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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Absolutely. For the first time in my life, I was not going to be somebody participating in a craze. I had the notion that I could be the craze. And that was it. I had this, why should I make a knockoff, essentially, of a razor scooter? Knockoff is not a very nice word. Like my scorpion yo-yos weren't really knockoffs. They're innovative, blah, blah, blah, but they were still just participating in a craze, not owning a craze.”
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 were called everything, but there, when they started, they put a name on the ones that were coming directly from them, but they were a Chinese factory. So they would make under many different brands in Japan already. And already they were getting orders from other people. You know, I'm not the only guy for sure that won something is super hot in Japan that figures this is coming to the United States.”
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'm reading an article in the LA Times, and there's an article about adults in Japan, in Tokyo, riding scooters called the Razor Scooter. And I thought to myself, immediately thought to myself, well, I'm in the craze business, and I also make miniature extreme sports items. This is going to be my ticket to kill, you know, tac-tac. You know, I'm going to be the guy that gets the razor scooter license to make miniature razor scooters because I just know this is going to, I sense this is going to come to the United States and be huge. And so somehow I got the telephone number of the company, JD, you know, JD Scooter Company, you know, that was making these scooters, invented the scooters.”
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 mean, I just couldn't. This is how I thought toys were, period. I mean, this is my only niche, and I was just moving a millions miles an hour. And it was emotionally draining to have your whole business collapse every year or year and a half. So at any moment, I thought this whole thing is going to just stop, you know?”
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 did. Yes. I had a niche, but they were far more experienced and advanced in the toy business than I was and had deeper relationships with all these retailers. And at the time, they sent around a letter saying that I was infringing their intellectual property, even though the exact opposite was true. And, you know, it was really, so it was really dirty, actually, in my understanding of the world.”
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
“China. The guy who made the yo-yo's. Was my connection, and he started to make all this stuff for me. It was again, they were flying off the shelves. And I had, of course, the original brand name, which was Fingerboard. Tactic came out as a competitor, and they were more authentic looking than mine at the time. You know, I had the original old school one, and they had a sort of more authentic looking piece.”
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
“Finger skateboards at first. This was a major craze. And of course, you know, by this time, I learned about product differentiation. So I made all kinds of parts of the street landscape, like barrels, 55 gallon drums and little barrels and street cones so that kids could fantasize playing with their fingerboards. And then I also... Branched out into things like BMX bikes and surfboards and pretty much any other extreme sport, I would go and get a famous brand and put it on it and, you know, sell 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
“Yes, exactly right. And they still do. But this was a very, again, Southern California, very organic. In the fingerboard, and they were called fingerboards. But the person that invented it didn't have access to major companies like Toys R Us and Walmart and all that kind of stuff. And I did, so we struck a deal and I manufactured them.”
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 don't know. Honestly, I don't know why this is part of my personality. Like, I don't know exactly why, but I'm just keeping, the only way you can describe it is keeping your eyes open and talking to everybody and seeing what's happening. And somebody I met introduced me to somebody who was selling something called fingerboards.”
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, at that point, on paper making lots of money, more than way more than I would be as a lawyer. And I'm very grateful to my wife for her patience because she was a lawyer. That meant I could reinvest all the capital to keep the business growing. So I didn't really, wasn't really able to take out a big salary or any salary, really.”
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
“And stuff like that. I mean, I remember as a kid in the 80s being taken to Toys R Us, you know, and it was like magic. You know, it's just a magical store wandering through those aisles and looking at all of the toys. And it was like, One of the great that and a happy meal at McDonald's were two, and I didn't get them very often. It was just amazing. Amazing”
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 hire a group of reps that would go to all the retailers in the country. He put a nationwide sales network together for me overnight. Basically, sales reps know people all over the country. And so it turns out you don't just have to sell them to science stores. They also sell extremely well in Toys R Us. So I started to get my big first big customers and I sold millions of Scorpion Yos globally. It was 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
“It was, you know, I just was learning how to be in business. So at this point, I personally contacted the buyer at the science store. And then somebody told me that you can't do all these sales yourself. You know, you can't expect to do well if you're just going to call the buyers at the major stores. You need an organization and you need sales reps, essentially. And I hired a sales manager. And that's what transformed my 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
“So, how did you have, I mean, with the pogs and the slammers, you had a guy who bought them from you and then distributed them, but now you had the yo-yo. So I'm assuming you had some connections in the industry at this point where you could find somebody willing to buy them and distribute them. No, or did you?”
