How Toy Crazes Are Born

Ann Zimmerman
Wall Street Journal
December 16, 2010

There's something you need to know about two of this year's hottest holiday toys: Your kids won't let you buy just one.

In the tradition of Hot Wheels cars, Beanie Babies animals and Pokémon trading cards, Squinkies and Zoobles toys have been carefully engineered to make children crave them in great numbers.

That would explain why there are 180 different Zoobles, tiny plastic big-eyed animals that hail from the land of "Petagonia." Costing about $6, each Zooble rolls up into a ball that will pop open to form the tiny creature.

Squinkies are even tinier and number 300 so far, ranging from babies and princesses to fish and elephants. Each fits in a plastic capsule, like the ones in gumball machines. A bubble pack of 16 Squinkies retails for about $10.

This is their first Christmas. Squinkies and Zoobles hit stores in August. When Squinkies had sold out at Target by the end of the first week, the toy maker knew it had a hit on its hands. The company behind Zoobles is making one million figures a month and can't keep up with demand.

A collectible toy that sparks a craze is the toy industry's Holy Grail. It's the gift that keeps on selling. "More like the gift that keeps on taking my money," says Linda Meadow, a Santa Monica, Calif., mother of three girls, whose 9-year-old is obsessed with Squinkies.

In a twist on the razor-and-blades business model, the relatively inexpensive Zoobles and Squinkies come with expensive accessories: A Zoobles treehouse is $39.99 at Toys "R" Us; a cupcake-shaped Squinkies dispenser is $19.99.

"If you get the fever, it does start to get expensive," says Anton Rabie, co-chief executive of Spin Master Ltd., Toronto, the maker of Zoobles and Bakugan, a line of similar collectible toys for boys launched in 2008.

The Zoobles' appeal resides in the way the figures transform from spheres and in their characteristics, which recall the Japanese animé style, Mr. Rabie says.

Carolyn Vandiver's Zoobles habit began a few months ago, after the Dallas mother promised her 6- and 4-year-old daughters a reward for good behavior during a shopping trip. The older girl wanted a $25 toy horse. But when her mother picked up the much-cheaper Zoobles instead, the girl was hooked.

"She likes little things that she can carry in her pockets, and she likes the way they pop open," Ms. Vandiver said, on a recent Sunday at Toys "R" Us, where she was picking up a few more Zoobles before Christmas. "At least I know she likes them. Last year, I bought my daughters a train, and they never looked at it."

It takes more than a long cast of characters for a collectible to spark a craze. Bill Nichols, head of Blip Toys LLC, of Minnetonka, Minn., the maker of Squinkies, says his toy owes much of its appeal to little girls' love of highly detailed objects.

Ripping a page from the Beanie Babies playbook, Blip Toys is stoking demand for Squinkies and limiting distribution. It is deliberately producing some figures in small numbers, prompting repeat trips to the store to find them.

Toys "R" Us recognized Squinkies' allure early on and contracted with Blip to be the only store to stock the rare blue monkey and yellow pig Squinkies. The bubble package heightens the effect, revealing only some of the 16 characters inside.

Mr. Nichols says creating rare Squinkies is part of the toy's "surprise factor." Some parents call it manipulation. Nancy Waldenberg, a Livingston, N.J., mother of three, says she still resents the way Nintendo's Pokémon trading cards "fueled a frenzy" by randomly inserting rare cards into the $10 card packs. "I guess they were smart marketers but it felt like a real scam, because we hardly ever found the rare cards," she says.

Toy makers with a hot new collectible worry it will be a one-season wonder. Their customers, after all, are fickle. Zhu Zhu Pets, the robotic hamsters with individual personalities, while still selling, aren't "the sensation" they were last year, despite the launch of Kung Zhu Pets line of fighting hamsters geared to boys, says Jim Silver, editor-in-chief of the consumer toy website timetoplaymag.com. "What helps keep a collectible alive is how much play factor there is," Mr. Silver says.

The urge to collect, sort and categorize things is actually part of a child's natural cognitive development, says Patricia Hogan, curator of the toy and doll collection at The Strong's National Museum of Play in Rochester, N.Y. "At about age six, children will start hoarding categories of things. Manufacturers who acknowledge that in kids have a good thing going."

From the ages of 3 to 6, children like to classify and collect objects by size, color and shape; from the ages of 5 to 7 boys and girls alike tend to aim for quantity, competing to see who has more, says Bruce Sanders, a consumer and organizational psychologist who writes about the psychology of retailing.

In the 1930s, a former Hollywood costume designer created the Nancy Ann Storybook Dolls—"wee dolls for wee collectors"—one of the first toy series expressly designed and marketed to be collected, Ms. Hogan says. Each series of costumed dolls represented a different theme, such as months of the year, the seasons, fairy tales and nursery rhymes.

Starting in 1968, Mattel's Hot Wheels die-cast cars became hot collectibles for boys; girls were collecting Barbie dolls, produced regularly with new hairdos and careers. A stream of new clothes and accessories fed Barbie's swell, elaborate wardrobe.

In the late 1970s, "Star Wars" figures became the first licensed-property blockbuster. But few collectible crazes have ever approached the intensity of the Beanie Baby frenzy in the mid-1990s. When Ty Inc. began limiting production of some Beanies, and retiring others, their perceived value increased. Fans and investors drove prices up even higher.

Spin Master and Blip are working to come up with more ways to keep children hooked. The next iteration of Zoobles will have a line of mama Zoobles with baby Zooblings in their bellies, a Spin Master spokesman says. Squinkies is creating a line for boys with ninja agents, skater dudes, soldiers and a dice game where players compete to win the opponent's figures.

"Girls have a relationship with their toys," Blip's Mr. Nichols says. "Boys want to own all of yours.”