Some people see an Etch A Sketch and want to draw. Alan Dorfman, 66, saw one and reached for a hacksaw: he cut it in two over a laundry tub, silver powder everywhere, so he could learn its insides well enough to rebuild it at palm size. His company has since sold about 10 million of the keychain versions, Natasha Khan reports in Friday’s front-page A-hed — the Journal’s home for the delightfully odd.
The origin story has everything. A Philadelphia kid who tried design and marketing and found law school too boring ends up selling novelty wood roses to supermarkets — until the boss flings a sticky octopus at the wall and Dorfman, watching it creep down, is hooked. Next came Larami, maker of the water gun that became the Super Soaker, where he ran a party-favors division of exactly one. In 1989 he left to start his own impulse-toy company — think putty that swells to as much as 25 times its size in water — and went back to his old employer with a keychain idea. Larami said no, then, worn down, asked for a sample. The skeptics in the room doubted a 3.5-inch squirt gun could fire; it drenched somebody’s tie, and he sold five million the first year.
The engineering of tiny
Every shrink is its own puzzle: an inch-wide Magic 8 Ball whose answer block has to float without trapping air bubbles, Jenga blocks weighted so they’ll stack (you still need a toothpick to slide one out), a Trivial Pursuit with type so small it ships with a magnifying card. When Michelle mentioned this year that she might take up Mahjong, he was already scheming up the world’s smallest set. The toys move especially well at truck stops, where they buy parents a quiet stretch of interstate. “Most men wouldn’t brag about being known for being small,” he says, then pulls a mini arcade game from his jacket.
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Two planning lessons in a very small package, both Career with a Retirement (M10) tail. First, the leap. Dorfman quit a steady job with Michelle pregnant with their first child — the move that makes a great A-hed and goes sideways in plenty of households nobody writes about. What makes a leap survivable is dull: months of expenses in cash, a spouse who’s truly in, and small products that pay the bills while you chase the big license. Note that he still builds the mock-up before he asks permission. Test small, then bet.
Second, the founder who won’t stop. “He cannot stop,” Michelle says; he talks about retiring someday, and she can’t see it. Work you love is a fine reason to keep going and no reason to skip the plan. A business that lives in one man’s head, built on licenses from other companies, is hard to sell and harder to hand off, so the retirement money should sit where the business can’t take it along — a SEP-IRA, or a solo 401(k) if there are no employees beyond a spouse, funded every year — next to a written answer for who runs it, or winds it down, if the ideas ever slow. It’s the little things in life, Dorfman says. A yearly review is one of them, and the umbrella fits in a pocket.