CAN YOU
INVENT A MILLION-DOLLAR FAD?
by Wesley S.
Griswold
POPULAR SCIENCE JANUARY 1966
pp78-81, 210
(
OCR'ed by Rick Furr - - Thank You! )
A
California firm isn't kidding when it invites you to send them
your ideas for fun and games. They've made millions on fads--from
Hula Hoops to bubbles
Here's a firm whose president may suddenly start
bouncing spectacularly lively rubber balls for the chief of
research and development to catch -- if he can. And the
executive vice-president thinks nothing of firing a blast of air
from a formidable-looking plastic gun at his busy and
unsuspecting secretary.
That's the Wham-O Mfg. Co. of San Gabriel, Calif.,
where anybody's idea of an amazing toy, or a novel product of
almost any sort has a chance to become a reality and be sold by
the millions.
"Tell
your readers that if they have an idea - - no matter how nutty - - to send
it to us"
Fun is their
business, and they're as interested in your idea of fun as in
their own. Mail, phone, telegraph, or carry it to their
threshold on El Monte St., and you will receive a warm welcome.
In fact, the welcome may eventually be followed by royalties.
That has been the happy fate of quite a few inventors to date.
They've included house painters, brickyard workers, school kids,
bank presidents, aircraft engineers, retired clerks, and
upholsterers -- to name just a few.
Though you may never have heard of Wham-O before,
you doubtless are already acquainted with Super Ball, their
latest sensation. It's about the size of a handball, and
has such extraordinary bounce, that it makes every other ball
seem tired. It falls just short of perpetual motion.
Kids from seven to 70 can be seen dribbling it or whamming it
over the rooftops almost anywhere you go these days.
Or maybe you've frustrated your youngsters by
appropriating their Frisbee Flying Saucer and coltishly skimming
it over the lawn. Or, at the very least, you used to
sheepishly sashay around inside a Hula Hoop.
Those outstanding fun fads all stemmed from the
Wham-O Mfg. Co., which turned them out by the tens of millions.
But the ideas for all three came from outsiders.
The high-bouncer. Super Ball, for
instance, was the inspiration of a chemist, Norman Stingley, who
worked for another firm -- and still does, though he picks up fat
royalty checks regularly.
"It took us nearly two years to iron the
kinks out of Super Ball before we produced it," said Richard
Knerr, 40, president of Wham-O. "It always had that
marvelous springiness -- a 92-percent recovery rate -- far beyond
that of any other ball. But it had a tendency to fly apart.
We've licked that with a very-high-pressure technique for forming
it. Now we're selling millions." Stingley is
said to receive a royalty of around a cent on each.
The Frisbee Flying Saucer was the inspiration of
a building inspector, a former Air Force pilot. It's just a
shallow plastic saucer with an airfoil edge that will boomerang
or sail and hover, depending on how you skim it. The
Frisbee Flying Saucer still sells by the millions, Knerr reports,
and the building inspector continues to reap a golden harvest.
The name Frisbee is not his; it is the name of an old game played
by skimming paper plates.
The celebrated Hula Hoop, which has a special
niche in toyland's hall of fame, was suggested to Knerr and his
partner, Arthur ("Spud") Melin, by a friend in
Australia. Down Under, it was used as an exercise hoop in gym
classes. But Wham-O embellished it, gave it a name
suggested by the gyrations of the person twirling it around his
body, tried it out on a few children in Pasadena, and the rest is
history.
"It became a worldwide fad," recalls
Knerr, "and we soon had plants turning it out in seven
countries. We still sell millions of them."
"There was a mechanical principle involved
in the Hula Hoop," he continued, "on which, after five
years of work, we obtained a patent. To illustrate: If you
put a little ring on a finger and try to twirl it, you'll have a
hard time. But put on a ring eight inches in diameter, say,
and twirling it becomes as easy as pie. With the Hula Hoop,
it's the ratio of waist diameter to hoop diameter that's
important. Small hoops just won't work -- or big waists,
for that matter."
Shot into business. The Wham-O firm
came into existence in a manner as offbeat as its subsequent
success.
Dick Knerr and Spud Melin have been friends since
childhood. In 1948, at the University of Southern
California, their hobby was raising falcons and training them to
hunt. To teach the birds to dive at prey, they hurled small
meatballs at them while they were on the wing. They used a
slingshot, and one day, when they tried to interest a prospect in
buying a falcon, he said, "I don't want a bird, but I'd sure
like a slingshot like that."
Never slow to recognize a potentially profitable
idea, Knerr and Melin bought a handsaw for $7 down and started
producing slingshots in Knerr's garage.
"We called them Wham-O slingshots,"
said Knerr, "because -- well, that's the sensation you felt
when you hit something with one of them.
"Spud would cut 'em, I'd sand 'em, and that's
the way the business started," he continued. "Spud
would go out one way and sell 'em, and I'd go out another.
