down as the controlling partners brought in more and more investors until finally, Amos had no ownership in Famous Amos. Meanwhile, the brand was changed from a gourmet item to a standard, store-bought cookie.
Amos plans to ride his bicycle from his home in Lanikai to the new store, where he'll bake cookies and greet customers the way he did three decades ago when he got his start. Although Amos dreams of a chain of Chip & Cookie stores, he said he is now just working to make his first one a success.
"If I don't have one successful store," he said, "I can't have a second successful store."
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