When no one wants your Meat Slingshot, what do you do? Make a better flying disc and name it after a pie plate, naturally.
Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not so secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is… Well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. So here’s one of those.
Welcome back to the Empire Builders Podcast. Dave Young here with Stephen Semple and today’s topic, Wham-O. It’s from Wham-O. In all the toy stores, I’m trying to think. Slinky wasn’t Wham-O, was it?
No, Slinky was not Wham-O.
Yeah. I’m trying to think of what Wham-O was.
All sorts of crap, right?
I didn’t realize the Frisbee was a Wham-O product. I mean, I remember the name. I remember the ads and it’s a cool name.
Yeah. Well, it’s so funny. Wham-O was Frisbee, Hula Hoops, Slip ‘N’ Slide, Super Ball, all of those-
All of those sorts of things were Wham-O. But what I find funny is before getting on, we were talking about this whole thing of sounds and things like that and communication. And then all of a sudden it’s like, “Oh, we’re going to talk about a company whose name actually has that real kinetic feel of Wham-O.”
Mm-hmm. I love a name that is also a sound. And if we have time, I’ll tell you about a client I’m working with that we changed the name of the company to make it a sound.
That’s awesome. Oh, the other ones that they did, Hacky Sack and Silly Strings was a couple of the other ones.
Were they responsible for lawn darts? That’s my question.
I’m not sure if they’re responsible for lawn darts. So since it didn’t come up-
… I guess probably not. The company started in 1949 out of, basically a lot of these things out, of the garage in South Pasadena. And it was Richard Knerr and Arthur Melin, who are basically two university graduates, started this company. And their first product was a slingshot, was a wooden slingshot made from ash wood. And the name Wham-O was actually inspired by the sound of the slingshot hitting a target.
But here’s the funny thing is, it wasn’t originally… The idea behind making it was not actually a toy. They loved training falcons, and it was to train falcons for hunting.
They would shoot the meat into the air. They got frustrated that the regular slingshot wouldn’t fire it the way they wanted to do it, so they made their own.
So they made a meat slingshot.
It turns out there wasn’t a huge market for meat slingshots. So you pivot and put it in the hands of children eventually.
Uh-huh, that’s right. “You’re going to put an eye out.” Well, somebody already did.
Be careful with that hamburger you’re firing out.
But that was their fault, not ours. Yeah. Those were the days, right?
When the manufacturer could say, “Well, that’s your fault. You shouldn’t have been an idiot.”
“What’d you expect a rock to do?” But again, so many businesses, it started with them just solving their own problem. And their own problem was they wanted this thing. But what they found out, they created one that was so good that all of a sudden was like, “Wow,” people became interested in this.
You know what? I was able to find-
I don’t know if that’s the same kind of-
I wasn’t able to find pictures of the original thing around, because it didn’t do particularly well, but it kind of put them onto a path. Because very quickly they added blow guns and boomerangs.
Right? But the whole idea was these types of things. And they get to the stage with these various products. So they’ve got the slingshot, they got the blow gun, they got the boomerang, they got these little niches going on and they’re selling basically $100,000 a year of this stuff. But they’re thinking to themselves, “If we’re going to really make this a business, we need a bigger idea.” And I’m going to say, if you’re going to really make this a business, you need an idea which is not going to put somebody’s eye out.
Probably. This is, again, like you said, the 1950s.
1950s. Really, no seat belts, like, “Come on now.”
The BB gun’s already invented.
You know, it’s funny, when you think back to how we were with safety and things like that, one of my really fond memories… Now this wouldn’t have been the ’50s, this would be the ’70s, but one of my really fond memories of being a kid was we’d be hauling stuff somewhere and we had this old green wood trailer with oversized tires on it that bounced like crazy when you’re driving down the road. And one of the funnest thing is we would go somewhere and coming home, all the kids would pile into the trailer in the back as we’re driving down the road.
You’d be the ballast to hold down the sheets of plywood. Yeah. Well, who needs tie downs when you’ve got 200 pounds of children?
And the weird thing is, it’s not like anybody thought that was weird.
Yeah. And if you weren’t on the trailer, you were sitting on the edge of a pickup with your back to the road.
Exactly. Exactly. Anyway, back to Wham-O. They’re needing a bigger idea. And while they’re on the beach, they come across this flying disc called Whirlaway.
Right? And they decide… They also found another one called Pluto Platter. So it didn’t work. It wasn’t really selling. And so Wham-O, they buy the rights to this. They go, “Look, we’ll buy the rights to this.” They make a few couple of design changes. And Morrison saw this people also tossing these metal pythons, right?
