Inventor Finds Sweet Success Making Candy
Larry Jones is in touch with his inner child, so much so that he knew kids would buy a lollipop in the shape of a skull that oozed edible red goo.
Jones, 67, wanted to call the confection Blood Suckers, but that name already was taken, so he dubbed it Skull Suckers. It was, said the Westlake Village freelance inventor, a great success, as were the lollipops he invented that lighted up and screamed, “Nooo!” when someone bit into them.
He demonstrates another invention named Worm Hole. “You eat the Gummi worm and then you toss down the dirt,” said Jones, with a grin. “Kids absolutely love the thing.”
Don’t worry, Mom, that’s not really dirt in the package, it’s brown sugar.
A creator of toys and specialty candies, Jones has dreamed up more than 1,700 products over the last three decades. Among the best-known are Cricket, one of the first interactive dolls; a 3-D version of the game Aggravation; and numerous road-racing toys, including toy cars that can zoom up and down a bedroom wall.
It’s a lucrative business. Retail toy sales totaled $30.9 billion in North America in 2000, according to the International Council of Toy Industries. Los Angeles County has more than 500 toy companies, according to the Toy Assn. of Southern California, and they are constantly on the lookout for the next must-have plaything.
El Segundo’s Mattel Inc., the nation’s leading toy maker, has 165 toy designers on staff, but it still turns to freelancers. “We get about 20% of our products through outside inventors,” said John Handy, Mattel’s senior vice president of design. A freelancer dreamed up the toy dragon called Roarin’ Snorin’ Norbert, in Mattel’s line of Harry Potter toys now in stores, Handy said.
Jones started out in engineering, quit to join the Army, where he was a paratrooper, and then went to Auburn University in Alabama on the G.I. Bill. He majored in fine arts and minored in industrial design.
In college, Jones created his first business--the Auburn Birthday Club, which still exists. He collected information from incoming students, cut a deal on cakes with a local bakery and then wrote to parents, offering to deliver, for $5, a personalized birthday cake to their child.
“I was making close to $500 a month when I graduated,” Jones said.
In the 1960s, Jones was vice president for research and development at Wham-O, the toy company that produced Frisbees and Hula Hoops. Wham-O had the chaotic, high-energy feel of today’s dot-coms.
“That was a crazy company,” Jones said, in its praise. “You walked in in the morning in shorts and a T-shirt and played games all day. It was great.”
The toy business is always hungry for new products, Jones said. About 5,000 to 6,000 products are introduced at the industry’s annual Toy Fair in New York, but 50% of them will have disappeared by the next Christmas, he said. With former Mattel employees as partners, Jones started California R & D Center in 1969. He later bought out his partners, and the company continues to offer clients help in developing playthings.
Over the years, Jones has discovered sure-fire ways to keep the ideas flowing. He gives seminars in Hong Kong, Taiwan and elsewhere in Asia on creativity, including his trademarked Idea-A-Second method.
When he sits down to create a toy, he starts with something familiar and then thinks of a twist. For example, what about a doll with taste buds--some sort of electronic sensor that recognizes different flavors? Add an electronic chip that allows the doll to say something about the flavor that the child can respond to, such as “That’s good chocolate. Do you like chocolate?”
The toy industry’s seasonality is one reason Jones has turned more and more to candy. As Mattel’s Handy pointed out, toy makers make 50% of their sales from Nov. 1 to Dec. 31. But candies are sold everywhere, year-round, Jones said, with sales surging around Valentine’s Day, Easter, Halloween and Christmas.
“I’ve looked at the success of Pez over the years,” said Jones, who invents candies that have a strong element of play.
Jones’ latest company is USA Artek Inc. He met his Chinese partner during a trip to Hong Kong, and the men now have an office in Westlake Village. Among their products is Truck’in Candy, an HO-scale tractor-trailer filled with fruit-flavored candies that sells for $1.99. Several retailers, including Mobil, have asked Artek to put an American flag on the side of the truck instead of a logo.
Jones’ chip-enhanced lollipops sell for $2.99, and the non-electronic candies for less than a dollar. But plenty of money is to be made in confections, a $23.8-billion industry in the U.S., according to the Department of Agriculture.
Before Jones went into the candy business, he did his homework. He subscribed to trade publications and tracked trends, such as the annual growth in novelty treat sales (currently about 12% compared with 2% for bulk candy), he said.
Martin Caveza, who heads the toy design department at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, said folks like Jones are “really a blend between a designer, an engineer and a marketing person.” The college teaches marketplace realities to the 20 would-be inventors accepted into the program each year, he said.
“The invention business is extremely lucrative,” Jones said. Without giving hard numbers, he said he made enough from his Cricket doll in a single year to buy a house on an acre in Bel-Air. And doing creative work has nonmonetary rewards as well.
“Creative people are happier and healthier,” Jones said, with a smile as bright as a 10-year-old’s.
