How To Have A Hit Product

Are you looking for new product ideas? If so, you could find this post interesting....

Here's how the "frisbee" came to be.... It's an unusual story. And it shows some important principles you can use to find possible product ideas....

The name "Frisbee" originated from the Frisbie Pie Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, founded by William Russell Frisbie in the 1870s. The Frisbie Pie Company's pies were made on lightweight pie tins with the company name embossed on them....

People found the pie tins were great to throw around.... Eating the pie first, to get the empty tin, was good too, but then you could have a fun game afterwards as well!

Yale University students were tossing around Frisbie pie tins regularly as a game in the 1940s. People were playing with "frisbies" before the official "Frisbee" came to be!

In the 1950s, Walter Frederick Morrison, a Los Angeles building inspector, decided to capitalize on Hollywood's obsession with UFOs. He designed a lightweight plastic disk, based on the Frisbie pie tins. However, he called his toy a "Flyin Saucer" to avoid legal hassles.

Morrison then sold the rights to the Flyin Saucer to the Wham-O Manufacturing company, and in 1957 they introduced the "Frisbee."

Finally, it got it's "official" name. However, the Frisbie Pie Company which inspired the "Frisbee" went out of business in 1958.

In 1994, Mattel acquired Wham-O. Nowadays, more frisbees are sold in the US than baseballs, basketballs, and footballs combined! This leads to the following question....

What things around you could be profitable, which people are doing already? A lot of "hits" like this evolve from things that people are doing already....

For the frisbee, people were already throwing around pie tins.... It just took someone to notice it and commercialize it. Walter Frederick Morrison in fact capitalized on TWO trends -- the fun game of throwing around pie tins, and the UFO craze at the same time.

Many new fashions come about by watching what young trendy folks are doing, and commercializing the trend.... An example are the "grunge" style fashions kids were wearing about 10 years ago.... Trendy kids developed this fashion themselves, then some savvy companies commercialized it.

Keep your eyes open, and who knows what you could find! If people are doing it already, and it's not yet commercialized, it could be a golden business opportunity!

What are young people doing nowadays? That seems to be where a lot of the "trends" come from.... The best people to tell you might be your kids!

As Gordon says, the most important thing could be the "timing".... Watching what others are doing seems to be the only way to get the timing right, in addition to testing!

It can be fun discovering what are the latest "new" trends too! Here's an example....

In 1998, Madonna sparked a new fashion trend by wearing temporary henna tattoos in her "Ray Of Light" music video. How have some capitalized on this?

The home henna kit! Here's an example..... If you do a search, you'll find there are quite a few henna kits available out there....

I don't know if the henna craze will heat up more or die out soon, but it's one recent example which some have already cashed in on....

What else is out there that people are doing which hasn't been commercially developed yet? I bet there's plenty! I'm keeping my eyes open.... :)

- Dien Rice