And so that was actually where he came up with a little bit of the design change. He kind of looked at that and went, “Oh, this is much better than this Pluto Platter thing.”
You drop the edge down and balances itself a little bit better.
Yeah, yeah. And one of the pie plates they came across, guess what the name of the pie plate was?
Okay. So they buy that too or just-
They just trademarked that because it wasn’t trademarked. So they went and trademarked the Frisbee name. And in the first two years, they sell a million Frisbees.
Right? And what they did to promote it, so here’s the really cool idea, they go to university campuses and they also gave it to people and people, guess what, immediately found on university cool ways to do tricks and stuff with the Frisbee. So that then got it going. And look, this was pre social media days. Imagine what you’d be able to do today in terms of demonstrating all this crazy stuff on social media.
Well, you’d have to get people off their phone.
Yeah. But what they have now is they have a way of creating ideas. And what they realized was they had to look for things and just make them better. So they created this open door policy. They would listen to anybody, “Come pitch an idea, we’ll listen.” So the next one was a neighbor had come back from Australia with this bamboo exercise hoop, and you had to use it doing a movement like a hula dancer.
And so they do a handshake deal. And if it’s a hit, we’re going to give you royalties. And instead they make it out of this lightweight, colorful plastic, and they put little beans inside so that it makes a sound.
It also has a little bit different feel to it. They took this idea to parks and they demonstrated it. And what am I talking about, Dave? What’s the name of the toy? What’s the name of the toy?
Oh, it’s the Hulu Hoop. Yeah.
Bingo. Yeah, it’s the Hulu Hoop. And in 1958, they launched the Hula Hoop, and it’s the biggest toy fad in history. And I think it still is.
And they were farming out the product they couldn’t keep up with production. Now, here’s where a little problem happens for them. Remember that handshake deal? If this is a deal, we’re going to pay your royalties?
They didn’t pay any royalties and they got sued.
Shoot. They should have paid the royalties.
On top of that, knockoffs happened, right?
Because it was pretty easy to copy and people were making it cheaper. And then by the end of 1958, they actually reported a loss because of so much of this competition going on.
Yeah. So they stopped production. They’ve got growing debt. They’ve got a warehouse full of unsold product. So they need to find another hit. Because what they’ve noticed is in their business model is the toy gets hot and then it drops off. So what they suddenly realize is they need to constantly be looking for these new ideas. So Robert Carrier is a guy from the upholstery industry and he came home one day to see his son sliding on the concrete driveway because it was wet. Again, remember, ’50s, right?
Sure. Anything to entertain yourself as a kid.
He takes some Naugahyde, incorporates a hose and holes, and now you’ve got…
Right. So basically the guys at Wham-O come across this idea and they replace it with vinyl plastic and you’ve got Slip ‘N’ Slide.
And when they launched Slip ‘N’ Slide, it sold like 3000 units in the first few months.
Right? Another inventor comes and sees them, Norman Stringley, who’s a petrochemical engineer who specializes in rubber, and he makes this really dense, high bouncing ball that could also spin in reverse.
Okay. Yeah, the Super Ball. Yeah.
Smash hit, six million sold in 1965 alone.
Well, and I think it was just a couple of years before that with the Absent-minded Professor and Flubber. Do you remember Flubber?
So that was like Super Ball was having a ball made out of Flubber.
Yeah. And I don’t know whether this is true or not, but seemingly the whole Super Ball thing was also part of the inspiration for creating the name of the Super Bowl.
Yeah. And again, this is one of those ones I could not find confirmation of it. It may just be one of those things that’s a great story that now is part of the world out there.
Yeah, the zeitgeist. The zeitgeist.
The zeitgeist, yeah, that’s it. And then in 1959, the Wham-O Bird Ornithopter, which was this aluminum spars and all this other… and brightly painted look like a hawker or an owl. And it was rubber bands. Remember those things, they were rubber band powered? They were about like three bucks and they made 600,000 of those. And then-
It was brightly painted so you could see it up in the tree when it got stuck.
And now you’re like, “Oh shoot.”
And then they created the Wheelie Bar, which was something that was great for attaching to a swing bicycle. And the air blaster and the bubble thing. One of the things that they just did was they realized they needed to just continually be making new ideas because the cycle for their types of toys, they would go really popular and drop off, really popular, drop off, really popular. In 1969, they did Silly String. Remember Silly String?
Right? The Hacky Sack in ’83. So just on and on and on and on, they would do these things. And in 1982, I was never able to find the price that Wham-O was sold for, but Wham-O was sold to Kransco Group Companies in ’82. And then in ’94, Mattel bought them.
Then in ’97, Wham-O became independent again.
And then in 2006, they were sold to Cornerstone Overseas Investment Limited for $80 million.
Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this.
[Using Stories To Sell Ad]
Let’s pick up our story where we left off, and trust me you haven’t missed a thing.
Then in ’97, Wham-O became independent again.
And then in 2006, they were sold to Cornerstone Overseas Investment Limited for $80 million. So the one thing I can find to put a value to Wham-O was they were bought, they went independent, and then they were sold again for $80 million. So I always like to try to go, “What was this company worth?”
Those guys probably left when it got sold the first time, would be my guess.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
But here’s my observation of this. These guys weren’t making games.
Hacky Sacks sort of became a game, right?
Because you could play it with several people. You’d have people in a circle all smacking the Hacky Sack. In fact, I have one. I thought it was laying back here. It’s sitting on my desk or around here somewhere in this stuff.
But it’s one of the little original leather ones.
But my observation is this is a stretch. Okay?
This is just me following a trend.
Do I need to sit down? Do I need to sit down?
No, I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I think, in fact, knowing you as well as I do, I think you’ll jump right on board with this.
These guys were making fidget toys. These guys were making things that you could do yourself just by yourself, right?
With the one exception being-
And it’s not necessarily Hula.
Frisbee would be the one exception, but Hula you could do yourself. All these other things you could do yourself.
And people figured out how to make Frisbee golf courses and then you could play that by yourself.
Oh, that’s true. Oh, that’s true. That’s true.
You’re just throwing towards a goal.
But they didn’t make Frisbee as a game. They made it as an activity.
So you could say they’re activities, but they were also things that you could just go do this activity and just be outside playing with something and be out on the driveway bouncing your Super Ball or-
I remember having a Super Ball. They were fun.
… holding your Hula Hoop, or shooting at things with the original slingshot.
The meat slinger. They had to quickly have pivoted from that, because I don’t think falconry ever got huge, right? They were looking at things that were just kind of cool. And I say fidget toys because even as we record these things, I have four or five things on my desk that I always have in my hand and I’m always just doing something, right?
It keeps my brain focused on this conversation instead of wandering all over the place.
We just didn’t have the terminology fidget toy, right?
Well, here’s the other thing. If you want to take it a step further, ADHD wasn’t known about then.
Correct. It was around, but we’d had-
Sure. Lots of kids with ADHD that needed… Just take your Super Ball outside. You could kill a lot of time goofing off with a Wham-O toy.
Well, and a great example of that is I was only diagnosed a few years ago as having ADHD.
So gone through my entire life with it, not knowing… Mind you, if I look close enough, the science were there.
Well, sure. Yeah. When I told people, I think mine was almost 10 years ago, but anytime I’d tell somebody like, “Wait, you didn’t know? You didn’t know.”
No, I was distracted. I didn’t notice.
The rest of us knew. “How long have you been having these memory problems?” “For as long as I can remember.”
But the one thing I want to tie back to on Wham-O, and it’s a great observation that that’s what they were basically creating, is the thing that they noticed very quickly was this was their natural business. Their natural business was you create something, it’s a hit, and it falls off.
And they just bought into it. They said, “That’s the nature of this business.” So what you need to do is continually be looking for these new ideas.
So this is reason why we didn’t talk very much about… They literally had this open door policy. If you were an inventor of a toy, you could come see them. And look, they looked at a lot of crap, but at the same time that they knew that they had to constantly be out there, it’s not about, “Oh my God, we’re making all this money from the Hula.” What they learned from the Hula, because it almost killed their business, is they need to be constantly looking for that next idea, that next idea.
And it’s not about, “Oh, it’s dropped off. We’ve got to revive this with marketing.” Toy, especially in those days, had this natural cycle that it went through. They bought into, “This is the way it is, so we got to constantly looking for new ideas, fill in that pipeline and creating it. And then also recognizing when this thing drops off, we’ve got to manage that drop off.” I really like the fact that they just really saw their business for what it was and said, “Okay, given that’s what it is, this is how we have to manage things.”
Yeah. And honestly, this fits it so well because the inventors are probably… They’re just figuring out something that they enjoyed. Right?
I made this little thing. I made this little thing out of paperclips and look what it does and it’s kind of fun and I think you could take it to the next level. And I think there’s lots of things like that. And so they were filling that need of these inventors who were probably just solving their own little attention problem.
Well, great. Oh, I discovered my kid was doing this and I did this and they’re now having fun with it and all the neighborhood kids are coming over and doing it.
Frisbee was a way to play a game of catch without needing a glove and a ball or pretending you’re playing baseball, right? And so if you weren’t a baseball player, you probably didn’t run around with a glove and baseball anyway. So it was a way to… And most of these toys, you didn’t need anybody else.