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 again, I wasn't making the original PON, but I was involved in a major craze that's sweeping through the culture, again, 10-year-old boys. And I went to like the, there was a science store from public television that was in the malls at that time. And a scorpion yo-yo was perfect for them. And so that was my first time I ever sold directly to a major account.”
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 actually. Essentially. Yes. I mean, actually pour the polyurethane into the yo-yo and then put a scorpion in there, bake the yo-yo, the whole thing. And it turns out that we were on the cusp at that time of the greatest yo-yo craze in the history of yo-y”
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
“At that point, it was just, I didn't understand it was a craze, but I understood that it would just be like keychains. Like it would be another thing that I could be doing to get rid of my 200,000 scorpions. And so I 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
“Yeah, or just like it's not a toy shop. You know, that's a good sign for a craze. Yeah, I didn't explain that. Yeah, it was like a random. I don't even know what kind of shop it was at this point, but they had some yo-yos. And they had like $100 aluminum yo-yo. And, you know, it just seemed like, wow, that's interesting. And then I got the idea. I could put a scorpion in a yo-yo.”
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 my career. But while I was in the process of making these scorpion keychains and anything else I could think of with a scorpion in it, I was in Pasadena and I walked into a shop and at like a random shop was selling yo-yos. And I'm like, wow, that's kind of weird.”
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 did not know what to do with them, honestly. And again, humiliated in front of my wife. Oh my God, all your profits, like where's the money guy? And so I took them and started to just like make keychains. And for like I was back in the market where I saw.”
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, but of course I was naive and I thought, oh, this goes on forever. This is my first crazy, you know. So I'm selling 75,000 scorpions slammers a month. I need to order like a few hundred thousand more scorpions to be ready to price of the scorpions went up. So all my profits were tied up in my second order of scorpions.”
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, and then the day I delivered the last scorpion, the pog craze collapsed. They're like, nobody was buying pogs and slammers in. It just stopped. It stopped. The whole industry shut down immediately, like in a matter of hours, it seemed black.”
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 had like 75 Scorpion Arrangers. And then I took bakery racks. And converted them into makeshift ovens with light bulbs with like insulation on the outside of a bakery rack. And I would stick bakery trays in there of scorpions. It was wild, you know?”
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 then I ask my Chinese friend to help me find employees. And she did. And I hired her to sort of supervise them. And I opened up this scorpion factory in Southern California. It was like a warehouse.”
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
“Are going to be sent You know, into the US level of sophistication, I didn't even think about it. Like, I didn't even understand, like, oh, well. Are they going to be annoyed that there's scorpions coming into the United States? You know, and they put them in like gasoline jugs filled with alcohol to preserve them. And I suppose that makes them food safe too for how they eat them in China. That's how they transport them. Yeah, yeah, no, I did nothing ever happened with customs that I remember.”
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
“And they gave me, and again, this was at the early days of China turning into a market. And they had... They had people who were importing products from China on a list and they gave me a printout with a dot matrix printer of a list of Chinese importers. I called that I had 20 of them. I called them all. I only found one that could find me scorpions, but he 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
“And I figure if they're gonna, there's a lot of people in China, if they're eating scorpions. There's a lot of scorpions. There's got to be a lot there. So I went down and at that time there was something called the Hong Kong Trade Council in downtown Los Angeles. And I went physically down there and talked to them.”
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, I didn't know, but I gan to go look for a warehouse near my house in South Pasadena where I could set up a factory. But the bigger problem was I immediately called Mac and said, I need 200,000 scorpions. And they said, no, no, you completely misunderstand the scale of our business. We go out with our kids at night in the desert with black lights.”
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 that's inborn. And that is like the secret is that I didn't stray too far from what I am. Like I am a 10-year-old boy. My favorite story is I got into trouble while I was a law clerk because I snuck into my judge's chambers in the middle of the night because he had the most powerful computer to do video gaming on. You know, I just have a 10-year-old. Boys”
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, all right, so you get this deal for some amazing. It's amazing that a scorpion embedded in polyurethane. But yeah, I mean, these slammers were going crazy. Kids were buying these cardboard pogs and the slammers.”
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
“Nope. Absolutely not. I had never bought a scorpion before. I knew a little bit about how much the plastic costs. But I figured, you know, but that was it. That was my only cost that I knew. But I wouldn't even at that age, it's just so hard to remember how naive I was. And I didn't even understand what margin was or how much you need to manufacture something. And so I just went ahead at that point. But I didn't have any money. So believe it or not, the world is a great place. He wrote me a check for $75,000 that day.”
