How the Fingerling caught on as 2017’s hot toy

About two years ago, Sydney Wiseman had a challenging assignment for an engineer at her family toy company.

Could he design a small robotic toy that resembled a pygmy marmoset, a tiny Amazonian monkey that Wiseman had been obsessed with since she was a child growing up in Montreal.

Sure, the engineer told her. What do you want the little monkey to do?

Thus was born the Fingerling, a 5-inch monkey that grips your finger with its legs and arms, as it babbles, blows kisses and blinks its eyes. Cradle a Fingerling in your hand and it drifts off to sleep. Press the Fingerling’s head and it passes gas.

Created by the Canadian company WowWee, the Fingerling has been anointed one of this year’s hot toys for the holidays, a designation most toymakers only dream of achieving.

For decades, there has always been a must-have holiday toy — Cabbage Patch Kids, Beanie Babies, a Tickle Me Elmo doll. Parents drive long distances to scour stores for the one item in short supply at exactly the moment when everyone wants it. Scalpers sell the toys at ridiculous markups, while counterfeiters dupe desperate families into buying knockoffs.

At stake are the tears — of joy or misery — of the children whose dearest wishes are fulfilled, or dashed.

How the Fingerling reached this tipping point — when suddenly millions of children cannot do without a $15 farting monkey — is the story of a promising idea’s going viral on social media, a large retailer’s savvy pricing strategy and the science of managing scarcity.

The monkey’s journey from Wiseman’s imagination to holiday sensation also shows how the making of a hot toy has evolved through the generations.

The $84 billion global toy industry is struggling for the attention of children obsessed with smartphones and tablets. Global toy sales have been growing each year, but at a slower pace than video games.

The average life span of a toy fad is about eight months from its launch until it’s marked down, said Richard Gottlieb, an analyst and publisher of Global Toy News.

“The life of an item is a little rockier” than it used to be, said Anne Marie Kehoe, the WalMart vice president who runs the retailer’s toy division in the United States. “We move as a country faster from one thing to the next.”

Cultivating the success of a hot toy carries its own risks, including managing supply. This past week, Fingerlings were out of stock on Wal-Mart’s website, while parents complained that they had been snookered into buying counterfeits from sellers on Amazon and other sites. While the monkeys are the core of the Fingerlings brand, WowWee also sells sloth and unicorn versions — one of which was listed on eBay for $5,000.