For the person in search of a new fad, there is good news: though a given fad might come and go, fads in general are here to stay. We live in a trendy society. People love the new, cringe at the old. In part, says Richard Johnson, author of AMERICAN FADS, “It’s just plain curiosity, a much underrated human drive.” There’s probably also an economic benefit to having things go in and out of fashion. In a consumer society, says Jack Santino, who is assistant professor of popular culture at the Bowling Green State University, “You need the old, so that people will look to buy the new.”

Fads hit every field. Just look around the stores – or the closets. There are fads in clothing. Remember hot pants? Go-go boots? Bell bottoms? One of the new fashion fads is old clothes. “I saw movie stars wearing them,” says entrepreneur Mark Werts, who was inspired to make hand-me-downs available to the general public. Last year, he sold more than $1 million in “antique clothing” at his San Francisco store, American Rag
Cie. There are fads in foods, too. Fondue had its day. In Toronto, one company had success importing chocolate-covered honeybees. A newspaperman trying to lose weight touched off a fad when he wrote about a chocolaty low-cal drink. In 1984, a million cans of Diet Chocolate Fudge soda were sold; this year manufacturer A.J. Canfield expects to sell 200 million. “This is the American dream,” says Alan B. Canfield, senior VP.

Often, a fad seems to sweep unexpectedly through the marketplace. But that’s misleading. A fad isn’t something consumers just discover. Behind most successful fads there’s a shrewd promoter. Edward Bernays, 93, considered dean of the public relations profession – one of his clients was Thomas Edison – brags that he was the promoter behind the soap whittling fad of years ago. Why? One of his accounts was Ivory.

“The product is only 10 percent of the game,” says entrepreneur E. Joseph Cossman. “The rest is how you promote it.” To promote his spud gun – which uses potato pellets as ammo – Cossman filled an entire room at the New York Toy Show with potatoes donated by farmers inundated with a bumper crop. Then he recruited a bunch of kids and turned them loose with spud guns. A spud war broke out, and Cossman sold more than a million guns. Another time, Cossman promoted his ant farm by paying stores near the toy show to display the product. A lingerie store even put the ant farm between two brassieres. Cossman has sold more than three million ant farms.

The Cabbage Patch Kid rage wasn’t simply a spontaneous vote by consumers either. Xavier Roberts, the 30-year old creator of the dolls, came up with the idea of giving each one a unique identity – and a birth certificate and set of adoption papers drawn from real birth records. Coleco, which had once marketed another fad, Davy Crockett moccasin kits, then held nationwide focus groups to figure out how to position the product. (It learned, for instance, that boys and adults should be part of its ad campaign.) It also hired child psychologists who provided testimony that the homely toys were healthy playthings. At a time when flashy, electronic toys were supposed to be the rage, Coleco sold out all 2.5 million of its 1983 stock in one season, more than any previous doll in history.

Even the Pet Rock didn’t just take off by itself. Dahl peddled it not only to Neiman Marcus, but also to NEWSWEEK, which gave it half a page.

We are all potential entrants in the fads game. What separates the winners from the losers? More than intelligence or cleverness, it’s probably another quality that makes all the difference: persistence. “Chances are that sometime during your life you have thought up some unusual product or service – only to discard the possibility because somebody told you it wouldn’t work,” says Robert Shook, author of WHY DIDN’T I
THINK OF THAT? Most of us don’t let ourselves get carried away. We continue on in our respectable lives. It’s the new courageous entrepreneurs who go ahead and mortgage the house or the car because they’ve got a hunk of rubber or a new board game that is so neat they know they just can’t lose. “Behind most fads there is an entrepreneur,” says Richard Johnson. Trivial Pursuit, which has become a staple in every baby-boomer’s home, is one example. The idea for the game was worked out by two brothers and a friend in about 45 minutes one Saturday afternoon over a few beers. To sell the idea to a distributor in the United States took two gut-wrenching years during which one of the brothers collapsed from stress. Parker Brothers returned the game unopened. A Milton
Bradley executive wasn’t interested. Finally, the game was licensed to Selchow & Righter in one of the company’s shrewdest moves since its big hit, Scrabble. The game brought in $750 million in 1984 in retail sales, almost entirely in North America. By 1985 Trivial Pursuit was available in 14 foreign languages, worth another $90 million in retail sales. At the end of this year it will be on sale in 28 countries, including mainland China.

