Wham-O looks to reinvent itself
President wants to make products ‘the new cool’
LOS ANGELES — Life was once an easy summer breeze for Wham-O. The Southern California toy outfit, founded in a South Pasadena garage shortly after the Second World War, churned out Frisbees like pancakes and Super Balls like gumballs.
Its Boogie Board (devised in 1971 by Orange County-bred Bahai surfer Tom Morey) stood sentinel in suburban garages. Only squares didn’t own a Hula Hoop (introduced in 1957; 100 million units sold within three years). In Wham-O’s television ads, its iconic starburst logo dropped into living rooms like a Super Ball off a third-storey balcony. Times sure have changed. Of the many entertainment centric outfits disrupted by the digital era, few have been upended like Wham-O. Its toys, once symbols of an endless summer, are now relics of a bygone season. Even the notion of a firm devoted to plastic playthings feels like an anachronism. Why kick around a beanbag when there’s FIFA Mobile Soccer?
Wham-O has had a rough time financially, too. Sales fell sharply from their peak, but were still hovering around $80 million as of 2005, according to public documents and company statements. Since then they’ve slipped further, to less than a quarter of that as of 2015. But a new set of executives isn’t convinced the company is doomed.
“We think there’s a way to make our products the new cool,” said Wham-O president Todd Richards. “Being outside can be the new iPhone.”
Around his desk at Wham-O headquarters in Carson lie various distractions — or are they research? A miniature basketball hoop. A water balloon “aqua bow.” Balls, discs and an assortment of flying objects.
Richards oversees an area staff of about 30 employees. (A second office of about 50 staffers sits in Hong Kong.) The group’s mission: to tweak designs and marketing for the 21st century. At their core, after all, many of their products function the same way as those toys in Grandpa’s basement. But Richards maintains they can be repositioned for a new audience.
“A lot of young people would love our products if they got the chance to know what they are. But they’ve never had the opportunity,” said Olyvia Pronin, the company’s director of marketing. “We’re trying to show them what they’re missing by going to wherever they are.”
Or to whatever they’re on. Wham-O is developing a Frisbee app that will essentially allow the disc to be “thrown” from one mobile device to another.
“You’re sitting in a meeting and you say ‘Hey Paul, catch this,’” Richards said, miming a wrist-flick swipe across an imaginary screen. “And Paul is at the other end of conference room and he looks up and ‘catches it.’”
After being run as a family business for nearly 35 years — the company was founded in 1948 by USC alums Richard Knerr and Arthur (Spud) Melin, who capitalized on what were then cuttingedge chemical and industrial advances — Wham-O in the last few decades has endured a revolving door of owners, including Mattel, not to mention a series of retail woes.
Richards took over as president when the faltering Wham-O was sold to his privately held Carson-based InterSport and Hong Kongbased Stallion Sport for an undisclosed — but certainly bargainbasement — sum at the end of 2015. The seller was Cornerstone Overseas Investments, which had owned Wham-O for about 10 years and watched as sales cratered.
Richards believes he’s finally hit upon a winning formula. He previously was a vice-president of sales for Wham-O in the early 2000s. After leaving the firm, he watched with some consternation as Wham-O under Cornerstone tried to compete using more generic products like beach sand pails.
Richards had little hope he could do anything about that until Stallion’s chief, Joseph Lin, approached him several years ago with word that Wham-O was available. The two parties soon had put together financing and closed the deal.
With eBay and other entities driving a huge nostalgia industry — the company has a store on the retail site, should you be in the market for that vintage Wham-O hunting slingshot — Richards made the acquisition under the belief that Wham-O was wellsituated and just needed some new energy. He quickly created a startup environment to rethink how Wham-O does business.
The company’s Carson offices feel like a space where employees of a Silicon Valley giant might engage in some much-needed toy-based relaxation from their stressful jobs. Only in this case, the toys are the stressful jobs.
For a mature business like Wham-O’s, the company’s ability to innovate can turn on small tweaks.
Wham-O also is using a crowdsourcing model, hearing as many as several dozen pitches per week from ordinary citizens who think they’ve come up with the next great toy; the ideas sometimes find their way into the company’s product-development pipeline.
Digital efforts aren’t the only way Wham-O is seeking to grow. New physical toys have been a priority, too.
The aqua bow, for instance, allows for water balloons to be shot a maximum distance of 150 metres, instantly making any family picnic more perilous.
And Richards says a radical new Frisbee design is on its way. He at first doesn’t let on what it is, then eventually some details slip out — it’s shaped more like a square and can thus “self-correct” and fly longer and straighter than the saucer-shaped disc that’s been keeping us and our mutts happy for years.
“It will change everything,” Richards said, flashing the smile of a man about to tell the rest of the Bingo room he’s holding the winning card.
But for all of its ambition, a number of hurdles stand in Wham-O’s way.
With consolidation having gripped the toy business for years, running an independent producer of low-tech toys isn’t simple. The number of retailers has dwindled and shelf space is at a premium. Online sales, meanwhile, can be tricky for a company that depends on consumers holding its products in their hands.
And while the specific style and name of Wham-O toys are copyrighted, their basic idea can be — and often is — imitated by competitors, who can take advantage of modern efficiency tools like inexpensive foreign labour and manufacturing costs.
Not to mention the challenge of competition from new fads the company isn’t behind (e.g., the fidget spinner).
Ultimately, though, any digitalage Wham-O revival may come down to an old-fashioned question: Do people enjoy its physical products?
Executives certainly think they will.
“Look at this,” Richards said, as he picked up Super Balls of varying weights and colours and began bouncing them. “Come on. You’re going to tell me anything on a screen is as fun as this?”