The serious business of toys -- innovation through creation — Brian Kessler — TEDxChapmanU

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: I'm Brian Kessler, I've invented 2,500 products, and I've sold over a billion dollars at retail. Just as an example, right now we have over three of the best-selling items selling at retail in 2014. These are inventions that I created. In the week before Easter, just to give you an example, we sold 500,000 pieces and around three to four million dollars worth of product at sales. And today I'm going to talk about where my background came from. I'm also going to talk about creating and the whole concept of what it takes to bring product to market. I don't know, did I mention I'm also the son of the man who patented the hula hoop? But before we get there, I want to show you one of my first items. So everyone knows a ball, okay? And I invented one of my first products was a ball, no, it wasn't one of my first products. A product I invented was a ball that bounces 75 feet in the air. Now it was just basically a little red, this one's pink, ball. And we weren't quite sure if people were going to get why it's different. So if you take a regular ball versus a sky ball and it bounces, a regular ball bounces about to here and a sky ball bounces up to 75 feet. So get ready. David Letterman took this and wound up doing these. David Letterman brought it on his TV show. And he had people calling in the balcony. Can they And the funny thing is, that's exactly what happened. David Letterman brought it on his TV show, and he had people calling in the balcony, can they bounce it up there? Sure enough, Letterman, they would have bounced it up. And then the next thing that happened was kids wound up going into the stores and taking the balls and bouncing them and knocking out ceiling tiles at retail. Well, what happened was other kids started seeing their videos and started making their own videos. And sure enough, the next thing we know, all around the internet, are millions, up to a hundred million different videos wound up being made of people bouncing and playing with skyball. So, sure enough, this was five years ago, skyball became this generation's Nerf ball. We've now sold over 30 million skyballs, and it is this generation's go-to product when they go to find that little red ball. So, let me tell you about my dad. My dad, Milton Kessler, was a Rust Belt industrialist guy, came from the Midwest, and he was a person that had no college degree, barely got through high school, but was a maker, and he knew how to make things. And out of his DNA, he would just look at the world and always be trying to figure out, "How do I make something? How do I make this better? How does that work better?" And my father did all kinds of things. I mean, he was working on things from a soap dish to weather stripping to hula hoops to bottle caps, you know, the push-pull caps on your water bottles. He invented, had six patents on that. And he was a guy that would always teach us how to go about thinking about the world. And I'll get to that in a second, but let me tell you about the hula hoop story. So, my father, in 1950, patented a toy that was a plastic hoop. And I think at first, he really was just going to do the idea where you could chase it down the street, because at the turn of the century, that was kind of a product. Nobody wanted it. Couldn't give it away. Had pictures of us diving through it, dragging it behind a boat, throwing it at each other, and didn't sell. So, sat in a closet, and for eight years, no one wanted it. Art Linkletter wound up having a TV show back in the '50s, which maybe some of you remember, a lot of you probably don't. But it was kind of like the original Johnny Carson type thing. And he had an aborigine tribeswoman come on to his TV show, and she did a dance with a bamboo hoop. Well, the next thing you know, they get 10,000 phone calls of where can they get this thing. Well, it was bamboo. It was from the backlands of Australia. We really weren't importing from Asia back in the day. And Linkletter's manager had gone to college with my Uncle Jerry at Ohio State University, and he had seen my dad's plastic hoop. They caught him up, and they flew him out the next day, and they set up Link Incorporated, and they created the first fad of all time. Hula Hoops sold 100 million units in 1958, and my father jumped in the business. He wasn't the only one. Most of you remember the name Wham-O and Hula Hoop. They wound up really being the company that took the product after the fad kind of came and went. As soon as the fad was over, my father was literally out of the toy business, and never touched a toy pretty much ever again. Went on to do waste energy and all kinds of other things. 30 years later, I started my toy company kind of in honor of him. But today, I want to talk a little bit about innovation, because to me, that's what the challenge of our country is right now. I feel like we're at a point where things are changing. We're at a point where what used to be the norm in America is now becoming not the norm. We're no longer the manufacturing leader of the world, which is what we were when I grew up with my father. Things are becoming global. That being said, we still have a very unique opportunity. We still tend to be the innovation capital of the world, and we wind up doing things that I feel like needs to be changed. We need to make sure we're careful about it. Because the way I learned to innovate was with my father doing drawings on a chalkboard, saying, "Okay, guys, this is how you would do this." And at dinner, we would sit there going, "Okay." This was pretty much every night for me. He would take plastic. I can tell you what plastic is made of from chewing it or smelling it if it's burning, if I light it on fire. And that was because my father used to light things on fire and let us sniff it and make us eat