Getting a Jump on the Next Big Thing

THUMP ... In a twinkling, junior Robert Heath is airborne. Not crazy airborne, like the tuft of doll’s hair that dangles from an exposed heating duct here at Otis College of Art and Design, but high enough to escape from his finals week project: the SpongeBob Bubble Mobile. THUMP-THUMP. ... Heath really does have to finish whipping up SpongeBob’s iridescent soap bubble if he ever hopes to shape one of the other ideas lurking around the right side of his brain.

But how could anyone work when the decibel level is roughly equivalent to the noise of roller coaster riders in mid-plunge? On this afternoon, Heath and other whooping toy design majors are hanging out with the president of Razor USA, Carlton Calvin, the trend seer and a driving force behind last year’s scooter mania. Calvin’s latest project is the Airgo, the redesigned pogo stick on which Heath is riding. The Airgo has managed to land on not just hot toy lists this holiday season but on Time magazine’s roster of best inventions of the year.

Recently, at The Times’ request, Calvin dropped by Otis College, one of two institutions in the country that offers a fine arts degree in toy design. He talked about how to hit upon the Next Big Thing--yeah, you’ve got to have industry smarts, but really, you have to be able to summon up the blue-sky world of a kid.

On this afternoon, Heath, 28, is going for big air on Razor’s new toy. “It does sort of feel like you can fly,” he says later. Other students cheer on Heath, who, at 5 feet, 11 inches, 175 pounds, wears jeans and an untucked long-sleeve shirt. THU--... It’s not like anyone is going to shush them, not when the 40-year-old chairman of the toy design department is pogo-ing, too, not when the linoleum already is scuffed up from too many 4 a.m. scooter races (not to mention “Razor bowling,” which involves crashing scooters into white lawn chairs). THU-DDDD... Heath rolls out of his fall from the pogo stick, seasoned skateboarder that he is. He gets up with a sweet grin, sideswiping his mop of short brown hair into place. Time to get back to SpongeBob.

It’s not all yabba-dabba-do time for the department’s 50 toy design majors, says chairman Martin J. Caveza, who formerly was a senior manager at Mattel Inc. in charge of the Nickelodeon design group. The 5-year-old program requires students to complete four years of study, with courses in child psychology, anatomy and ergonomics, along with modern art history and literature. (In New York City, the Fashion Institute of Technology has offered a two-year toy design program since 1989.) And on the seventh floor of Otis College, in a place smelling of sawdust and clay, buzzing with the sound of sewing machines and lathes, students dream up and build toys.

Future toy makers hunker over worktables that are covered with globs of glue and bits of Styrofoam, a Mr. Potato Head here, a Hello Kitty figurine there--mini-muses, perhaps, for a mega-hit of their own someday in a tough market.

Every February, at the American International Toy Fair in New York, 6,000 new toys are unveiled; half of them won’t survive through the holiday season. And recently, the $23-billion traditional toy industry--which excludes video games--has been faltering. Last year, a weakening economy and other factors led to flat sales for the first time in years, according to the New York-based Toy Industry Assn. trade group. Experts are not sure yet how this holiday season will shake out.

In 2000, at least, one toy emerged as a superstar. The No. 3 best-selling toy was the Razor scooter, despite the fact that it wasn’t on the market until July 2000 and had an average retail price of $82, reported the NPD Group, a market research firm in New York. (By contrast, the No. 1 seller, the Hot Wheels basic car, sold for 86 cents.)

Razor USA, which was founded in June 2000 in Cerritos, has sold more than 5 million scooters. But to the Otis College students, what’s even more intoxicating is the way that Calvin’s company left its mark on popular culture.

Twenty toy design majors manage to take a break from finals week for Calvin’s recent talk. They are quiet, perching on stools, notebooks open, pens poised. Calvin, 40, is a mild-mannered Minnesota native and former philosophy major at Cornell University. He is married, a dad who scooters with his two small boys in their San Marino neighborhood. In a plaid shirt, cuffed khakis, brown Oxfords and rectangular glasses, he spins his story with an air of incredulity. In 1991, Calvin quit his job as an attorney at a big Los Angeles law firm that specialized in litigation and the entertainment industry. He wanted time off to care for a dying friend; he also decided to look for work that would be more fun and creative. In the early ‘90s, while working as a children’s books publisher, he heard about a kid craze for collectibles called pogs. (Pogs are stackable milk caps that are whacked with a plastic disc called a slammer, but Calvin doesn’t have to explain any of that to the students.) “I thought, ‘What would be the coolest slammer? Wouldn’t it be cool if you could, you know, put a real bug in a slammer?’” The students giggle. Of course.

He hooked up with Chinese farmers who shipped him loads of dead scorpions. In his garage, Calvin figured out a way to make scorpion-embedded slammers and sold 500,000 for $8 each. When the pogs fad died, he popped the leftover scorpions into yo-yos and sold a million of those in the mid-’90s. He was selling trendy toys such as miniature skateboards called finger boards when, in March 2000, he read a story in The Times that scooters were selling like crazy in Japan.

