Hobbyhorses Galloping Faster Than Ever
Hobbyhorses date back to ancient Greece but remain a favorite toy for Space-Age tots. Ask Chuck Sakolsky, who was in charge of making and selling nearly $5.5-million worth last year.
“The funny thing is that even though it is a rocket ship world, kids’ interest in horses has never gone away. The hobbyhorse is as basic to the toy business as anything there is,” said Sakolsky, general manager of the Wonder Products Inc. factory in northwest Louisiana’s Bossier City, near Shreveport.
The Wonder Horse--a heavy-duty plastic horse molded in mid-gallop and held up by steel springs--is a 20th-Century descendant of the hobbyhorse, a stick with a horse’s head at one end.
Toy historians have traced hobbyhorses to the time of Socrates and to illustrations in a 15th-Century French book of hours. No references to rocking horses are known before the 17th Century, but whenever they were invented, they had become immensely popular by the 1800s.
Wonder introduced the spring-mounted horse in 1939, Sakolsky said, and bouncing horses all but eliminated American-made molded rocking horses from toy departments by the middle 1970s.
“Mostly what’s out there are flat pieces of wood put together to look like a horse,” he said, adding that most of today’s molded horses on rockers are imported.
The Wonder company plans to reintroduce its rocking horse this year, capitalizing on growing nostalgia among parents and older people.
Like the rocking horse, Wonder is coming back from almost nothing.
The company was founded in Memphis, Tenn.; the move to Bossier City came after it had been sold twice. CBS Inc., the broadcasting and entertainment concern that owned a Louisiana swing set company called Gym Dandy, put the two together.
“CBS got out of the toy business a couple years back. . . . They sold the company to some of its managers. They really didn’t have the wherewithal to keep it going,” Sakolsky said.
Basic or not, the company went under. Rotocast Plastic Products Inc. of Miami bought it for $2.5 million last year at a sheriff’s sale and brought in Sakolsky to run it.
“We’ve doubled our business since 1987 and we’ll double it again in 1990,” he said.
Sakolsky estimated that Wonder sold about $3-million worth of toys in 1988, $5.5 million in 1989 and probably will sell nearly $10-million worth in 1990. He declined to give the number of toys sold but said the company has relationships with retailers ranging from large toy chains to small shops.
“At one time, we had close to 70% of the market,” he said. “In 1988, I think we had around 30%. I believe we’ll have 50% of the market by 1990.”
The company’s mainstay remains the spring-mounted horse, which retails anywhere from $40--for a 28-inch model suitable for a 2- or 3-year-old--to more than $100.
“We have palominos, roans, pintos . . . we’re coming out with a dapple gray,” he said.
Sakolsky also has gone back through 40 years of catalogues to find products worth bringing back, and has created a couple of his own.
Last year the company introduced a horse of a brighter color--a hand-painted replica of a 1914 carousel horse, painted in vivid merry-go-round hues, priced at $150. The same horse, mounted on a brass pole and sold as furniture, retails for up to $500.
“It is the Rolls-Royce of the ride-on horses,” said Sakolsky. “I sort of think of these as grandmother horses, because it’s the sort of thing a grandmother looks at and says, ‘Gee--that’s what my grandchild has to have.’ ”
