Product lines are also more complex, and are grouped into related categories the Sea-Doo line has around a dozen products, there are several Slip 'N Slide variations, a group of "lawn games" and so on. For example, Sea-Doo is a manufacturer of personal water craft Wham-O makes a "Sea-Doo" product line of small inflatable rafts designed to be towed behind the watercraft. Since the toys were not expensive or complicated, they were sold by a wide variety of retailers, from large department stores to corner Five and dime shops.Īfter the sale of the company, the various new owners experimented with changes to this formula the toy industry was changing, with more complicated products and fewer sales outlets.Īs of 2006, the portfolio of product lines includes several groups of related items which use licensed brand names. New products would be developed and added to the line for a tryout period, and old ones retired (either for a few years or permanently) as their popularity waned. They also did extensive research to find new product ideas, including traveling all over the world.įor many years, the company's product strategy was to have a stable of eight to twelve simple and inexpensive products, such as Frisbees, Super Balls, and Hula Hoops. Knerr and Melin aimed their products directly at kids, going out to playgrounds to reach them. Its debut at a New York toy fair made it wildly popular, but the fish could not produce eggs fast enough, so the idea was dropped.Wham-O's initial success can be seen as a result of the insight of its founders. Melin turned this into the Instant Fish product, an aquarium kit that consisted of some of the fish eggs and some mud in which to hatch them.
When the rains came, the eggs hatched and fish emerged overnight. While camping, he discovered a species of fish that laid eggs in the mud during Africa's dry season. One such product came as a result of Melin's safari to Africa in the early 1960s. Many products, of course, were not successful.
#WHAM O MAGIC WINDOW MOVIE#
In 1962, they sold a limbo dance kit to take advantage of that fad, and in 1975 when the movie Jaws was released, they sold plastic shark teeth. In the 1960s, Wham-O came out with a US$119 do-it-yourself bomb shelter cover. Other products tried to take advantage of existing national trends. The company sold some 20 million of these during the 1960s, and the NFL named the Super Bowl games after it. It was made of a relatively hard elastomer Polybutadiene alloy dubbed Zectron, exhibiting a remarkable 0.92 coefficient of restitution when bounced on hard surfaces. In the early 1960s, Wham-O created the Super Ball. He sold the design to Wham-O in 1957 and the design was modified, the product renamed Frisbee and sales took off in 1959. In 1955 Fred Morrison began marketing a plastic flying disc which he called the "Pluto Platter". Shortly after, they got lucky again with the Frisbee. By the end of 1959, after US$45 million in profits, the fad slowly was dying out. Twenty-five million were sold in less than four months, and in two years sales reached more than 100 million units. Knerr and Melin had created the biggest fad to date. The new Hula Hoop was born (the name "hula hoop" has been used since the 18th century). In 1957, Wham-O, still a fledgling company, took the idea of Australian bamboo "exercise hoops" and manufactured them with Marlex.
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