Calvin ordered a scooter and loved it; the scooter was fast and fun and looked cool. He called the Taiwanese company JD Corp. that designed and made the scooters and convinced its owner to form a joint venture with him. In the U.S., without advertising, Calvin couldn’t ship out scooters fast enough. Overnight, it seemed, everyone from 11-year-old kids in L.A. to executives in Manhattan to Silicon Valley computer geeks owned a shiny, foldable Razor scooter and zipped around on its in-line skate wheels.

Did he expect that kind of reaction? a student asks. “I think I knew right away,” Calvin says. “When I first got hold of one and started to walk around the streets--I lived in Pasadena--adults would stop me and say, ‘What the heck is that? I’ve got to get one of those.’”

Other students raise variations of the billion-dollar question: How do you know what’s going to be hot? Calvin doesn’t have a ready answer. He talks to kids and toy store workers, he goes with what he himself finds irresistible. He has the sensibility of an 11-year-old, Calvin says later, the kind who would rather stay at home and jump on a trampoline or play video games all day--which is what he really wants to do.

Even as scooter sales were skyrocketing, Calvin was hunting for the next shooting star. On visits to toy stores, he heard that pogo sticks could be hot again. Calvin asked his newly hired design team to rethink the pogo stick and give it the same sort of feel as a Razor scooter--a classic toy turned hip enough for adults and Yuppie-oriented shops like the Sharper Image. The sleek, adjustable $80 Airgo is made of aircraft-grade aluminum, and, no surprise, it folds up. With a built-in pump, Calvin says, the bounce is smoother and quieter than a ride on a traditional spring-powered pogo stick. No one knows for certain whether that will be enough to carry it into the scooter’s ranks of popularity--this year’s top-selling toys list won’t be released until early 2002, an NPD Group spokeswoman said. But at FAO Schwarz stores, the Airgo has been a bestseller since its release this summer, spokesman Alan Marcus says.

The pogo stick was invented in 1918 by George Hansburg, a toy designer from Illinois who had seen children jumping on a similar contraption in Germany. In upstate New York, Hansburg’s old company, SBI Enterprises Inc., still ships out more than 300,000 pogo sticks each year.

SBI holds the design patent but did not register “pogo stick” as a brand name, says Irwin Arginsky, the company’s general manager. Arginsky brings up Razor’s pogo stick without being asked. Razor’s version is one of 45 or so on the market, he says. “Not everyone can make a pogo stick. They think they can. ... All they’re doing is taking scooter components and trying to reconfigure them into an item that has been on the American scene for 83 years.”

At Otis College, boxes of Airgos are stacked on a table behind Calvin. After he answers 15 minutes of questions, a student calls out:

“Can we see a demonstration?”

“Yeah, if someone wants to come up,” Calvin says. “Does anyone pogo stick?”

Laughter and chatter erupt; names of possible candidates are offered up. Most of the students have never been on a pogo stick before; they climb on stools for a better view. The first volunteers, department chairman Caveza and a student, both topple off after a few hops. “Awesome!” “So cool!” The shrieks and glee eclipse any conversation, and the pogo sticks are moved to a hallway. Calvin stands off to one side, smiling but saying little. He is not one for much small talk and would rather soak up a scene.

The students and Calvin are on the same path, poised to riff off the next trend with an invention that doesn’t go the way of blink-of-the-eye fads. The trick is to come up with something inspired by the Zeitgeist but with a twist, so a new generation can rediscover the fun.

On this afternoon, sophomore Claire Cole wants another shot at staying aloft. “[Razor USA] makes you want it,” she says. “I want it. I have to touch it. I have to have it.” The Airgo appeals to the kid-like urge to jump, she notes, and to the Microsoft Xbox generation’s weakness for sleek toys. “It’s a pogo stick,” Cole says. “Everybody has seen a pogo stick, but they made it now seem like a Razor. They made it new.”

Cole says she gravitates away from fads and toward classics--old cars, big band and swing music. She is an outgoing 19-year-old, in low-rider Gap jeans, a fitted black T-shirt and Converse high-tops. Growing up, she had a creative bent, designing outfits for her dog, fashioning her own toy chest. Now, in school, she is working on an action figure inspired by “Gilligan’s Island,” Tarzan and Indiana Jones movies: a Native American cook in a grass skirt, holding a spear topped with grapes and a blackberry pie. The apron is fastened in back with a bone.

Students try to stay on top of pop culture, heading out as a class to see “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” or “Monsters, Inc.,” dropping by toy stores or preschools. Heath’s car-inside-a-bubble design is tied to the Nickelodeon cartoon character, SpongeBob SquarePants, who lives in a wacky underwater world. His other inspirations include “Twin Peaks,” MTV’s “reality shows” and the Japanese robots that are scattered around his Long Beach apartment.

Before he enrolled in toy design school, Heath worked as a substitute fifth-grade teacher. “I just love that kids have a sense of wonder,” he says, “and they want to make things fun. They’re toy designers themselves. They’ll take an object and turn it into a toy, just by improvising.”

Hours after Calvin leaves campus, Heath and the other students finally get the hang of the Airgo, and they have the bruises to show for it. They pogo over trash cans; they land 360-degree spins; they compete to see who can stay on the longest, playing for pennies or super glue. The next morning, when Cole gets to the seventh floor, the first thing she hears is the sound of minds at work and play: THUMP-THUMP ...