When Ryan Weaver was laid off from his job on an Alaskan oil rig last year, he asked God to give him "just one idea" to pay off his $160,000 student debt, says Anna Nicolaou in the Financial Times. The 26-year-old's "salvation" came in the form of a decades-old spinning propeller toy when his wife, a special-needs teacher, asked him to order "fidget" gadgets for her class. Noting that similar stress-relieving toys were all across YouTube, Weaver decided to try his luck selling "fidget spinners" on retail website Amazon. Now he sells 500 to 1,000 spinners a day, for $17.95 a pop.
The craze, which went viral online, has "shaken" the $90bn global toy industry. When Weaver first listed fidget spinners in December under the company name EWR Products, there were only a few other sellers on Amazon. Four months later Walmart, the world's largest retailer, is "scrambling to air freight spinners directly from Chinese factories to get them into stores faster". The earliest incarnation of the toy emerged in 1997 from engineer Catherine Hettinger, who let the patent expire in 2005. Over a decade later, newer versions of fidget spinners have been revived into relevance among schoolchildren on social media and You Tube.
It is difficult to measure the size of the market for fidget spinners, as large corporations have only recently began to sell them. Meanwhile, observers say the buzz around the toy underscores how much the toy retail industry has changed. It's still a huge market toy sales have been growing at about 3% a year since 2011 but mainstream toy retailers have been hit by the emergence of Amazon "as the premier destination for online shopping". Meanwhile, toymakers are struggling with shorter product cycles. Popular, respected brands, such as Star Wars, have held their cachet, but newer ones, such as Frozen and Finding Dory, have shorter lifespans and "out of the blue" trends such as fidget spinners present an even bigger challenge.
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