Can a silly idea lead to success?

As a scam, Klutz ‘failed miserably’

It started out as a kind of get-rich-quick scheme, says John Cassidy. He and his partners wanted to get in, make enough money to buy a remote island and settle down to a life of indulgence and excess.

By Carma Wadley
Deseret News senior writer

And why not? they wondered. After all, things like Pet Rocks were selling, so why not "Juggling for the Complete Klutz"?

That was 25 years and more than 150 books and games ago. What started out as a simple venture working out of a garage turned into a major player in the world of kids’ entertainment, "far bigger than we ever dreamed about," said Cassidy in a telephone interview from his office in Palo Alto, Calif. "As a scam, it failed miserably." They accidentally hit on something people wanted in increasing numbers, and they had to keep working.

It started when Cassidy was spending his summers as a river guide in California and Idaho. "If you can’t sing around the campfire, you have to come up with something else," he said. So, for him, that something else was juggling.

In the off-season, he worked with remedial readers in a nearby high school, and in a struggle to find something the students would be interested in, he put together a mimeographed lesson plan on how to juggle.

The simple instructions — and the fact that they came with bean bags that you could practice with — were popular. They started selling them out of their garage, and after a couple of years they were still selling strong. They hadn’t made their millions, but "we didn’t tank, either."

The next thing they tried was the Hacky Sack, or footbag. Again, the simple instructions came with the tool. Again, it was a success. "We just caught the crest of that fad."

Cassidy’s partners eventually left, but the turning point came, he said, "when I got married and went parental. The career thing lost its terror." And he began to think, maybe he really had quite literally tumbled onto something.

Toys with tools became the standard. The company did all the classic children’s games: jacks, marbles, string games, jump rope. They branched out into simple magic tricks and moved into fashion accessories. They did arts and crafts. And through it all, said Cassidy, "I represented the nitwit element. I’m very bad at most of what we do. But if I can do it, so can others."

What has made the Klutz products so successful, he said, is that they never deviated from their core values: quality and uncompromising immaturity.

"Our books are for the stupid but not the hopelessly uneducatable. They read our books and think, ‘Hey, these guys are dumber than I am.’ They breeze through it and think, ‘I’m smarter than I thought I was.’ We’re very user friendly."

At Klutz, he said, "our world is not the world of perfect Martha Stewart cakes. We don’t ignore failure, we celebrate it. We use it as a starting place."

And so, they do books for the artistically undiscovered — books that may use thumbprints as inspiration, or take you step-by-step through simple pictures.

They do books for the musically unaccomplished — with simple instructions for guitar or harmonica.

They provide help for the crafty underachievers — simple designs for greeting cards, window art, cake decorating or fill-in-the-blanks scrapbooks.

Ideas for new projects come from hanging out with kids. "We don’t have one-way mirror focus groups. We go hang out in classrooms. I like kids a lot. As sappy as it sounds, that’s the truth."

Klutz has recently been acquired by Scholastic Books, "but they’re still going to let us be left-coast and wacka-wacka," he says. After all, it’s what you would expect from a company whose mission statement is "create wonderful things, be good, have fun." Who needs any more than that?

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