Where is wham o inc

Business Visionaries. Hot Property. Times Events. Times Store. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options. Within four months, they had sold more than 20 million hoops and the company was struggling to keep the stores supplied. Eventually more than million hoops were sold throughout the world. Frisbee throwing competitions were also increasingly popular, such that by the World Frisbee Disc Championship was held in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California.

These competitions were sponsored by the International Frisbee Association, which was a division of Wham-O. The Super Ball joined Wham-O's lineup of hit toys in Early in the s Norman Stingley, a chemical engineer, compressed a synthetic rubber material under intense pressure to create a resilient ball that would rebound to unprecedented heights — bouncing about three times higher than a tennis ball.

They eventually manufactured the Super Ball from polybutadiene with smaller amounts of sulfur which made a more durable ball. Wham-O specialized in simple, outdoors-oriented products without age boundaries. They kept expenses down by keeping their products list small and contracting out the manufacturing, using their San Gabriel, California facility mostly for labeling and packaging.

They also chose not to follow the trends into licensed toys or electronic toys like many toy manufacturers. In , Spud persuaded Rich to sell their controlling interest in Wham-O. The company makes more than 70 products, mostly toys designed for active, outdoor play. Wham-O manufactures a complete line of snow toys including sleds and saucers, and water toys including floating tubes, the Slip 'n Slide, and water blasters.

The company makes other outdoor games such as bumper golf and croquet golf, and some tabletop action games such as Pinball Soccer. The company was owned by giant toy firm Mattel in the s, and in relaunched under a private management group.

In the s the company has been growing quickly and acquiring a variety of smaller manufacturers. While attending the University of Southern California, the pair searched for some product they could easily sell through a small home business. The company name came from one of their first products, a slingshot. Melin and Knerr were fans of hunting with falcons, and they used a homemade wooden slingshot to fling bits of meat up to the birds.

The two friends bought a saw from Sears on the installment plan and began making slingshots in a garage. The company had a variety of early products, including blowguns and tomahawks. Melin and Knerr were always on the lookout for exotic new toys, and they hit it big twice in a row in the mids.

First came the Frisbee. The founding mythology of the Frisbee is contradictory. One prevailing story is that students at Yale threw pie tins from the Frisbie Baking Company for fun, as far back as the s. The California version is that kids at the beach made a sport of whirling plastic coffee can lids, or that Hollywood cameramen did the same with the lids of film cans. In a California carpenter, Fred Morrison, began making plastic throwing discs, which he called Pluto Platters, and selling them on the beach and at local fairs.

Morrison patented the Pluto Platter in , and then sold the rights to Wham-O. Wham-O brought out the plastic Pluto Platter in , and retailed it for less than a dollar. The company hired college students to hawk the Platters when it could not get distribution in regular stores. The Platters became all the rage at college campuses. Within the year, Wham-O had sold a million discs. In Wham-O enhanced the design of the disc and renamed it Frisbee.

Richard Knerr claimed in an interview with the New York Times July 1, that he had named the product after a cartoon character, Mr. Frisbee, and the similarity to the Frisbie Baking Co. Whatever its origin, the name Frisbee stuck, and became the generic term for plastic flying discs long after other companies began putting out their own brands.

The Frisbee proved an enduring favorite, and eventually Wham-O did much to market and promote the toy, creating Frisbee sports and then sanctioning national competitions. But this did not come until the s.

Wham-O was kept very busy the year the renamed Frisbee came out, because the company debuted one of the hottest toys ever, the Hula Hoop. Knerr and Melin were always searching for offbeat toys, so an Australian friend introduced them to a bamboo ring kids in that country used in exercise classes.

Knerr and Melin were first baffled by the hoop until they figured out that it was meant for twirling around the waist. Wham-O began making the hoops out of plastic, and introduced them to the market in the spring of The Hula Hoop became a sudden craze, as children in southern California learned the balanced motion that kept the Hula Hoop swinging.

The fad swept across the country, and Hula Hooping children were shown on television and organized into competitions. Within four months, Wham-O had sold more than 20 million hoops. Wham-O struggled to find enough manufacturers to keep stores supplied.

At the peak of the craze, the company contracted with more than a hundred plastic manufacturers. As the fad went global, Wham-O also set up manufacturing outposts abroad, with factories in Tokyo, London, Frankfurt, and Toronto. In the United States, psychologists offered abstract explanations for the popularity of the Hula Hoop, explaining it as the rebellion of children against their parents children were usually better at Hula Hooping than adults , and as a comfort that counteracted the stress of a population that frequently changed homes.

Whatever the reasons behind it, the Hula Hoop was an incredible sales phenomenon, eventually becoming the first toy ever to sell more than million units. But the Hula Hoop fad disappeared as quickly as it came. By the fall of , with children back in school, sales dried up completely.

Knerr later bemoaned the craziness of that year to a writer from Forbes February 15, : "We completely lost control," he said. Although the Hula Hoop came and went, the Frisbee steadily gained in popularity. Wham-O promoted the Frisbee through the s by developing appealing Frisbee sports. Wham-O Vice-President Ed Headrick was credited with a successful promotional campaign that spawned several official Frisbee games. The first Frisbee game beyond simple throwing and catching was called Guts, and it may have been played before the Frisbee era with pie tins, or even with rusty circular saws.

The idea of Guts was to throw the disc at the opposing team so hard that no one could catch it. Headrick helped the burgeoning sport by introducing a Professional Model Frisbee. Headrick also modified Frisbee design with rings or grooves that made the disc fly more steadily. The rings became known as the Lines of Headrick.