Cash Cows ... and More

We were intrigued when a colleague, a fancier of things bovine, received a bouquet of cow-shaped cookies to fete her promotion.

Our curiosity led us via telephone to Plano, Texas, home of Cookies by Design, and to Gwen Willhite, founder/chairwoman of a cookie empire with 180 franchisees, including half a dozen in the Southland.

Willhite started saying it with cookies in 1983. She’d been a purchasing agent for a sheet metal machine shop, but found herself jobless when the bottom fell out of the oil industry.

“I’d always done artsy-craftsy things,” she says, and, eager to go into business on her own, she hit upon the idea of cookie bouquets as a gift for men who, she’d observed, were often “just embarrassed by flowers or balloons, but they always liked food.”

Before long the company was cutting cookies in 500 shapes. There are ghosts and graduates, bears and buzzards (as in “Happy Birthday, You Old Buzzard”) and computers (“Let’s Interface”).

For $30 (five cookies) to $102 (15 cookies), there’s a cookie for every occasion. “We’ve sent them for happy divorces,” says Willhite. “We’ve sent them to cats and dogs. We sent one to a garage sale once.”

Carolyn Anderson, manager of the downtown L.A. franchise, says her strangest request was “a witch riding a turkey” for an occasion that fell between Halloween and Thanksgiving. “We don’t do obscenities,” Anderson mentions. “We’ve had people ask.”

Willhite, 57, today heads a company that grosses “somewhere around $30 million” annually. “Not bad,” she observes, “for someone who started this on their unemployment check.”