How to make millions out of a bag of rubber bands

Melbourne Herald Sun, Thursday April 17, 2014

I noticed my granddaughters working quietly on a couch, knotting some elastic bands into bracelets. A few days later, on a tram, a couple of young schoolgirls were also knitting the bands. Looking more curiously, I started to notice how many mums were wearing the bands, and how elaborate the kids' had become.

Aha! I realised it was a trend taking off which most of us probably did not even notice. The birth of a fad.

As a marketer you dream of creating a fad - of your product in everyone's hand, discussed on everyone's lips. Alas, it happens just a few times a decade, so your chance of winning the jackpot is as slim as Tattslotto.

The bracelets are made on a Rainbow Loom - a little peg board devised by a Michigan engineer. On it you intertwine a few score colourful rubber bands and create pretty designs that delight both young girls and boys.

Three years ago, Cheong Choon Ng invented the game for his daughters. Then they persuaded him that the world might like it too, so he invested $10,000, to create the first batch of the plastic looms and bands. Then he waited for the orders - which did not come.

He took them to stores and toy shops but had little response until a craft shop took a small quantity. Because they were set up for craft demonstrations, they were able to show the Loom at work - and rapidly sold out. They re-ordered, so did their chain around the country.

They now understood the sales method: show how it works on YouTube, and promote it on Google. Soon girls and boys from all over America were making Rainbow videos, and orders were flooding in.

By August they had finally been noticed by the big stores - Wal Mart, Toys-R-Us - and were flooded under pre-Christmas orders. By year's end he'd moved 3.5 million units.

He now has world sales - we know about Australia, but also Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, Japan, Israel, even Turkey - the list grows daily. At the beginning of this year it won the Toy of the Year award.

What is wonderful about this success is the total lack of electronics, shooting ranges, and mobile media, except for discussion on Facebook; and the chance for our children to actually learn a craft and use their fingers to make something, rather than just press buttons. It doesn't even beep!

Fads, of course, have their limited life spans and then subside back to a quiet level - though always greater than where they started. They never really totally die.

Think back: did you ever keep a tamagotchi? Or perhaps you walked tall in the playground with a set of Pokemons. Girls had to have Barbie dolls, or perhaps a generation earlier, Cabbage Patch Dolls?

In almost every case you had an enterprising inventor who, hopefully, went on to make lots of money after his idea was picked up by the toy manufacturers. It's well to remember that toy makers are always looking for three or four "hits of the year" for their range - they need something new to take to the store buyers every sales cycle.

So what was your generation's fad - Rubik's Cube perhaps? Or earlier - hula hoops, yo-yos? So long as you didn't get into one passing fad, tattoos. That one's hard to take off and put into the back of the cupboard.

No, stick to weaving elastic bands. When you've had enough, they're easily undone.