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 is when I started to behave like a regular business person, somehow gradually I learned about business. I went to a toy show, the Pomona toy show, which, you know, back in the olden days, there used to be small toy stores. And in order to buy toys, toy stores would go to these toy shows. There was one in Pomona, a major one for the West Coast. And I rented a corner of a booth, I mean, like a tenth of a booth. And I had one aquarium with all total of six scorpions that I made, that I'd ever figured out how to make in this in a little aquarium. And I was, you know, talking to people, people were walking by, and a guy walked by who was a, happened to be in the pog and slammer business. It was a toy distributor. And he said, if you don't leave this”
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, all right, so eventually I'm assuming you figure out how to make this. Six months, yes. Okay, six months. So you successfully figure out how to embed a scorpion in polyurethane as a slammer for pogs.”
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, it's so cool. First of all, I did all the reading I could and I went down to the Natural History Museum in LA where they actually embed specimens in plastic and I talked to them and I checked out a book from the Natural Library on Embedding Specimens in Plastic. But of course they're not making there's a there's a couple problems. One is I wanted mine to be shatterproof and like the globes and other things are not shatterproof. So I did research on materials. I called actually industrial chemical companies in LA and arrived at polyurethane as the kind of plastic that wouldn't break. But all kinds of problems, just like you might imagine. The first problem was, you know, scorpions, if you don't dry them out, took me a long time to figure this out. They'd turn white and you can't see the scorpion.”
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 turned the paper weight over and I saw they put their brand, their company on the back, just the name, Mac. I still remember it. This is 30 years later. And I thought, you know, I'll call them up and ask them to make these discs for me, right? Be no problem. I call them up. They say, there's no way we're going to make these disks for you, but we can sell you some scorpions if you want to try to figure out how to do it yourself. So I ordered, I got a hundred scorpions in a little jar of alcohol, came in the mail or US. And I went into my garage. I was renting a house in Pasadena, went into the, you know, from old Craftsman House, happened to have a garage, classic, started my business in the garage story, went in there for six months. My wife thought I was crazy, trying to figure out it's not trivial how to get a scorpion inside a little plastic disc.”
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 next step was I wanted them to make pogs for me. So I was going to have them illustrate and I was going to print the pogs and I was going to sell them. But while I was doing that, my wife is also a lawyer. And we were driving through Arizona to go on a case and I was just going along for the ride. And you stop at the rest stops and they sell these paper weights with real scorpions embedded in And they're like domes. And I looked at it and I got an idea.”
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 the problem was I didn't understand business at that point at all. But I did get, I got a lot of meetings out in New York. It was very fun. I went to the big beautiful publishing houses. And now I know that what you do when you have an ideal dad is you print up the books and you go to the book shows and you start selling them to the bookstores and you build a teeny little company that eventually gets big did not understand that at that time but while I was doing it was working with illustrators and some of the illustrators were involved in this craze called pogs and slammers and that's what got me interested in pogs and slammers”
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've always wanted to be an artist, believe it or not. And I made that pitch to my wife. But I also felt. Know, like I needed to earn some money. And so I thought I'll work with illustrators and do children's books. So I thought of this idea called masterpiece fairy tales, where I would tell the classic fairy tales, but I would take the paintings of the great impressionists and retell the story in their style. So it might be Van Gogh told the story of puss and boots, you know.”
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 before all of that happened, Carleton grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota in the sixties and 70s. His mom was a schoolteacher, and his dad was an entrepreneur who started out in direct mail. Carleton went to law school, but he hated it, so in his early thirties, he decided to pursue another interest, becoming an entrepreneur himself.”
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 tried yo yo's, he sold fingerboards, he was in the pogs and slammers business, Carleton understood something important, and it was almost intuitive. Kids are loyal to a toy one minute, and then abandon it the next, and his business was all about timing. Spot the craze, write it high, and then scramble before it fizzles out. But Razor was different. It was bigger, faster, and hotter than anything he had ever touched. But just as quickly as it rose, it collapsed. Sails dried up almost overnight. But Carleton hung on, and slowly rebuilt Razor into a bigger brand. And over time, Razor became more than a craze. It grew into a powerhouse, manual scooters, electric scooters, bikes, hoverboards, even a skateboard that twisted and swerved called the ripstick.”
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's happened to me so many times. And 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.”
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