Gary Dahl created the perfect business and became a millionaire selling perfect pets: rocks. What is said a born entrepreneur.
In the mid -1970s, the Pet Rocks (pet rocks) became great popular in the United States, capturing for a few months The free spirit – or some would say stupidity – of the time.
Its creator was Gary Dahl, an independent advertising editor (“That is another way of saying ‘in bankruptcy'”I would say later, according to the New York Times), who conceived the idea while taking some beers with friends in his hometown, in the North California.
They started talking about pets and how much maintenance some require, and Dahl told them that he had perfect pets: rocks. Then he decided to pack some and put them on sale.
The Pet Rocks were exactly what he said in their wrapping: ordinary stones, oval, imported from a beach in Mexico and packaged in a cardboard box that had ventilation holes and a straw nest, very similar to a pet bearer.
The touch of gold was The manual that accompanied the rockwhere it was advised how to train and care for the stone pet.
It included instructions like this: «Pet rocks are easy to train. They can quickly learn to ‘sit’, ‘stay’ and ‘become dead’ ».
Another advice said: «Never take your Pet Rock to swim. It is known that They are bad swimmers and will sink to the bottom. It’s okay to give them an occasional bath in shallow waters ».
The manual also informed the owners that stone pets “They seem to prosper without food”which are “Pretty lazy” And what are they “Third and they won’t come when they are called”.
“Enjoy the holidays” and “They prefer to travel in the pockets”he added.
“People are so boring, tired of all their problems,” Dahl said to People magazine in 1975. “This (the rocks rocks) takes them to a fantasy trip … you could say that We have packaged the sense of humor«.
Americans loved the idea.
The rocks were marketed for US $ 3.95 (equivalent to US $ 15 today) and Dahl sold more than five million in 1975. He became a billionaire before his idea became fashionable, after Christmas.
According to the New York Times, with that money he changed his car for a Mercedes Benz and replaced the small cabin in which he lived with a large house with a pool.
But it was difficult to replicate the success of Pet Rock.
Dahl made a series of failed projectswhich included a “sand breeding kit” that commercialized in 1976 (allowed the buyers to “raise” “male” and “female” tubes.
In 1978 he tried to sell acrylic cubes with land that, he said, had been taken from China smuggling. Cubes cost US $ 5.95 each.
“If enough Americans buy a square inch of Earth from China Red, in a short time we will have taken the entire country under their noses”he told Time magazine at that time.
He also tried to invest in other ventures: he opened a tavern and a sailing brokerage business.
But none of these Ideas He took off and, at the end of the decade, his investors sued him, saying that they had received a very small part of their profits.
Meanwhile, although he had the copyright of Pet Rocks, that did not prevent other sellers from marketing their own stones.
So Dahl returned to advertising and wrote the book «Advertising for Dummies« (Advertising for fools) in 2001.
He died in 2015 at the age of 78with feelings found about the idea that made him rich.
“He gave me a profile too high”He told Associated Press in 1988.
Since Pet Rock created, he said, he spent too much time dealing with inventors who approached him with all kinds of meaningless ideas: “A lot of crazy,” he called them.
“There is a strange periphery of crazy people who believes that I owe them a way of life”he said.
«Sometimes I look back and I wonder if my life would not have been simpler if I had not created it«.