You didn’t need anybody else.
Frisbee you did, but it was just a game of catch.
Right. And also what they recognized was people would very quickly, like with Hula and Frisbee and all these things, people would very quickly figure out their own ways to make it fun and do strange things.
Which then also made it more… People gamified it on their own and will gamify it on their own. Give kids a bunch of stuff, they’ll gamify it.
I’m sure it wasn’t too long before there was somebody, the first person in the Guinness Book of World Records for Hula Hoop.
Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Because you just see how long you can do it, you see how many spins you can do it.
Yeah. And again, the interesting part to me was it didn’t start as, “Hey, we’re making this toy.” It was, “we made this thing,” and then they started to discover that it was fun. It was just fun on their own firing without the falcons and now it’s a toy.
Yeah, I love it. I love it.
Wham-O, it’s a sound. Right? I know this is an audio podcast, but just do a Google search for the Wham-O logo, right? It’s a sound. You can hear it when you read it and you can see that it’s in motion, right?
All of these things had that in common too. Everything was about motion and something moving, some kind of action.
Well, the other thing that’s really smart about the Wham-O logo is it’s that it’s colorful. But the other thing is the way they’ve done the Wham-O, if you really look at it carefully, it’s the letters at the beginning are big and it gets smaller, which is kind of how you would say Wham-O, right?
If you actually listen to it, the sound drops off. And even the way they drew it, they were drawing upon the common way in which comics convey this. And if you think about it at the time, you would have had also things like Batman with the, “Pow!”
So they were also tying into a popular zeitgeist of communication, which is really brilliant.
That probably was also attractive to the same kids.
And they would recognize it. They would see the language of the comic book and the logo of Wham-O.
Bingo. Immediately, mm-hmm.
The way it recedes, it’s not that it gets smaller in your brain, it’s that it’s getting farther away.
No, but that’s what I meant by just trying to explain since we’re on a podcast that the lettering gets smaller.
But it gives you that feeling of motion.
So they managed to put sound, color and motion into a static logo.
And that’s a super cool thing to do.
Yeah. Yeah. Really, really amazing thing to do. Yeah.
Yeah, it was very cool. Very cool.
This is a long episode. Do you want to hear about this client I mentioned at the beginning?
Short story. And this is a air conditioning client in Tucson, and his company was named Tailored Mechanical.
I think he listens to the podcast, so he’s probably going to hear this and go, “Oh my God.” But we’re in the middle of rebranding. And we asked him when he became a client, like, “Are you okay with us recommending a change in the name of the company?” Because Tailored Mechanical doesn’t exactly tell you that they’re an air conditioning repair company, right? I’m not sure what they do if you tell me mechanical, right? They’re not auto mechanics and they don’t fix elevators and things like that. I don’t know.
But anyway, his name’s Chris Plunkett and his wife’s name is Scarlett. And so we gave him a couple of new name suggestions, knowing the one that we really wanted him to pick. We gave him one that had air conditioning in the title, just the typical thing. And then we’re like, “I mean, your wife’s name is pretty cool. You could call this company Scarlett. There’s no other air conditioner company named Scarlett. That would be a cool name.But, dude, everybody already just calls you Plunkett because it’s a sound and it’s fun to say. And so that’s the name of your company, Plunkett.”
And the logo is like Wham-O, it’s got motion in it.
It’s bigger at both ends because there’s a pa-pa. There’s two syllables and they’re both kind of consonants, Plunkett. And so that’s going to be fun and we’re going to have fun with it.
It’s almost going to feel like a Wham-O kind of a brand, but the whole goal… Remember the whole goal with companies like this is, we just need to make him memorable, right?
And anyway, I love the Wham-O story. I love that this is the kind of smart decisions that people can make that closely make their brand memorable. Rememberable is even a better word. It’s not a word.
Yes. Yes. That’s awesome. That’ll be a fun campaign.
You should send me some of the ads and we should put them in on the podcast.
Yeah. I mean, we haven’t even got to that stage yet. We’ve just got the trucks wrapped and people are looking…
When you’ve got that, send it along. We’ll put them in the podcast.
You don’t know what we’re doing to make the trucks also have motion even when they’re sitting still?
They’ve got the big logo on them and they’re brightly colored. They’re different colors on both sides. And we’ve put NASCAR style numbers on the doors.
And people scratch their heads. It’s like, “Well, it’s just science. Trucks go faster if they have numbers on them. Have you never watched a race?”
That’s just science. All right, David, that’s fun. That’s fun, man.
It’s fun to have a client that lets you do fun things in the aim of creating entertainment, and that’s the currency of attention.
Thank you, Stephen. Great.
So much fun. Thanks, David.
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