Sono Craig Zucker, l'inventore di Buckyballs, ed è così che lavoro

L'imprenditore seriale Craig Zucker è noto soprattutto per la creazione Buckyballs, la marca più famosa di giocattoli magnetici in terre rare che gli utenti possono impilare in forme geometriche, o schiaccialo come una palla antistress metallica modulare.

Come dispositivo di agitazione pre-spinner, Buckyballs ha coinvolto molti adulti in una lunga teleconferenza. Sicuramente non sono adatti ai bambini: ingoiare due Buckyball lo è come spararti lentamente dall'interno. Un timore per la sicurezza ha portato a una lunga battaglia legale con gli Stati Uniti. Commissione per la sicurezza dei prodotti di consumo, e Buckyballs si è spento 2012. Ma alla fine gli Stati Uniti. il governo ha allentato le norme sui giocattoli magnetici, e Zucker è tornato con un sequel chiamato Buckyball Specifiche.

Abbiamo parlato con Craig della storia dei suoi controversi giocattoli, come gestisce un team remoto, and what it’s like to work in an office full of little magnets.

First of all, tell us a little about your background and how you got to where you are today.

I can tell you this, as a kid I didn’t dream of selling desk toys—or of most of the other things I’ve worked on over the years. I’m just a Cleveland kid who moved to New York City after college at Miami of Ohio and then leapt at pretty much every opportunity or weird inspiration that came my way. I’ve had a few entrepreneurial ventures in my time here, one of which was bottling, branding and selling NYC tap water. You can imagine how that turned out … (But what I can say? We have great tap that doesn’t need to come from Fiji.)

After several of those ventures, I joined up with another guy to start Buckyballs, a desktoy made of rare-earth magnets, and man, was it something to watch Buckyballs take off. All of our efforts and growth were organic. There was no strategic marketing firm or PR team behind it. It was truly unbelievable—people latched onto our balls and we just kind of blew up. We rode that for a bit and then got hit with some serious regulatory issues on the federal level. We put up a great fight and stuck it out for a long time, but eventually we had to close the business at its height of $25 million per year in sales.

Four years later, the legal decision against Buckyballs was overturned. With a former competitor (the guy behind Zen Magnets), I launched a new evolution of the rare-earth magnet desk toy: Specifiche. Speks is a set of smaller magnets than Buckyballs that are 100% compliant and meet all safety regulations no matter how you slice it.