She gave warm cookies away. Strangers followed her inside.

Debbi Fields was 20 years old in 1977 when she opened Mrs. Fields Chocolate Chippery, a small cookie shop in Palo Alto, California. Almost no one expected it to work. She approached several banks before securing financing, according to the University of New Hampshire's Rosenberg International Franchise Center. Even her husband, Randall, a business tycoon, bet she wouldn't clear $50 on opening day. By noon, with not a single sale rung up, he looked right. So Fields loaded a tray with her warm, soft-baked cookies and walked out onto the street, handing them to strangers. The logic was plain. People would not buy a cookie they had never tasted, so she let them taste one first. They came inside. She made $75 that day. The free sample became a permanent fixture of the brand, which at its height ran hundreds of locations across the United States and abroad. A mall sample, as Fields proved, has a way of becoming a mall purchase.