Richard Knerr is cofounder of the most successful

fad factory in history, Wham-O.

What’s behind a fad? Usually, it starts with a product that is so silly or obvious that you scratch your head and ask, why didn’t I think of that? “Anybody with three dollars worth of plastic could have manufactured a Hula Hoop,” says Richard Knerr, co-inventor of that granddaddy of American fads. Richard James originally came across the idea for the Slinky when a tension spring accidentally fell to the floor and began
“ walking.”

The enticing thing about a simple, silly idea is that you don’t have to be an
engineer or an MBA to think one up. A carpenter developed the Frisbee: he shaped the first prototype out of metal. A chemist had the idea for the Super Ball and persisted even after his boss rejected the idea. Rubik’s Cube was created by a Hungarian architecture teacher as a mental exercise for his students. One day in 1967 while driving along the California freeway, Don Kracke, then an ambitious 35-year-old in the advertising business, saw three Volkswagen buses that were hand-painted with flowers. The truth was that they were pretty miserable looking flowers. Kracke thought, “Why not make stick-on decals in the shape of flowers?” With an investment of $5,000 Kracke got into the decal business. He had flowers, polka dots, and paisleys manufactured. He called them Rickie Tickie Stickies and then proceeded to talk 10 local stores into stocking them. Within a single year, 90 million of the colorful decals – Kracke’s and knock-offs – had been sold.

Lots of companies don’t create the next fad entirely by themselves. They do rely on their own marketing and distribution capabilities, but they also find hot products by sorting through prototypes of thousands of would-be fad-makers. Pac-Man is one example. That’s the friendly creature with the giant, gobbling mouth that started out in a video game in 1980. After the biggest video game success in history, the nearly featureless creature was licensed to 600 other products. It’s been used on sneakers, telephones, and toothbrushes. Sales so far: $300 million. The Bally Midway Manufacturing Co., which licenses Pac-Man, got this character from Namco Limited, a Japanese company that created the original video game. The character, which has become an American cultural artifact, was inspired by a Japanese folk hero with a legendary appetite.

What does a company look for in a new product? “You look for something that makes people say, ‘Ooooh, what’s that?’ ” according to Richard Knerr, who founded Wham-O, Inc. with his best friend and $600. The company introduced such legendary fads as the Frisbee, the Super Ball, and the Hula Hoop. Knerr took the idea for the Hula Hoop from an exercise hoop used in Australia. “You’d start to use the hoop and people would say, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ That’s when we knew we had a winner,” says
Knerr.

Joseph Sugarman, who selects about 80 products for his JS & A mail-order catalog each year, says that he chooses products only “if in my own personal judgment and taste, I can become enthusiastic about them.” Sugarman, who sold the first mail-order pocket calculator and the first liquid-crystal display watch, also hunts for the angle or appeal that might have been overlooked. At the height of the CB craze, for example, someone showed him a walkie-talkie. Sugarman, whose catalog features electronics, knew it operated on the same frequency as a CB. In a deft bit of fad marketing, he renamed it a “Pocket CB” and sold 250,000 of them at $40 apiece. But not every fad pans out. Once, Sugarman took to heart the old idea about building a better mousetrap. He included in his catalog a $1,500 laser-operated mousetrap. Not one of them sold.

Some companies are in fad-intensive industries. Just to survive they have to keep coming up with fads. Take bubble gum. One winner is never enough in this $500 million industry where the average product has a life span of three months to a year and a half. Amurol Products Co., outside Chicago, establishes “focus groups” of kids to evaluate product ideas, and contracts with corporate think tanks to figure out what new shape or color will hold the attention of the fickle 6- to 18-year-old set. “The competition is fierce,” says A.G. Atwood, Amurol’s president and CEO. The company works on a couple of hundred ideas each year, though less than a dozen will actually appear in the candy stores. When Amurol figured out that kids like gum with a big liquid center, the company came out with Tidal Wave gum in a range of fruity flavors: Oceans of Orange, Strawberry Surf, Awesome Apple.

next