FADS
CASHING IN ON CRAZY IDEAS
By Steve Fishman

Gary Dahl was an unemployed copywriter when he got a brilliant idea: he was going to sell a rock for $4. Even his friends told him that it was the stupidest plan they’d
ever heard. Nobody would pay for something you could find in your own backyard.

That’s what they thought!

Dahl sold 1.3 million ordinary rocks – bought from a local sand and gravel store.
Pet Rocks became a national craze. All of a sudden, the guy who nobody wanted to hire was in demand everywhere. “I had one phone to each ear,” says, Dahl. “I taught my PR
guy to impersonate me so he could also answer my calls.” Dahl, who was once crammed
into a 600-square-foot house, now lives in one 10 times its size. “My new swimming
pool is bigger than my old home,” he says.

All that because of a rock! And because Dahl had stumbled onto every merchandiser’s dream: a fad.

Fads drive consumers crazy. Suddenly the comparative shopper will do anything to get that gizmo his neighbor’s kid brought home. Imagine this: During the Cabbage Patch craze two dozen Milwaukee shoppers traveled to Milwaukee County Stadium believing that thousands of the impossible-to-find dolls would be dropped from a B-29 airplane. (They had been told to pay for the dolls by waving their American Express
cards at the plane.) When consumers start behaving this way, two things happen: Dour social critics rail against the excesses of commercialism, and elated merchandisers rake in the money. Take for example the Wacky WallWalker®. Ken Hakuta, who once exported cat food for a living, first happened onto these rubbery, $1.69 octopuses when a friend from Japan sent them to his children as gifts. Hakuta took the WallWalkers® with him to a restaurant, threw them against a wall, and waited as they crept unsteadily toward the floor.

“Everybody went berserk,” says Hakuta. After convincing the manufacturer to
produce the first batch on credit, Hakuta sold 140 million of them. At the height of the
craze, he was netting $250,000 every week. (A factory of 300 employees in South Korea
still cranks out WallWalkers® full time.)

To the entrepreneur, the very existence of fads is encouraging. It suggests you can dream up a single idea that will make you rich. The product need not be complicated to manufacture or even useful. But the payoff can still be enormous. “That’s why everybody,” says Jack Santino, who studies fads at Bowling Green State University,
“ is looking for the next stupid, million-dollar idea.”

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