How the Pop It! Invaded Your Home |
 | | Rose Wong |
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Every year or so, a new toy will appear in my apartment and multiply like an invasive species. In 2019 it was L.O.L. dolls, the gaudy nightmare that scattered tiny plastic shoes and sunglasses throughout my living room. This year, a Pop It! — a small, flexible silicone toy that resembles Bubble Wrap, with little blisters you can pop in and out — came to us in a goody bag. By the summer, we had acquired 10 of them in different shapes, sizes and colors, and my older daughter was trading them at camp. She'd leave the house with a Pop It! shaped like an ice cream cone and return with one shaped like a unicorn's head. |
I polled friends across the country over the summer, and their houses had also been infested with Pop It! fidget toys. Other media outlets have taken notice, too. "It seems to be taking everybody by storm this year," said Adrienne Appell, a senior vice president at The Toy Association, a nonprofit trade association for the toy industry. David Capon, the president of FoxMind, the company that manufactures Pop It!, said that sales have risen more than 10-fold in the past year. |
I wanted to learn how a toy goes from unknown to juggernaut. In the particular case of Pop It!, it's a combination of a viral TikTok video starring a monkey, a much longer back story involving a dream about breasts and a pandemic causing widespread boredom and anxiety among children and teens doing remote learning. |
The toy has a curious back story. |
Though the Pop It! is used by many children as a fidget toy to keep their fingers occupied during class, a sort of successor to the fidget spinner craze of a few years ago, it was conceived as a portable game. The company behind the original idea is an Israeli outfit called Theora Design, which was founded by a married couple, Theo and Ora Coster. |
Theo emigrated from the Netherlands to Israel after World War II and married Ora, an art teacher who would become the creative mind behind their company, which released games like Guess Who?, an '80s classic guessing game, and Elsie Sticks, which was popular in the '70s and involved interlocking ice pop sticks. |
In the mid '70s, Ora's sister died from breast cancer, and shortly after, she had a dream about a field of breasts. She woke up and told Theo that she wanted to create a game based on her vision. "Imagine a field of breasts, that you can press from one side, and then press from the other side," Boaz Coster, her son and co-C.E.O. of Theora Design, said when describing his mother's vision. Theo created a prototype in rubber that sat around the Theora showroom for decades. |
The company upgraded it with silicone to give the game a better hand feel, and ultimately Mr. Capon of FoxMind decided to manufacture and market it as a game called Last One Lost, a logic puzzle where the person who presses the last bubble remaining on the board loses. It hit the toy fairs in 2013. |
But it wasn't until the game was relaunched under the Pop It! brand and sold at Target in 2019 that sales really started to take off, said Mark Thoma, vice president of design and marketing at Buffalo Games, a company that helps distribute the Pop It! What happened to spur the outrageous growth? A viral video on TikTok. |
A monkey plays on TikTok. |
According to Richard Gottlieb, the CEO of Global Toy Experts and publisher of Global Toy News, before the internet, one of the oldest social networks was the schoolyard network. "Typically how that works is a cool kid comes to school, and he or she brings a toy and because they're cool everybody else wants it, and it moves like a virus from playground to playground, state to state, and ultimately country to country," he said. |
Last October, Gaitlyn Rae's owners posted a video of her popping a Pop It! in and out with delicate concentration against the backdrop of spa sounds, with hashtags including #asmr #relax and #sensoryplay. The Pop It! had simply appeared in Gaitlyn's house, too, just like with my kids. Her owner, Jessica Lacher, told the BBC: "Somebody sent her a pop-it for her birthday. … That was the first we had ever seen of them." Less than a year later, the hashtag #popit has more than 11 billion views on TikTok. |
Do fidget toys actually help kids? |
Why this toy at this time? There's always a bit of alchemy when it comes to making a hit toy — if there were an obvious formula, everyone would do it, the experts told me. But Ms. Appell, of The Toy Association, speculated that the potential anxiety-quelling aspects of the Pop It! may have made it a pandemic-era hit. She said that many children used them during remote learning. "Especially in these times, they can be calming, they can be soothing," she said. "Even adults are enjoying them." |
I can personally attest to the viscerally satisfying qualities of popping those little bubbles in and out; sometimes I will idly pick one up while watching TV, and it keeps my hands occupied and makes my mind feel a little quieter. But I wanted to know if there is any evidence that fidget toys actually help children calm their anxiety or help them focus on tasks. |
Dr. Diaz, who specializes in treating children with A.D.H.D., said that in her experience, the usefulness of a fidget toy is unique to each kid. She described two children in her practice who had the same diagnosis and had chosen a Rubik's Cube as a fidget toy. One child could continue to answer her questions while he played with the cube; the other was totally sucked into playing with the toy and could not absorb any of the conversation. |
Of course, toys don't need to have a purpose to bring our children a great deal of joy. I don't think either of my daughters would benefit from a Pop It! in an academic setting, and they very quickly lost their luster as fidgets or games. Instead, for my 8-year-old, the Pop It! served as a bonding tool for her new friends at camp. They were negotiating relationships by trading toys. |
According to Mr. Gottlieb, the length of many toy crazes before they start going out of fashion is about nine months, which means we may have already reached peak Pop It! I can't wait to see what the next invasive species is going to be, and what inventive things my kids are going to do with it. |
| Parenting can be a grind. Let's celebrate the tiny victories. |
It's always a struggle to get our almost 3-year-old to keep walking with us. Today on a hike we challenged her to catch our shadows and it kept her moving and entertained the whole time! — Becca Herman, Fort Collins, Colo. |
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