YouSaid · the spoken record

Carlton Calvin

lines on the record: 91
first: 2025-09-08
most recent: 2025-09-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Carleton Calvin, co founder of Razor. By the way, Pogs and Slammers, they've not totally gone away. You can still buy them on Amazon and you can find the slammers with the scorpions inside on eBay. And because the phrase scorpion slammer is so unforgettable, it's also the name of a very hot sauce made, of course, with scorpion chilies.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love the luck story. You know, there's like, what if I didn't read the article in the LA Times that the Razor Scooter was going crazy in Tokyo? And what if Robert hadn't been such an amazing person and such a visionary to put me and Gino together with him and start the company? And what if we had shut down, you know, because I was discouraged the year after, you know, there's all these like luck is so humbling as part of success. And, you know, things happen in a cultural moment, which means you can never bring back the hula hoop. Like, how do you explain things like this? I often think that, you know, the Beatles, if you brought them into the market today, might not, you know, become famous. I mean, I feel...”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Carlton, when you think about just the journey you took, I mean, went to law school, almost became a lawyer and kind of fell into the toy business because you wanted to make fairy tale picture books and started with these pogs and then kind of cut the bug and built a really significant brand here with Razor. How much of it do you attribute to the work you put in? How much do you attribute to luck and timing?”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, if I knew that. But actually, what's interesting, what I'm working on is that intrigues me, and this is going to be just sound boring at this point, but I think discovering trends using artificial intelligence or some other method of combing the culture for what's happening and finding it early. That's what was in my weird brain and being able to figure out how to do that algorithmically is very intriguing to me. I mean, I don't know that it's going to happen. I can't promise it's going to happen. That's one thing that's very exciting to me. And in fact, exciting to me in general is artificial intelligence for the business, for sure. I'm very interested in how that could roll through the business.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, at first, you know, I've got a really great team and we just madly began to figure out how to ship from Vietnam or Vietnam essentially or Thailand. We began to move everything until it was a pause and then we sort of moved everything back. We're just basically running around like our chicken with his head cut off trying to respond to what's ever happening next.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's an unmitigated disaster. Like we were, I was literally, I have, you know, made money every single year. I was actually thinking we were going to lose money this year. You know, you're getting hot news. I suppose, I mean, I don't know who else you're talking to, but our prices are significantly higher at retail. We're not benefiting from it because it's really retailers who forced the raise prices because of the tariffs. They're using it to pay the tariff and they don't pay us anymore and our sales are going down. Their sales are good. You know, if you look at their total dollar volume of sales, they've raised the prices. They're selling fewer units, but their overall dollar transactions good. But our sales are going down. But not. We're not crashing, but it's a terrible situation.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But then at some point, like everything that is really going to be a phenomenon, it began to catch on on its own without my help, without anybody's help. And I said, Chain, it's time to be in business again. And that was that. And he invented it. He had the patent on it. And we signed a deal. Now there was, you know, I had to like fend off, as I often do, you know, fend off other people who want to sell it, but I was successful and I have a long relationship with Shane, so it wasn't impossible. And we got it. And it was like another incredible, it was like our peak year. It was the second major cultural event that we were involved in.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I had a good relationship with Shane. And every year he would show me these wild and crazy inventions that he made. And I'm like, yeah, yay, yeah. You know, I'm happy to keep showing me, you know, we could try it a little bit, but I don't know. It just seems too odd. And amongst the things that I kept rejecting was the hoverboard. And I kept saying, you know, it's too hard to use. You know, I can't write it. And if I can't write it, You know, I don't want to sell it, right? And then I had my incredible marketing guy who's been with me from the start, Ali. He even was like, he could ride anything. And he's like, this isn't so easy to ride.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, let's talk about the hoverboard. So, this is a product that I guess is brought to you by an inventor. Or you discover it and It's a guy named Shane Chan. And tell me about. How you came across this product and also why you thought it was going to just go crazy.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know when the day Amazon started buying, we started to shift with them. We were very early on Amazon. But we had two dramatic shifts. The most saddest dramatic shift for Razor has been the loss of Toys R Us. You know, not only is it a loss from the kids' perspective of a fantasy place to go, but they actually always carried our entire line. And when we came out with something innovative, they got way behind it, you know? And we could always rely on three big customers Walmart Target and Toys R Us. If we're going to put something on television that they would get behind it and support it. And now without Toys R Us, you lose a third of the triad. And we really lost a very significant part of our sales when Toys R Us went bankrupt. And it was not completely replaced by the other people.