Burt Rubin is another entrepreneur who risked everything for a fad. And Rubin had a lot to risk. In 1971 at age 25, he and a partner started to sell extra-wide cigarette rolling papers, especially suited for smoking marijuana. In 1980, the company, E-Z Wider, was sold for $6.2 million, and Rubin took up horseback riding and art collecting. He also read voraciously. One day he came across a report on the “comet mania” created when Halley’s comet passed earth 76 years ago. Among other products, telescope sales had boomed. It didn’t take much more prodding. Rubin invested most of his savings in a telescope company. “I guess it’s just the entrepreneurial spirit,” he says. So far, he has sold 35,000 Halleyscopes, and he’s right about the comet fad. More than 80 companies are marketing comet-related products and services, including a game called “Pin the Tail on the Comet,” Comet Rock Candy, and comet-watching trips to sites like Australia.

The real challenge for fad entrepreneurs is to translate momentary success into sustained earnings. The opportunity exists not only to make a fortune, but to lose one.
Dahl remembers that at the height of the Pet Rock fad he was in debt for hundreds of
thousands of dollars. Had anything gone wrong, he would have gone bust. Rubin still has to sell 15,000 more telescopes before he breaks even. Even Slinky, that tried and true American fad, almost died. Early success went to inventor Richard James’ head. In quick succession, his attention turned to drinking, other women, and religion. In 1960, when he left for missionary work in Bolivia, James Industries had just six people on the payroll – down from 125. It was James’ wife, Betty, who counted on relatives to help care for the children while she rebuilt the company. Today, the business is still growing.
Last year’s sales were 25 percent higher than the year before, reports Betty James. Another giant fad that never did yield much money to its creator was the Mood Stone ring. Joshua Reynolds, its inventor, traveled the country telling how his ring changes color to reveal the mood of its wearer. Publicist Valerie Jennings gave samples to
Muhammad Ali, Joe Namath, and Cher. “I had $5 million of orders the first month,”
says Reynolds. Unfortunately, Reynolds didn’t anticipate that competitors would lure away his suppliers by paying them more. Mood Stones grossed about $250 million. There was mood clothing, mood nail polish, even mood panties. But Reynolds’ company took in $3 million, and very little was profit. Jennings, for one, was never paid.

Are there more mood rings out there? Are ever-more sophisticated consumers really going to fall for more rocks or dolls or coils of wire? Of course. There are plenty of silly ideas that the consumer is waiting to go nuts over. A couple of Canadians sitting around a bar asked themselves, what do we like to do? Drink beer and lift weights, was the reply. They developed a beer mug that doubles as a weight, so you can exercise your biceps as you imbibe; 30,000 sold in Canada. Another guy read reports that a particular shade of pink had calming effects. He printed 5,000 posters – no design, no drawing, just the color. They all sold. Rubin, who’s still riding the Halley’s comet fad, confides he has already started to think about the next big fad. Just imagine, he says, 1992. 1992?
That’s the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America. “It will be bigger than the bicentennial,” says this energetic entrepreneur. “And that means a chance for a lot of people to make a lot of money.”

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Karaoke Nation, or How I Spent a Year in Search of Glamour, Fulfillment and a Million Dollars. by Steve Fishman Lately, I noticed, people looked at businesspeople of all ages and saw an imagination at work. "Who would quarrel with the idea that ideas themselves are the most powerful currency in the new world of business?" asked one business writer. "Ideas Rule!" trumpeted the cover of one magazine, adding, if they spread. In the world of business, the new one, inventiveness was in. There was some evidence that people were, in fact, coming up with more ideas than ever. During the Eighties, there'd been a total of 1.2 million patent applications in the United States. By the end of the Nineties that figure had reached 2 million. And the annual rate seemed to be racing. In 2001, there were more than twice as many patent applications as in 1991. Edison suspected that the major inventions had all been proposed during his lifetime. But by 2001, there was a patent application filed, on average, every other minute twenty-four-hours-a-day every day of the year. Never had so many believed that a germ of invention resided within each person. The U.S. Patent Office, a good sport, appeared to accommodate those who wanted to get in the ideas game. Not long ago, applicants were required to demonstrate a "flash of genius," which proved an unfortunate brake on inventiveness. More recently, "useful" and "non-obvious" had become the standards of patentability. (Though perhaps, really, the most meaningful standard was persistence since, according to one study, more than 90 percent of all applications eventually become patents.) The new standards opened up the field. Indeed it could seem as if people whose creative outlet was once, say, detailing their minivans, now rushed to the Patent Office with homegrown innovations like: "landing lights on a toilet seat" for those inconvenient middle-of-the night put-downs, helium-filled furniture that could be stored out of the way, i.e., floating near the ceiling, and, a personal favorite, a prosthetic arm which allowed the lonely sports fan to give himself a "high-five." Kids, too, got in the act. One five-year-old received a patent for inventing a new "method of swinging on a swing" -the side-to-side method earned patent 6,368,227.