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The
fidget spinner, whose sales have soared into the tens of millions as suppliers
struggle to meet demand. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
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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.
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Catherine
Hettinger, creator of the fidget spinner, with her granddaughter Chloe.
Photograph: Richard Luscombe
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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
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Stores
are having trouble meeting demand for so-called fidget toys -- stress-relievers
for young teens and college kids.
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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.
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.
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