Friday, May 05, 2017

NEWS POST: As Fidget Spinner Craze Sweeps Globe, Its Inventor Struggles To Make Ends Meet

The fidget spinner, whose sales have soared into the tens of millions as suppliers struggle to meet demand. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
Florida-based creator Catherine Hettinger couldn’t afford the patent on the ubiquitous playground toy but insists she’s ‘pleased’ about its sudden popularity

As the inventor of the original fidget spinner – the ubiquitous new toy that has quickly become a craze in playgrounds around the world – Catherine Hettinger should be enjoying the high life.

But the Florida-based creator is not making a penny off her genius invention, even as global sales of the gadget she envisioned two decades ago as a way to entertain her seven-year-old daughter soar into the tens of millions (SEE BELOW) and suppliers struggle to meet massive demand.

Hettinger held the patent on fingerspinners for eight years, but surrendered it in 2005 because she could not afford the US$400 (£310) renewal fee.

“I just didn’t have the money. It’s very simple,” she said.

The palm-sized spinners consist of a ball bearing which sits in a three-pronged plastic device which can then be flicked and spun round. Some schools in the UK and the US have banned the devices, but some teachers believe that they can help children concentrate – especially those with ADHD.

Now, while the manufacturers and retailers who are selling the modern-day versions of the toy rack up huge profits, Hettinger, 62, is downsizing from her tiny house to a cheaper condo, wondering whether to get her disconnected telephone line reinstated, and figuring out how to afford “a car that truly works”.

“It’s challenging, being an inventor,” she told the Guardian during a coffee-shop interview near her home in Winter Park, a historic suburban city just east of Orlando.

“Only about 3% of inventions make any money. I’ve watched other inventors mortgage their houses and lose a lot. You take roommates, you get help from friends and family. It is hard.”

Hettinger accepts that had she been able to afford to keep the patent, she would now likely be sitting on a sizeable fortune. “I wouldn’t have any problem. That would have been good,” she said.

But while she joins a notable list of others – including Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the world wide web, and hoverboard inventor Shane Chen, who by accident or design failed to cash in personally on their world-changing creations – Hettinger insists that she is not bitter over the lost opportunity, and is instead “encouraged” by the spinners’ sudden popularity.

“Several people have asked me: ‘Aren’t you really mad?’ But for me I’m just pleased that something I designed is something that people understand and really works for them,” she said.

“There’s just a lot of circumstances in modern life when you’re boxed in, you’re cramped in, and we need this kind of thing to de-stress. It’s also fun. That’s the thing about culture, once everybody starts doing it, it’s kind of OK.”

Her views are not shared by increasing numbers of schools, who are banning children from bringing or using the spinners because they are seen as a distraction. But Hettinger said she was pleased that in other circumstances, schools were finding the devices helpful. “I know a special needs teacher who used it with autistic kids, and it really helped to calm them down,” she said.

Catherine Hettinger, creator of the fidget spinner, with her granddaughter Chloe. Photograph: Richard Luscombe
Hettinger says the origins of the spinner lie in “one horrible summer” back in the early 1990s when she was suffering from myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disorder that causes muscle weakness, and was also caring for her daughter Sara, now 30.

“I couldn’t pick up her toys or play with her much at all, so I started throwing things together with newspaper and tape then other stuff,” she said. “It wasn’t really even prototyping, it was some semblance of something, she’d start playing with it in a different way, I’d repurpose it.”

After several redesigns, a basic, non-mechanical version of the spinner was born. “We kind of co-invented it – she could spin it and I could spin it, and that’s how it was designed,” she added.

Hettinger, who spent her childhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, spent the next few years exhibiting and selling upgraded versions of her design at arts and craft fairs around Florida. “The project was great, I essentially broke even, I sold units and tested it with a couple of thousand people,” she said.

She also flew with her daughter to Washington DC for an appointment with the US patent and trademark office and secured a patent on her design in 1997.

But just when it looked like her original spinner was on track for wider commercial success, Hettinger was hit by a disappointment.

The toy manufacturing giant Hasbro, who had been testing the design, decided not to proceed to production – effectively leaving the project to wither and eventually die with the lapse of the patent in 2005.

“I’m a techie, I’m not a person who closes multimillion-dollar deals,” Hettinger said. “If there had been money or I’d had a venture capitalist back then, it would have been different.”

Undeterred, Hettinger is currently working contract engineering jobs to earn income while helping advise others at meetings of the inventors council of central Florida, and also has plans to manufacture and sell her original spinner design if a Kickstarter appeal can raise enough funds.

It is not quite how things could have turned out had she retained the fidget spinner patent and secured her financial future, but Hettinger insists she has only one regret: “I would probably be doing more inventing,” she said.

NEWS POST: The Hottest New Toy Fad Is A Spinning Piece Of Plastic
Stores are having trouble meeting demand for so-called fidget toys -- stress-relievers for young teens and college kids.
It’s the surprise hottest toy of the spring, and it isn’t a high-tech gadget.

So-called fidget spinners, low-tech, low-price stress-relieving toys, are a huge fad sweeping the country, and stores can’t keep them in stock, manufacturers and retailers told The Post on Thursday.

The demand for these devices is coming from children, college students and adults who are looking to the toys to help them release nervous energy or stop fidgeting.

College students specifically are gobbling them up ahead of finals, hoping they will help them focus.

The toys, which come in plastic, brass, steel or copper, retail mostly for US$5 to US$7.

“I see a lot of students using them in the library and in classes during finals,” said one Fairfield University student.

With Walmart, Toys ’R’ Us and other chains having a hard time keeping the products in stock, some retailers are demanding manufacturers airfreight shipments to their warehouse rather than stick them on a ship from China.

It costs five times as much to fly them in compared with standard sea shipping, but planes drastically cut transit time.

At Midtown Manhattan-based Almar Sales Co., the sales team sold an astounding 20 million fidget toys to Walmart, Toys ’R’ Us, Party City and others in April, executive vice president Allen Ashkenazie told The Post.

“At this rate, it would be our largest-selling toy in our 50-plus-year history,” said Ashkenazie.

Because Almar agreed to airfreight the spinners, the stores have them on their shelves now.

“The retailers are willing to pay a premium to have the spinners airfreighted.”

Some manufacturers are marketing the products as a study aid that can be helpful for people who suffer from ADHD.

Hand spinners popped up last year but made a huge splash in March as social media posts went viral.

“We saw an increase in sales for Rubik’s Cubes, yo-yos and other toys that keep little hands occupied — items that we’ve carried for decades,” Toys ’R’ Us spokeswoman Meghan Sowa said in an email statement to The Post.

“That’s when our expert buyers did some research and saw the buzz building for spinners and fidget cubes,” she said. “We took immediate action and started airfreighting product to shelves.”

If retailers have not yet placed an order, they may be too late.

Some manufacturers in China are selling directly to US consumers via Amazon, which was the first retailer to sell hand spinners here, according to Josh Loerzel, an executive with Portland, Ore.-based Zing, a second fidget spinner maker.

While the US each year seems to stumble upon a crazy toy fad — milk caps, Beanie Babies and Pokémon, to name three — fidget spinners may be among the most lucrative for toy makers.

But Ashkenazie at Almar knows it won’t last forever.

“I can literally walk into the office on a Monday morning in a few weeks from now and it can be yesterday’s news,” he said. “As if it never existed.”

Originally published (STORY 1) on THE GUARDIAN UK and (STORY 2) on NEW YORK POST

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