We ran some mail-order advertising, began lining up dealers, and
first thing we knew, we were taking orders from sporting-goods
dealers all over the United States."
Business became so good that the boys moved out
of the Knerr garage into one corner of an abandoned grocery store.
They started producing throwing knives, fencing foils, and
boomerangs in addition to slingshots. Soon they took over
the entire store, and a factory besides.
The Frisbee Flying Saucer was their first really
big hit, and after that they were obliged to build a plant of
their own, in San Gabriel, and start subcontracting their
burgeoning production as well.
Knerr and Melin (the firm's shorter, slimmer,
somewhat pixyish executive vice-president) are Wham-O's principal
owners. They also make the final decision on whether or not
to put an idea into production.
You're invited. "One of our
main endeavors is persuading people to send us ideas," Knerr
said. "We get thousands of them, from all over the
world. And we look at them all -- every one.
Of course, we hear from our share of crackpots -- guys with
little black boxes who say they can move mountains, or pedal up
among the satellites if we'll only supply the oxygen. But I
wish you'd tell your readers that if they have an idea -- no
matter how nutty it seems to them -- to send it to us.
Maybe we've got an application for it. We don't just make
toys, you know, even though they're our principal line. We're
branching out in a lot of ways, even into housewares and
cosmetics."
"Who does the initial screening of this
flood of suggestions?" I asked.
"Ed Headrick -- he's in charge of research
and development."
Headrick says, "We average 20 new ideas in
the mail every day. If there's any publicity about us, the
number shoots up to 50 or 100 or 150. Too many people,
though, think we'd be interested in reviving some toy they used
to play with as kids. That's not true. We want the
new and different."
"What's the percentage of good ideas in a
carload?" I asked.
"Well," said Headrick, "we have to
review, say, 100 just to find one that even has interest.
We have to look at 1,000 before we turn up one that seems worth
the cost of testing. We have to run through 50 to 100 tests
of different ideas before we come up with something as good as
Super Ball. And all the time, of course, we're developing
ideas of our own -- the whole company is attuned to that."
Keeping it bouncing. "Speaking
of Super Ball," I said, "I note that you say it's 'made
of new, amazing Zectron.' What's that?"
It's a secret mixture of man-made materials,''
Headrick told me, "but the name Zectron doesn't mean a thing
-- it just sounds zingy, and Super Ball is certainly
that."
"Have you ever had a flop?" I
asked Knerr.
"Oh, sure," he said. "We're
not perfect. Take Instant Fish, for example. We had
the idea of marketing fish eggs that would hatch before the
astonished eyes of people who bought then and put them in bowls
of water. We're always seeking what we call 'the magical
degree of amazement' in our products. We want people to
exclaim, 'What was that?' or 'Gee, I never saw anything like that
before.' And we want to appeal to all ages and both sexes."
"What was wrong with Instant Fish?"
I asked.
"Oh, we got a ton of orders, and then found
that the fish had let us down. They just wouldn't lay eggs
fast enough to make the project profitable."
< Picture1 - Kneer & Melin >
All smiles over the success of the multimilllion-dollar
business they've built out of fun and games, Richard P. Knerr
(left) and A. K. Melin clown among some hit products in
their San Gabriel, Calif., office.
< Picture2 - Monster Bubbles >
Ever dodge a balloon-size soap bubble drifting by?
It had probably floated away from generators like these.
The youngsters are playing with Monster Bubble sets, an idea bred
in Wham-O's factory.
< Picture
3 - Super Ball (Lady) >
If fun is your business, illustrating it with gag
shots comes natural. This gal supposedly needs the hard hat
to survive a shower of Super Balls, a spectacularly bouncy item
set in motion by Wham-O.
< Picture 4 - Slip'n Slide >
Slip'n Slide gets a try out by a young enthusiast.
Like many of Wham-O's best-sellers, this slippery product grew
from an outsider's idea. A young upholsterer is now getting
royalties on this one.
< Picture 5 - Hula Hoop >
Famous Hula Hoop of a few years ago was the first
Wham-O product to become an international sensation, selling in
the millions. It worked best if diameter of your waist was
small compared to the hoop's.
< Picture 6 - Limbo >
Limbering up with Limbo, acrobatic gals try their
skill at a South American game Wham-O built into a fad with
plastic apparatus. Point is to keep lowering bar and still
slither under it, leaning backward.
< Picture 7 - WaterWiggle >
A wildly leaping shower with a face painted on
the head -- that's Water Wiggle. You attach a slim tubing
of flexible plastic to your garden hose, and water pressure,
whipping the leering "head" to and fro, whips up
excitement, too. Wham-O finds it a "cool" summer
seller.
Special thanks to Rick Furr for his contributions !
Super Ball
® is a brand name and registered trademark of Wham-O
Incorporated, San Francisco, CA
Zectron ®
is a registered trademark of Wham-O Manufacturing Company, San
Francisco, CA
Wham-O ®
is a registered trademark of Wham-O Incorporated, San Francisco,
CA
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