When no one wants your Meat Slingshot, what do you do? Make a better flying disc and name it after a pie plate, naturally.

Dave Young:

Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not so secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is… Well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. So here’s one of those.

[ECO Office Ad]

Dave Young:

Welcome back to the Empire Builders Podcast. Dave Young here with Stephen Semple and today’s topic, Wham-O. It’s from Wham-O. In all the toy stores, I’m trying to think. Slinky wasn’t Wham-O, was it?

Stephen Semple:

No, Slinky was not Wham-O.

Dave Young:

Yeah. I’m trying to think of what Wham-O was.

Stephen Semple:

Frisbee’s.

Dave Young:

Frisbee’s.

Stephen Semple:

Hula Hoops.

Dave Young:

Okay.

Stephen Semple:

All sorts of crap, right?

Dave Young:

I didn’t realize the Frisbee was a Wham-O product. I mean, I remember the name. I remember the ads and it’s a cool name.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. Well, it’s so funny. Wham-O was Frisbee, Hula Hoops, Slip ‘N’ Slide, Super Ball, all of those-

Dave Young:

Probably lawn darts.

Stephen Semple:

All of those sorts of things were Wham-O. But what I find funny is before getting on, we were talking about this whole thing of sounds and things like that and communication. And then all of a sudden it’s like, “Oh, we’re going to talk about a company whose name actually has that real kinetic feel of Wham-O.”

Dave Young:

Mm-hmm. I love a name that is also a sound. And if we have time, I’ll tell you about a client I’m working with that we changed the name of the company to make it a sound.

Stephen Semple:

Oh, that’s cool.

Dave Young:

Yeah.

Stephen Semple:

That’s awesome. Oh, the other ones that they did, Hacky Sack and Silly Strings was a couple of the other ones.

Dave Young:

Were they responsible for lawn darts? That’s my question.

Stephen Semple:

I’m not sure if they’re responsible for lawn darts. So since it didn’t come up-

Dave Young:

Maybe not. Yeah.

Stephen Semple:

… I guess probably not. The company started in 1949 out of, basically a lot of these things out, of the garage in South Pasadena. And it was Richard Knerr and Arthur Melin, who are basically two university graduates, started this company. And their first product was a slingshot, was a wooden slingshot made from ash wood. And the name Wham-O was actually inspired by the sound of the slingshot hitting a target.

Dave Young:

You release it… Yeah.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Young:

Very satisfying.

Stephen Semple:

But here’s the funny thing is, it wasn’t originally… The idea behind making it was not actually a toy. They loved training falcons, and it was to train falcons for hunting.

Dave Young:

A slingshot? Okay.

Stephen Semple:

They would shoot the meat into the air. They got frustrated that the regular slingshot wouldn’t fire it the way they wanted to do it, so they made their own.

Dave Young:

So they made a meat slingshot.

Stephen Semple:

Made a meat slingshot.

Dave Young:

It turns out there wasn’t a huge market for meat slingshots. So you pivot and put it in the hands of children eventually.

Stephen Semple:

It’s the 1950s, dude.

Dave Young:

Uh-huh, that’s right. “You’re going to put an eye out.” Well, somebody already did.

Stephen Semple:

Be careful with that hamburger you’re firing out.

Dave Young:

But that was their fault, not ours. Yeah. Those were the days, right?

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

When the manufacturer could say, “Well, that’s your fault. You shouldn’t have been an idiot.”

Stephen Semple:

“What’d you expect a rock to do?” But again, so many businesses, it started with them just solving their own problem. And their own problem was they wanted this thing. But what they found out, they created one that was so good that all of a sudden was like, “Wow,” people became interested in this.

Dave Young:

It the wrist rocket?

Stephen Semple:

You know what? I was able to find-

Dave Young:

I don’t know if that’s the same kind of-

Stephen Semple:

I wasn’t able to find pictures of the original thing around, because it didn’t do particularly well, but it kind of put them onto a path. Because very quickly they added blow guns and boomerangs.

Dave Young:

Nice.

Stephen Semple:

Right? But the whole idea was these types of things. And they get to the stage with these various products. So they’ve got the slingshot, they got the blow gun, they got the boomerang, they got these little niches going on and they’re selling basically $100,000 a year of this stuff. But they’re thinking to themselves, “If we’re going to really make this a business, we need a bigger idea.” And I’m going to say, if you’re going to really make this a business, you need an idea which is not going to put somebody’s eye out.

Dave Young:

Probably. This is, again, like you said, the 1950s.

Stephen Semple:

1950s. Really, no seat belts, like, “Come on now.”

Dave Young:

The BB gun’s already invented.

Stephen Semple:

You know, it’s funny, when you think back to how we were with safety and things like that, one of my really fond memories… Now this wouldn’t have been the ’50s, this would be the ’70s, but one of my really fond memories of being a kid was we’d be hauling stuff somewhere and we had this old green wood trailer with oversized tires on it that bounced like crazy when you’re driving down the road. And one of the funnest thing is we would go somewhere and coming home, all the kids would pile into the trailer in the back as we’re driving down the road.

Dave Young:

You’d be the ballast to hold down the sheets of plywood. Yeah. Well, who needs tie downs when you’ve got 200 pounds of children?

Stephen Semple:

And the weird thing is, it’s not like anybody thought that was weird.

Dave Young:

No.

Stephen Semple:

That was what you do.

Dave Young:

Yeah. And if you weren’t on the trailer, you were sitting on the edge of a pickup with your back to the road.

Stephen Semple:

Exactly. Exactly. Anyway, back to Wham-O. They’re needing a bigger idea. And while they’re on the beach, they come across this flying disc called Whirlaway.

Dave Young:

Okay.

Stephen Semple:

Right? And they decide… They also found another one called Pluto Platter. So it didn’t work. It wasn’t really selling. And so Wham-O, they buy the rights to this. They go, “Look, we’ll buy the rights to this.” They make a few couple of design changes. And Morrison saw this people also tossing these metal pythons, right?

Dave Young:

Oh, okay.

Stephen Semple:

And so that was actually where he came up with a little bit of the design change. He kind of looked at that and went, “Oh, this is much better than this Pluto Platter thing.”

Dave Young:

You drop the edge down and balances itself a little bit better.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah, yeah. And one of the pie plates they came across, guess what the name of the pie plate was?

Dave Young:

Frisbee maybe?

Stephen Semple:

Bingo.

Dave Young:

Yeah? Okay.

Stephen Semple:

Frisbee.

Dave Young:

Okay. So they buy that too or just-

Stephen Semple:

They just trademarked that because it wasn’t trademarked. So they went and trademarked the Frisbee name. And in the first two years, they sell a million Frisbees.

Dave Young:

Wow.

Stephen Semple:

Right? And what they did to promote it, so here’s the really cool idea, they go to university campuses and they also gave it to people and people, guess what, immediately found on university cool ways to do tricks and stuff with the Frisbee. So that then got it going. And look, this was pre social media days. Imagine what you’d be able to do today in terms of demonstrating all this crazy stuff on social media.

Dave Young:

Well, you’d have to get people off their phone.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. But what they have now is they have a way of creating ideas. And what they realized was they had to look for things and just make them better. So they created this open door policy. They would listen to anybody, “Come pitch an idea, we’ll listen.” So the next one was a ne...