Play Is Secret to Inventor’s Success
Now that Swingset Press has its first potential hit product, founder and inventor Ron Solomon faces a new challenge: how to do it again.
He’s hoping for a repeat of the “Aha!” moment that inspired his publishing company’s fourth and most popular children’s product: a secret journal that kids write in using a special ink. The ink is visible only under the black light of the accompanying miniature ultraviolet-light unit.
My Ultra Secret Stuff Journal, which hit the stores in August, is in its third printing, with 130,000 published to date, Solomon said. His home-based business has three new black-light products under wraps for 2001.
Beyond that, though, Solomon hesitates to extend the product line for fear of sacrificing originality for profit. By letting his ideas come up naturally, he thinks they’ll be fresher and more likely to be the next big thing.
“This is where entrepreneurs come to that juncture,” Solomon said. “If you go for the buck . . . then stuff becomes derivative.”
His wife, Iris, co-founder and marketing chief of the 3-year-old Van Nuys company, is more enthusiastic about pursuing the potential of additional black-light products, he said. So far, they have compromised, a survival strategy the partners often use for their business and marriage.
“We are expanding it less than I want and more than he wants,” said Iris Solomon. The tension between creativity and profitability is commonplace in the world of product development, whether it’s a book-based product such as the kind Swingset Press specializes in or the script for one of the children’s television shows Solomon used to work on, he said.
“Designers I know . . . get kind of bored quickly with things so they always want to think of the next new thing,” agreed Steven M. Montgomery, a product-development instructor at the Art Center College of Design and principal of BioDesign, both in Pasadena.
The vagaries of the creative process are familiar to Solomon. A creator, writer and producer of award-winning shows for NBC such as “Saved by the Bell,” “California Dreams” and “Hang Time,” he spent many hours pursuing the elusive creative muse. He said he has found that ideas flow faster when one’s internal critic is silenced.
One of the best ways to accomplish that, he said, is old-fashioned play. He and his writers would prepare for each season by spending several hundred dollars at a toy store. Back in the shared writing room, a surprise Nerf ball attack or a new Lego set would almost always end the staring off into space that ensued when writers hit a creative block.
“All of a sudden you stopped focusing on the problem and started having fun and loosening up,” Solomon said.
He hopes to recreate that playfulness at Swingset Press’ new facility. The company, with annual sales this year set to reach $1 million, has outgrown Solomon’s backyard writing studio, and the owners have found a spot nearby that provides offices and warehouse space.
Solomon plans to paint the warehouse interior in bold primary colors, install a full-size swing set and set up a conference table and creative workstation for himself. A showroom featuring company products will also share the space.
Other tools can also help get the creative juices flowing, according to Montgomery. He teaches his product-design students to set aside their first good idea and immediately think of something else that might work. That can prevent them from becoming attached to what might not turn out to be the most effective idea, he said.
Research is also important, Montgomery said. His students learn as much about their design subject as possible. That can include the history of similar products and anthropologist-like observation of people interacting with their environment. Good research can help students make the necessary creative leap.
“We don’t deduce [ideas] from what people are doing” with a product now, Montgomery said. “We use what is more inductive logic, where we try to see what might work better for them in the future.”
That’s exactly how Solomon and his wife came up with the idea for their first product in 1997. My First Phonebook, a photo phone book for children in preschool and early grade school, was born in the car one day when the couple’s small children wanted to call their grandparents. They were too young to read their parents’ phone book easily. How much simpler it would be if they could just turn to a picture of their relative or friends, their parents thought.
The resulting product was such a hit at the Los Angeles Gift Show that year that the couple decided to start Swingset Press to produce it.
Their creative process has gotten only a bit more complicated: The couple now use neighborhood kids and their children’s classmates to test product ideas and variations. The decision to go with an idea still boils down to “whatever makes us say, ‘Cool!’ the most,” Solomon said.
Even then, there’s no guarantee of success, they’ve found.
A foray into the pet market with My Best Friend, a pet record book for kids, has not worked out so far, Solomon said. The couple had fallen in love with the idea and pursued it without the market research they had done on their other products.
They didn’t know then that although the idea was sound, their particular version was probably too comprehensive and intimidating for its intended market, he said. The need for their specific product hasn’t materialized.
Solomon said he’ll keep that in mind as he tries to come up with a new hit product. He’s tinkering with a “book with a twist” for possible release in 2002. And he’ll weigh need when or if he decides to commercialize a scavenger-hunt-style reading game he invented for his sons, now 6 and 9, a few years ago.
“The best ideas are born of necessity,” Solomon said. “They just are.”
*
What role does innovation play in your business? Write to us at Mind to Market, Business Section, Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012, or e-mail cyndia.zwahlen@latimes.com.