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, basically, my patents on the scooters were expiring. And people can't successfully haven't yet. So there's the measured pessimist in me, haven't yet successfully knocked off the electric product.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Begins around 2015. Yes Before we get to that story, What were you doing about copycats? Were you still suing people who were knocking off your electric scooters and things like that, or were you just saying it is where it is and let's just focus on it? Yeah, it is.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me ask you about because I want to get into really the other product that would also blow up called the hoverboards. Which is not a hoverboard. It's not hovering back to the future. It looks like it.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yes, the Razor scooter was notoriously, you know, something that was created and lasted forever. And actually these electric motorcycles and scooters, they just keep getting stronger and stronger and stronger. And they're not as easy to knock off as the scooter. It's not so much the patent, but the actual technology in making them is quite challenging, you know, to do it well. And so that is, we have a very, very steady business on our evergreen items.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It sounds like by the time you start to release these electric versions, these are battery-powered versions of little motorcycles and go-karts and dirt bikes, and then the ripstick, that you start to really find a way to create some kind of stability in the company, in the brand.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're coming across very good items that didn't have any organic momentum on their own, so they needed television advertising to get them going. And through a very long phase of making wheel goods, which nobody had been doing and putting them on TV.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's a distinction. Like if it's a craze, that still works. Very few crazes. So we also discovered television. And so we could take innovative items that were not organically growing. you know ripstick was that had an organic momentum word of mouth that exploded into the culture and everyone had to have one”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, I mean, obviously, Toys R Us isn't there anymore. And, you know, Walmart and Target still sell toys, but it's somewhat different. I mean, was there a point where you couldn't just make a toy, put it there?”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this is again, I was in my own neighborhood and all of a sudden I saw like five kids on something called the waveboard. And I said, okay. This is a craze. So I called a couple of my people who sold into smaller venues. And he goes, yeah, this is crazy. And so I contacted the inventor and I said, you got to do it with us. We're going to make this a giant craze. And we did.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then, but you didn't abandon analog things. There's a product that you guys bring out in 2006 called the Ripstick, which is, I still see them. It's like basically imagine two sort of platforms connected by a rod, and it's like a kind of a skateboard meets a, I don't know what. And I've tried to stand on these things. I don't have the balance. This thing, how did this thing come about?”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This really begins your, I wouldn't say total shift, but a kind of a shift into powered electrified Ride on things like not just scooters, but then dirt bikes and like sort of ATV style vehicles that were not ATVs or dirt bikes that were thousands of dollars, but that were more like toys.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And actually, the first iteration was really outside inventor. They made a battery powered motor that could mount on a razor scooter. And that sold well, but it didn't take me long to realize that was not the way to sell an electric scooter. You don't want to just like bolt one on. You want to make it from the ground up as an electric scooter.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. Yeah, we called it the screen machine. So the business was began to thrive almost immediately because both scooters began to sell again. Like, you know, maybe after eight months or something. And people were buying this new products from Razor. They were very supportive. Toys R Us supportive people believed in Razor as a brand. And they were good products without being crazy. hits, but of course me as my personality, I'm looking for something magical always.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I began to think of Brand Extensions, so just commonsensical things. When we came up, you know, it was just like a theme, but that we would try to do what we did with the scooter, essentially, you know, which is look at the classic toys that young kids have, like, you know, power wheels or poco sticks, or we had a lot of them. And we would just razorize them. So we'd bring them out in shiny aluminum and higher quality and some innovation. I always wanted to do something innovative with the product too. So, you know, updated versions of classic product.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I mean, I think that, you know, to be just totally fair, our patent has expired. And at lower price points, I'm more of a quality based higher-end scooter, even at the basic $30 scooter. So I don't have the market share that I had of that product that I did originally. But everybody gets some form of the scooter that I see.