Little Squirt Turns Big Shot
Anyone unclear on the biggest breakthrough in weapons technology over the last decade hasn’t looked down the barrel of a modern squirt gun.
This year’s biggest model is nearly 3 feet long, connects to a backpack that carries two gallons of water, expels 20 ounces of fluid per second and is capable of drenching targets almost 40 feet away.
It is the Super Soaker CPS 3000 by Larami Ltd. The CPS is short for constant pressure system. There’s also the XP line, which stands for extra power, and the SC series, which connects to a “Super Charger” for quick refills.
These water weapons are the latest in a line of high-tech squirt guns that began with the tinkerings of an engineer at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and have transformed the toy industry as much as they have transformed neighborhood water fights.
Ten years ago, the squirt gun market was still largely the province of 29-cent plastic pistols that could barely douse an insect. Squirt guns weren’t even tracked as a separate category by toy industry analysts. Today it is a $215-million-a-year business in the United States, and Larami owns 90% of it.
“Super Soakers have joined the ranks of Tonka Trucks and Matchbox cars--products that are perennial,” said Dave Brewi, vice president of merchandise for Toys R Us. “They have dominated the market as much as you can.”
Elaborate Super Soaker battles have become a summertime ritual across the country. In Downey, for instance, elementary schools celebrate graduation each year by staging Super Soaker parties on school playgrounds.
“You just keep running and shooting,” said Anthony Ramirez, 10, one of 150 fifth-graders at Mandi Price Elementary School in Downey to take part in his school’s shootout this spring.
“It seems like every summer you have to buy a new one,” said his mother, Diana Ramirez, who was shopping at a Toys R Us in Cerritos recently. And like countless parents across the country, she does, plunking down $20 or so a year to keep Anthony current in the water-gun arms race.
Getting consumers to keep trading up for more powerful guns is a key component to Larami’s strategy. The New Jersey-based company covers nearly every price point, from a few dollars for the cheapest model to the $39.95 price tag on the CPS 3000.
But Larami, which was acquired by toy giant Hasbro Inc. for about $100 million five years ago, has also maintained its stranglehold through constant innovation, gaining nearly 20 patents over the last decade and suing every other toy maker that comes near its designs.
“We have an engineering staff that works on developing new guns all the time,” said Al Davis, a co-founder and executive vice president of Larami. “If other companies step on our patents, we don’t hesitate going after them.”
Super Soakers are an assemblage of chambers, pumps and levers. Most of the guns have bulbous plastic tanks mounted on top for holding water. Underneath the gun’s barrel is a sliding handle used to fill the gun with air pressurized up to 35 pounds a square inch.
When the gun’s trigger is pulled, it opens a seal at the tip of the barrel and the water--pushed by all that pressurized air--rushes out in a tight stream.
There are only a few moving parts. The guns are made of plastic, with a metal rod and spring connected to the trigger. The mechanism isn’t all that different from that used in air rifles, garden sprayers and other things that have been around for decades.
But somehow, no one bothered to apply this technology to squirt guns until 1982, when Lonnie Johnson, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer responsible for power subsystems on the Galileo spacecraft, was tinkering with a way to make a heat pump that used water instead of Freon as a coolant.
“I had hooked up the pump to the water faucet and shot a stream of water across the bathroom into the tub,” said Johnson, now 49 and running his own research lab in Atlanta. “The pressure was so great that the curtains were swaying. I told myself that it would be a great water gun.”
It was seven years before anyone else saw that same potential. Daisy Manufacturing Co., maker of BB guns, passed on the idea after two years of discussions with Johnson. Another company licensed the design but never made the gun and subsequently went out of business.
In 1989, Johnson came to a meeting with Larami engineers armed with a prototype he’d made from a soda bottle and PVC pipe. He left with a $30,000 check and has since made millions of dollars from royalties on every gun sold.
Many toy retailers didn’t think consumers would spend $10 on a squirt gun. But Toy R Us decided to carry it, and Larami got a huge break in November 1990 when Johnny Carson featured the Super Soaker on his annual toy review.
The next 12 months stunned the industry. In 1990, sales of all toy guns, including squirt guns, totaled about $89 million. A year later, toy gun sales overall soared to $232 million, according to the Toy Manufacturers of America, and the Super Soaker accounted for most of the difference.
“They’ve created a category all to themselves,” said Eric Johnson, a professor of management at Vanderbilt University who follows the toy industry. “They took an old idea, but radically improved it from children’s perspective.”
So radically that some municipalities have passed laws to control them. In Pender County, North Carolina, police are authorized to confiscate Super Soakers on the courthouse square. Dave Morison, former county attorney, said the ordinance was passed after “a couple of little old ladies got wet” in the cross-fire at the county’s annual spring festival.
Indeed, the guns are so powerful that they come with warnings: they are not to be aimed at people’s faces. The company has also made a point of giving the guns fluorescent colors and playful designs to minimize any association--in the minds of children or their parents--between these high-powered squirt guns and real weapons.
The guns have evolved considerably over the last eight years, adding multiple nozzles, larger water tanks, more reliable pumps and quicker loading systems.
But there is one performance category that hasn’t changed: firing range. Almost every Super Soaker, from the first gun through the CPS 3000, has a maximum range of 37.5 feet, which, it turns out, is something of a technological limit.
As soon as water leaves the gun’s barrel, the stream’s outer edges start to shear off in the air. You can make the stream go faster with more pressure, but that requires more pumping, and the gains in distance diminish because the faster the stream is traveling, the quicker it degenerates into a dull spray.
“The only thing that helps you is to go to a larger diameter,” inventor Johnson said. “But then you run out of water faster. It just gets to the point where Mother Nature is not cooperating.”
Today Larami’s main rival is Yes Entertainment of Pleasanton, Calif., the only other company supplying high-powered squirt guns to Toys R Us, Wal-Mart and other major retailers.
Yes has had a modest hit this year with its “Doublecross” gun, which uses a bladder system instead of a pump, loads under pressure straight from the hose, and has two pistol-like attachments that can be aimed and fired independently.
“For a very small company, we’ve made good inroads,” said Maria Orosz, director of product development for Yes.
Meanwhile, Larami is setting its sights ever higher. Next year, the company plans to roll out its first line of guns aimed at the college-age market.
Company executives are circumspect. But Davis said the centerpiece of the new line “is much bigger, much more powerful. Eleven-year-olds may not be able to pick it up.”
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Making a Big Splash
“Squirt gun” doesn’t begin to describe today’s water weapons. Hatched from the mind of an aerospace engineer, the modern-day Super Soaker has a firing range of 40 feet and carries up to two gallons of water. Larami Ltd., the company that makes the toy, owns 90% of a market that now tops $215 million a year.
