Inventing Fun: A History of Wham-O | Hacker News Reader

Inventing Fun: A History of Wham-O

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54 pointsartsandsci13 comments

The history page on Wham-O is gone but thanks to archive.org I could still read a bit more about that car getting crushed by a giant bouncy ball.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100726130417/http://www.wham-o...

This engaging story also has an important reminder: startup work can be silly and fun

Then when the founders are no longer there and are bought out by a corporation the stopped discovering successful new products.

It was more like the market tastes changed to products that Wham-O wasn't interested in making (video game consoles, electronics, etc). You can only make fad toys for so long until you run out of ideas.

Fidget Spinners?

You know, like for kids!

"Once perfected, the berserk Super Ball ... The ball became so popular that football's biggest game, the Super Bowl, was a pun on it".

Color me skeptical.

The article didn't make that up, it's a well-known thing. I mean, I guess Lamar Hunt could have been lying, but he's definitely the first one to use the name "Super Bowl" and he always said he named it after the Super Ball.

Here, it's on Wikipedia because of course it is:

Lamar Hunt, owner of the AFL's Kansas City Chiefs, first used the term "Super Bowl" to refer to the NFL-AFL championship game in the merger meetings. Hunt later said the name was likely in his head because his children had been playing with a Super Ball toy; a vintage example of the ball is on display at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. In a July 25, 1966, letter to NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle, Hunt wrote, "I have kiddingly called it the 'Super Bowl,' which obviously can be improved upon."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl

> By the end of the 1970s, ... kids were turning less to outdoor play and more toward higher-priced electronic offerings...

A sad trend.

What would be the process of stating a toy company today?

There are tons of new toy companies started every day; just visit the American International Toy Fair in New York next February to get an idea of what's happening and what it takes.

Note the toy business can be quite painful (as well as fun). There are many regulations in regards to safety (ranging from paint toxicity and bits that don't fall off and cause choking all the way up to privacy protection for kids under 13). Margins are incredibly low and sales prices have to be low because kids go through a lot of toys and are finicky (we all know the joke about the kid preferring the packaging to the toy itself, which is a real phenomenon).

You can see this in the market caps of the two industry "giants", Hasbro (12B, 1.5X revenue) and Mattel (5.5B, 1X revenue) which are not large companies.

Still, it can be fun. I did some work with Hasbro and know some Mattel folks: they are all "ordinary" business folks (hard nosed about COGS and marketing) but all seemed to have fun with the product line and really enjoy it. More, frankly, than some I know toiling in the bowels of FB or GOOG, much less Oracle.

Wow thanks for the write up? Maybe it's easier to get a patent and try to license it?

Because of the low margins, patent licenses are likely to be quite low (though David Hampton, who invented Furby, did quite well -- but he worked for them for quite a long while as well).

The Skylanders founders did well too, but they had a functioning business which they sold to Activision.

In general the reason there are so many people at the toy fair with toy products is because the licensing margins are so low. In fact it typically runs the opposite direction (think Lego licensing other properties). I do have a friend who's doing the whole deal from the ground up (building a franchise from the ground up) but it's hard yakka and he isn't airborne yet.

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