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, at that time, you know, there were four million new customers turning from four-year-olds old where they couldn't write a razor scooter to five years old. So there was still all the new kids. So wonderful, they were not a flash in the pan. That's basically the answer. That's what happened. I mean, yeah, because”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really, what happened was, so to be really candid is that Gino was a great partner. And, you know, These scooters did not cost very much to manufacture. You know, he owns Razor with me, but he also owned the factory that made them. And he charged us a pretty penny for those scooters. And so we owed him a lot of money for these like leftovers. We'd already paid him for all the other scooters. But, you know, but for the leftover scooters, he said, listen. I'm going to help you with that. You don't have to pay me the full price on those scooters. And so, but that came out of all of our profit, essentially. But he took a hit, we took a hit. And so I just sat on him. I sat on him, but... You know, after a certain amount of time, the retailers were able to work through their inventory of their extra inventory, and then they needed.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's just like, you shouldn't do this. You just have to have more faith that we'll be able to come up with new things. And we should keep all these people. And, you know, I really respect Robert so much. And, you know, again, for so many years, we just had this partnership where we talk over everything. And he, I'm not, I don't get. Sat in my ideas, I think like to think. I think I'm open minded and he has a lot of influence over me and he persuaded me. It's really the answer. And I just did. I just kept going.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably 45 or 50. Yes. This is like the fourth time that my entire business has completely collapsed. And I'm But I don't think I'll be able to do it again. And I'm just a very, very frugal, you know, and not optimistic, skeptical person. And I just said, it's over. We should just save every penny we can”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because I never had a craze that continued before. I never had a craze that continued before. And I never had a brand before. And I didn't understand what it meant to own a brand. I thought I just had the next yo-yo or the next, you know, fingerboard and that it was just all over and that there was hardly any business here, that I couldn't handle just by myself because I handled fingerboards and pogs by myself.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They'd already paid us for them I mean, my reaction was because I am, I mean, of course I'm struggling to do everything I can. You know, it's sort of like after the pogs, I tried to make keychains. So I'm trying to think of anything I can do. But. Not having had a lot of success with keychains, my impulse was to fire everybody. That was my impulse.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe 15 million. Yes, maybe 15 million. And so I maybe only had a third of the market, believe it or not. You know, others were cheaper. I was at 100 and $130. There were a lot of scooters sold. No matter how many times the retailers go through this, no matter how many times I went through this, everybody's thinking to themselves this time is different. Like this time it's going to sell a million a month for the next three years. And they can't even just do simple math that there's not that many people, right? And so as much as I was trying to tell everybody in my organization, we can't keep ordering scooters. We still had like a million scooters in the warehouse for the next month's sale, which then were zero.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It doesn't make sense unless you understand crazes. It happened to me so many times, which means, so this is how it relates to the knockoffs. They were also selling at the same time. So between the two of us, we sold a scooter to every single kid in America who wanted one. Like literally, everybody between the age of. You know five and eleven or twelve got one.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It did not, I sold as many as I could manufacture during the time I was selling them. So I couldn't have sold any more than I did. But they sold a lot. And helped cause the thing that always happens, which is the sales completely stopped on a dime.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This was where my legal training came in Hamdy. But yes, we had a patent. And that could also be a reason, but I'm not sure that other bigger companies didn't get involved because they were aware of our patent. We certainly publicized it right away, but mostly people ignored our fact that we had a patent.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can't move that fast is essentially the answer. It's just too fast for them. And also they're probably wise. They're like wise but incorrect. They're like, oh, this is going to be over before we could get into it. So we won't be able to sell any.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was this vision of future transportation where adults would be riding scooters that helped popularize it in local. My favorite thing, a cover of the New Yorker of a guy riding Razor Scooter and then another man riding a tricycle. Just infuse the culture in a way that, like, yo yo's didn't or other crazes happened before.