Yo-Yo’s Back And It’s Gone High-Tech
It’s a truism in the toy world that what goes up must come down. Cabbage Patch Kids? Gone to seed. The pet rock? Sunk. Beanie Babies? Soft. The Hula-Hoop? Don’t get around much anymore.
The yo-yo, though, defies all the logic about toy fads. Over the last seven decades, the humble toy has been up and down more than an Imperial in the hands of a 10-year-old on a full-blown sugar rush.
Today, the yo-yo’s yo-yo effect is at work again. The fad has come around. That burst of color on schoolyards and in back yards is not the autumn leaves, but yo-yos on the end of strings.
“They’ve seemed to run in a 10-year cycle,” said Mike Caffrey, director of sales and marketing for Duncan in Middlefield, Ohio, which sells about three out of every five yo-yos in America. “We’re about ready to hit the peak again.” For the last six months, Duncan’s factory in Indiana has worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Toy stores and hobby shops are reporting stronger-than-ever sales. “I can’t keep them on the shelves,” said Scott Boren, who owns Happy Hippo stores.
A spokeswoman for Zany Brainy said sales had risen 35 percent a year for the last two years, but were up an additional 35 percent in the last six months.
Neither Duncan nor the retailers would disclose sales figures, but analysts estimated that yo-yos are an $80 million-a-year business.
The hottest segment of the market is not the $3 garden-variety yo-yo, though it still is a solid seller. The fastest growth is in the designer models, with features that allow the yo-yo to “sleep” for 30 seconds or more, which sell for $10 and up.
One model - the SB-2 by What’s Next Manufacturing Inc. - is due on local shelves in November. This baby has been clocked at 14,300 rpm (about 100 mph around the rim) and can spin for a full 90 seconds, long enough for any kid to do a complicated trick. The SB-2 is made of aircraft aluminum, contains a ball-bearing axle and adjustable string-gap feature, and comes with a 40-page manual, a spare bearing, a carrying pouch and five extra strings.
It retails for $100.
This is not your father’s yo-yo.
The yo-yo was first noted in primitive times in the Philippines. Legend has it that yo-yos made of rocks and attached to vines were used by hunters in trees who threw down the yo-yos to stun prey. Some scientists dispute the notion, contending that a yo-yo on a string or rope quickly loses its force as it falls. Yo-yos still were a plaything in 19th-century Philippines, and the word “yo-yo” means “to return” in the native Tagalog.
The modern yo-yo is credited to Donald Duncan, who also invented the parking meter. In the late 1920s, Duncan saw a Filipino emigre playing with a small stone yo-yo in San Francisco. Duncan fashioned one out of glass and string, set up a company and recruited Filipinos to tour the schools of America as yo-yo experts.
Generations of Americans can recall the demonstrations, at which the experts would carve patterns and children’s initials on wooden yo-yos. Duncan noticed strong sales after each show. One 30-day stopover in Philadelphia in 1931 led to the sales of 3 million yo-yos.
The yo-yo’s high point was in 1963, in the midst of a $1 million television advertising blitz. Duncan could not maintain its TV advertising budget for such a low-priced item, and the yo-yo market eventually crashed in the late 1960s. Duncan, with a million unsold yo-yos in its warehouse, filed for bankruptcy. One of its manufacturers, Flambeau Products Corp. of Middlefield, Ohio, took over Duncan and kept it going.
Sales were mainly flat until Duncan started advertising on child-oriented cable-TV shows about 1990. That helped.
Then Caffrey came back to Duncan. Caffrey was a Duncan demonstrator straight out of high school in the mid-1970s. On his own, he invented the Yomega “yo-yo with a brain,” and left Duncan in 1984 to form Yomega.
He had a falling-out with his partners and quit, surfacing as a toy designer for Milton Bradley. But his heart - and his hand - remained loyal to yo-yos.
In 1993, Duncan asked him to come back, as director of marketing and sales.
Caffrey knew he had to create demand and launch a fad. His idea was to revive the demonstrations of old - with a twist.
Rather than send demonstrators from town to town, Caffrey hired James Watson, a professor of astronomy and physics at Ball State University, and his wife, Nancy, a middle-school science teacher in Muncie, Ind., to create a lesson plan to teach the physics of a spinning yo-yo. Grade-school teachers could buy kits of yo-yos, which usually retail for about $3, for $1 apiece.
Bingo.
Since last year, about 80,000 kits have gone out to schools all over the country, mainly in the spring when the weather is warmer and classes can meet outside. “The kids would go out in the schoolyard with their yo-yos,” said Caffrey. “Other kids in other classes would see them.”
And these other kids would head to the stores to buy yo-yos at retail.
“The classes that didn’t have the yo-yos were jealous,” said Cathy Murray, who teaches sixth-grade science and used the lesson.
Daniel Battisti, who teaches fifth and sixth graders, said he was sold on the lesson at the end of the last school year. “It tied very neatly into physics,” he said. “It made the kids happy and it made me happy.”
He said siblings of his students bought their own yo-yos, and his students bought additional yo-yos in different colors.
He hopes to use the lesson again this year.
On another group of students.