Hawaiian Game Has Dealers Pog-Wild : Business: Kids flip their lids over flinging milk bottle caps. Entrepreneurs hope the reborn trend will spread to the mainland.
Get ready for the sound of clink, clink, clink followed by the sight of flying, inch-wide plastic and cardboard discs.
It’s pog, a game played much like marbles but with milk bottle caps. Youngsters have set aside far costlier Nintendo sets for the chance to win at a game their great-grandparents played in an earlier form more than half a century ago.
And businesses in the South Bay and elsewhere in Southern California are moving fast to cash in on the phenomenon. After pog’s resurgence in Hawaii, printers and retailers are betting that youngsters on the mainland will ignite a pog craze, if not this summer, by the time school starts.
A whole slew of trend-watching entrepreneurs predict that pogs will not be just another Garbage Pail Kids, but lasting collectibles, right up there with a Joe DiMaggio baseball card or X-Men comic book No. 1.
“If what I think will happen does, come back in a month and you will see pogs flying out of this place,” said Craig Masuoka, co-owner of California Color Products in Torrance, one of about half a dozen Southern California companies making the milk bottle tops.
At Wall-to-Wall Comics in Torrance, $5.95 sets of Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtle pogs are in a glass display case. Pogs also can be bought individually--about 100 discs have been sold at the store so far, mostly those that cost 25 cents. Eagerly anticipated is the Spawn pog set, featuring a hot new comic book super hero.
“It’s cheap for kids,” said Carl Choi, 15, the store’s pog specialist, as he demonstrated the game on the countertop. “This is something they can afford. And they play the game and win pogs. They don’t have to always keep buying them.”
Pog has its roots in the Great Depression, when a similar game became popular among children. The game is a cinch to learn: Players hurl a plastic pog down onto a stack of the cardboard discs, all of them face-up. The player gets points for each pog that lands face-down. If the game involves pricier pogs, winners get to keep the pogs they’ve flipped.
The flying chips were reborn two years ago when teachers at an Oahu elementary school rounded up milk covers from the Haleakala Dairy and introduced the game to their students. The disc of choice among children at the time was the container cap for a drink made of passion fruit, orange and guava (POG), hence the name.
To demonstrate to skeptics how popular the hobby has become on the islands, pog promoters call directory assistance in Hawaii and ask the operator about the discs. In one such call last week, the operator described her personal collection and offered a bit of pog news: There’s been a crackdown on bootleg Barney pogs.
Indeed, older children and adults also have taken to collecting the discs, even to the point of framing sets and hanging them in their living rooms. Some discs, bearing images of comic book heroes or featuring the works of artists, have sold for $5 apiece. Organizations have even sold customized pogs to raise money.
California Color got wind of the trend last spring, when it was still hot in Hawaii. A customer there told Masuoka about the phenomenon, and he placed a mail-order ad in the Honolulu paper. He got 300 calls.
The Torrance company, which primarily prints stickers and T-shirt designs, had sales increase about 25% after it produced more than 1 million discs for the islands, where $1 buys about four or five pogs. Masuoka, a former advertising executive and promoter, is enlisting a distribution company to help blanket the market in Southern California.
“At this point, it’s sales promotion and marketing that will take this game to another level,” Masuoka said. “. . . If you want to get out there, you’ve got to do it quickly.”
So far, so good. The company got dozens of orders at the L.A. Gift show last week. Pog tournaments have been held in Buena Park and Newport Beach. And a Buena Park teacher banned pog games just before the school year ended, virtually guaranteeing greater interest in the game.
Last week, two Hawaiian pog distributors, Gayle Yoshizawa and Gordon Mar, traveled to comic book stores and toy shops in the South Bay to sell their flashy designs. Their priciest pog is an authentic, 70-year-old milk cap.
For Mar, the discs were lifesavers. Mar went into the business after Hurricane Iniki devastated the economy and he lost his job as a tour guide.
“If it wasn’t for the milk caps, all the card stores would have closed down,” he said.
But now the market in Hawaii is flooded with an estimated 150 million pogs for about 1 million people, said Bill Hodson, a former Newport Beach stockbroker who last spring launched his own version of pog, called Trov, as in treasure trove.
“Here, it’s going to be a little bit tougher to get the pog craze going,” Hodson said of Southern California. “There are a lot of fads out there. And anyone with an entrepreneurial bone in his body will get into it.”
His proposal is to form an association of milk cap distributors to keep tabs on the market and teach people how to play.
In Orange County, Hodson has been organizing tournaments and demonstrating pogs at schools and parks. Masuoka, meanwhile, is banking on the market for collectible pogs taking off. Nicknamed “faux pogs” on the islands, these are discs featuring everything from holograms to American Gladiators to Jurassic pogs. They often are sold in packages of six or more.
“You can see why people collect them,” he said. “This is taking the same growth pattern as trading cards.”
California Color Products plans to print Grateful Dead pogs, and scented pogs are on the way. They are not alone. Baseball card firms and comic book companies are getting into the action, as are advertisers. In Hawaii, Lexus pogs were circulating at one point.
“It’s funny,” Masuoka said. “It’s not electronic, it’s a really simple game, and it takes off like crazy. If those kids at the school in Hawaii had been really passive, this game would have not come out of the archives.”