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a good question. I mean, I sort of take these things on face value. But scooters have always been positive. But these were small, made out of aluminum, so super light, and they had ball-bearing wheels from rollerblades. And that made them much better at scootering. Then the old fat better. It's sort of like the brain, like a technological improvement. They were aesthetically beautiful, which isn't always the case. They were culturally. They were used by adults and children. That was, I think, influential. So adults could talk about them and ride them in a way that like yo-yos were never used by adults. So it had a broader appeal. And it had something to do with, you know, the internet coming and they were used in Silicon Valley, you know, in warehouses.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, Target, I think, sharper image. I mean, everywhere, everywhere. You know, places that would normally, all the sporting good stores I sold to, dick sporting goods, sports authority, you know, I don't even, it's so hard to, you know, it's like, you know, beanie babies or, you know, cabbage pad kids at the time when parents are scrambling for them and can't get them. It was ridiculous. It was once in a lifetime experience for me and just once generational sales.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The scooter sold for retail at $100 for the, and immediately I came up really incredibly quickly with all like good, better, best, classic, because I'd already been in business a little bit. So it went from like a hundred dollar retail for the base model to like $140 for one with some parts to it. A suspension or wheelie bar, all kinds of little, like we had the A, the A2, the A3, and we were golden.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I'm only like been doing serious, you know, it took me a long time to get from making children's books to actually doing the pogs. You know, that was a, and then from the pogs, it was probably just three years.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Immediately scaled up to a real company from three. I had three employees selling fingerboards. And I put together a whole team. Like I had a, you know, president. I had vice president of sales, marketing, just the skeleton, but customer service, every kind of, and I didn't even know honestly, I had no idea what a company looked like. Like I didn't know that you needed a marketing VP or a finance VP or a sales VP. I had no idea. I just thought, oh, you just do it all yourself. But that's not it.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In China. Yes. Yes. In anticipation. And they shut down all these other customers. So they didn't have to make them and slap all these other weird brands on them. They could just put Razor on all of them and ship them to me. And I would ship them to Toys R Us and the other retailers.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, this is the biggest craze. And maybe they were already being sold by knockoffs even faster than Razor could get into the market in the US. They might have been being sold in convenience stores in LA, you know, just like the POGs. Like they're in, and certainly as it progressed, it got to the point where you could go to a pizza shop and they'd be selling knockoff scooters. Not razor scooters, right”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For not nobody had to put in capital in. My businesses tend not to be in capital intensive, but you'll appreciate this. Business people appreciate this. A business of this size that we formed would ordinarily require a lot of capital, but we were in very unique times. And it's exclusive to crazes. But these Toys R Us and Walmart were paying COD for scooters to me.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stores. But of course, they were not selling to the stores. They were selling to distributors. And so I was going to get them wholesale prices instead of them selling it through a middleman who then sold it to Toys R Us or Walmart. So there was a big opportunity to capture more profit for them. But the big concept was branding, you know, and building a company for the future.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know this is a great question. I mean, this is like an amazing part of like how this happens. I mean, basically it was based on trust. And Robert is like, I want it. It's hard to express how good a person and honest Robert is. And Gino too, and we all, and I like to think of myself that way too. And we got, and Robert and I had an immediate connection. And, you know, a lot of untrustworthy people were approaching him, you know, not with the, and also they didn't have this grand vision. You know, the grand vision is stop what you're doing, which is a big risk on their part, and own a brand. And the brand is everything. I mean, I clearly like any number of people I had my relationships with Toys R Us and Walmart and Amazon, not Amazon, Target, you know, all the players, and I could bring them to the...”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm sorry, Gino Sai, sorry to introduce him, a genius, amazing human being, wonderful human being too, who was the inventor and the creator and the original razor scooter guy. Gino had been an entrepreneur for he and Robert are older than me and they had been entrepreneurs for longer. He didn't waste time going to medical. I mean law school. And so they knew business. He had maybe 10 different companies at that time. He was a wealthy man already.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he was an inventor and he was doing folding bikes that he invented. So he had a warehouse in Cerritos, which is where our headquarters is now, and also was getting interested in, you know, helping Gino with the Razor Scooter business because it was just going crazy in Japan already.”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right. Okay, so you decide to sell the actual scooter in the US. And from what I gather, like to get the ball rolling on this, you connect with two guys who will soon eventually become your business partners, starting with there's a guy in LA is a guy named Robert Chen. And so who exactly was Robert”
2025-09-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT