10 – Beanie Babies,
- With profits totalling in the billions, Beanie Babies are a toy fad of cultish proportions. For those living under a pet rock, these are basically bean-filled sacks with furry ears and cutesy-wutesy names like Patti the Platypus or Dobby the Derp-Derp.
- The toys were an immediate success for their creator, Ty Warner, with 30,000 sold at their first toy show. Incredibly, Ty built his empire without any advertising and without selling them through major chain stores, like Toys-R-Us. Instead of causing his product to fall through the cracks into obscurity, the toys’ rarity made them more desirable to consumers. Ty also retired certain models at the end of their initial stock-run, turning them coveted collectibles.
- At the peak of Beanie Baby mania, Ty Warner raked in $700 million in a single year. He’s now a billionaire, all because of the game-changing idea to fill some sacks with beans.
9 – Snuggies,
- The infamous Snuggie is a blanket with arms that became an unlikely phenomenon in the late 2000s. More than twenty million Americans purchased a Snuggie between fall 2008 and Christmas 2009, at roughly $20 a blanket.
- Snuggies, and their less successful competitor Slankets, appeal to people who value comfort over style, and to those who want to freely use their hands while wearing a blanket.
- Although the fad has died down somewhat in recent years, sales remain strong – particularly for kids and, err, pets. They’re often seen on airplanes and at sporting events, and have even inspired ‘Snuggie pub crawls’, where drunken blanket-people stumble from bar to bar trying in vain to get laid.
8 – Big Mouth Billy Bass,
- Big Mouth Billy Bass is a singing wall-mounted animatronic fish that helped reel in the dough for its Texan novelty toy creators Gemmys in the late Nineties.
- Invented by Joe Pellettiere, this singing fish was a hugely popular gag gift and stocking stuffer in the early 2000s. Stores sold hundreds of the annoying things each hour and struggled to keep up with demand. Sales topped a million in the year 2000 alone and a whole host of imitators soon flooded the market.
- Billy Bass sung songs like ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’, and anyone unfortunate enough to work in a store that sold them is probably still undergoing therapy from having to hear it all day every day.
7 – The Happy Smile Trainer,
- Forgotten how to smile? This legitimate Japanese sensation will teach you how again in just five minutes a day.
- Consumers use the Happy Smile Trainer to enhance their mouth and jaw muscles and create perfect Joker-style smiles. By biting down on the silicone mouthpiece for five minutes once a day, they’ll allegedly improve the angles and balance of their face and cheeks, and strengthen their teeth and gums.
- The science is unconfirmed, but one thing’s for sure: at $52 US a pop, this product’s creators from the Japanese Trend Shop are smiling all the way to the bank.
6 – Head On,
- Head On is a controversial product that claims to relieve headaches. Since virtually everyone gets headaches, the target audience is the entire human race – or at least the gullible majority.
- Head On gained notoriety in 2006 because of its repetitive commercial that consisted only of the tagline ‘Head On’.
- The instructions say to apply it directly to the forehead three times in succession. Apparently it worked for some, but this is most likely just a placebo effect.