the stuff. I don't recommend you doing that anymore. It was completely bad for you. But it did teach me to be innate about really enjoying and learning about how to create. And today, I really feel like instead of making it very complex and very structured, I think it's very simple. It's about creation, application, and execution. Creation is very simple. Look at the world, see what someone needs, see what you think is really important, come up with that great idea. Then apply it. Make sure your great idea isn't just some crazy idea that no one really wants, that a consumer, that an individual can really use it and can really need it. And then execute it. Now, execution to me is one of the most important parts. I've been to China over 150 times because I feel like it's really important when you do a product to be intimately involved with every aspect. The design, the manufacturing, the tooling, the packaging, so that when it gets to that end user, that consumer, they really enjoy and appreciate what they're getting. And it's not turning out to be starting out a small ball that winds up being 500 feet in size and no one can use. So, I'm going to now show you some of my stuff. Okay, we talked about a hoop. And so, the first thing I did was I took my father's classic hoop and I created a new technology. Inside, I don't know if you can hear it, I'll try to put it close to my mic. Inside is a liquid core. And this liquid core allows a hula hoop to stay up in the air five times longer than a regular hoop. So, people like me, I was hoop-impaired, I wasn't able to hula hoop as a young kid. This winds up using the centrifugal force of staying in the air longer, and then all you do is catch the wave. And by doing that, millions of people have been able to enjoy hooping that could never do it before. So, not only are they cool looking and do they do cool things, but you can do so many new things by just taking little steps each time to innovate. If you can turn the lights down, guys. So, the next thing I did was Cosmic Hoop. And Cosmic Hoop is great because it does a really wonderful visual effect by lighting up. And it just goes to show how introducing new technologies allows you to continually make interesting new products. Okay? So, alright. Now, I had the world's greatest bouncing ball. I have some of the coolest hoops. We've sold, I don't know, 50, 75 million of these products. Then I was like, alright, what can I do that's new and different and that can add to it? So, I said, well, you know, a frisbee's been around for a long, long time. Why don't I make a bouncing frisbee like a bouncing skyball? So, I came up with this. We went to tooling. We innovated it. And this was my first one. Well, the problem was this doesn't fly very well and it doesn't bounce very well. So, it was not the right idea. We then had to evolve to the next level. So, the first thing I said, well, alright, to get a frisbee to fly, you need to have the concavity to create that aerodynamic ability for it to glide. So, we went in and we cut new tooling to create that lip on the bottom. Yes, it flies much better, but when you went to bounce it, it winds up bouncing to the right. So, that didn't work very well either. I then said, alright, well, let's just blow the heck out of it. So, we made a really full one that could bounce, but obviously doesn't fly very well. And then I started feeling like, alright, what we really need to do is create that concavity and start working with a bladder system that creates the bounce. And finally, I wound up creating Sky Bouncer. And Sky Bouncer, like Sky Ball, bounces really well and flies really well. So, I'll try to bounce behind in the audience. Up here! And so, Sky Bouncer is actually this year's 2014's top selling spring/summer toy in the country. Walmart sold almost 100,000 pieces of it in one week before retail. Alright, so, well, what else can you do? So, everybody knows about a yo-yo, right? Been around for 50 years, kind of the same thing, get a little Dunkin' yo-yo. Of course, I wanted to see what else I could do with it. So, I thought, well, why don't we make a bouncing yo-yo? So, the first thing I did was suck two Sky Balls together to try to see if it could bounce. Then I took, oh, come here. Then I took two Sky Balls together and tried to make it a yo-yo. And unfortunately, it was kind of funky looking. It doesn't yo-yo very well. So, the buyer didn't like it very much. He said, alright, well, let's make it smaller. So, we tried to make it smaller. And even smaller, it just doesn't do very well. So, I said, well, you know, Sky Bouncer's doing really well. Why not make some mini Sky Bouncer's and then turn Sky Bouncer into a yo-yo? Now, this product's not out yet. This comes out this fall. But, this is our new Sky Bouncer yo-yo. It does everything that a yo-yo does. But hopefully, it also bounces. And by doing that, we're introducing something that's new and fresh. Well, alright. So, these are kind of examples of things I've created. And I think what I'm trying to encourage people, when I talk about creation, when I talk about innovation, when I talk about what does our country need for the future, it's not a big classroom with 20 different rules of how you're supposed to create things, how you're supposed to invent things, how you're supposed to engineer things. I think, first of all, it's those very three simple things. Look at the world. And I guess the question is, do you have to be the son of the man who patented the hula hoop to be an inventor? And I say the answer is no. I think what you have to be, though, is the son or daughter of a person who will encourage you, will teach you to look at the universe, to think about what is right now, try to figure out a way to make it better, and then very simply and intuitively take those steps to turn it into reality and make it something people want. Thank you. I'm Brian Kessler. I am an inventor.