YouSaid · the spoken record

John Osher

lines on the record: 72
first: 2026-02-16
most recent: 2026-02-16
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

“Toys R Us with my buyer's boss. And I said, You're basically putting us out of business. And I wanted to find out if there's anything you can do to help me. And he looked at me and he says, You know, this was when Toys R Us was in their heyday. I mean, they were really powerful. And he said, you know, we need new toy companies. We don't want you to fail. And he said, let's see if we can make an arrangement, a deal. You know, I give him something and we'll buy your inventory. For the rest of my life, all through the toy industry, every time I see him, I practically break into tears because it was so kind of him. And I got a second chance.”
2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first thing I want to do, and this is called entrepreneurial terror, and I think most Meeting to get together with others, it's all on your head. And I remember I spent two or three days. I just wanted to hide under the bed. I mean, I didn't want to get out of bed. And I was getting divorced at the time and I was living in a city, Cleveland, where I moved with the baby company where I didn't really know many people. So I didn't have a big support network. My investors, by the way, all quit investing. The bank dropped me. Everything happened all at once. After three days of this, I just got up and said, I better do something. And I got up and I put down a piece of paper. What do I have to do? Got to get a new bank. I got to get more money in the company. I have to deal with Toys R Us. And once I started that and I got over the fear, I went to work and I got my rep, my sales rep in New York, and we got a point with the boss.”
2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It didn't really have time to. The season was just starting. And any pre-sales were okay. They were not terrible. But basically, we were going to be put out of business. I had all this inventory and they canceled and did the same with the crunch balls. And I really had no preparation for this type of thing. And I went through the toughest few months of my life.”
2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It started off, it starts off as a plant with leaves and flowers. It's all fabric. You put your hand in it and the head pops up and it has arms and it works as a puppet. And what happened was that our first year, Toys R Us was buying it and they bought, ordered a nice amount. And before we shipped it, before I could ship it, they canceled the order because they were overstocked that year.”
2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So most of the toy industry back then was toys came from inventors, toy inventors. So I went to look at a bunch of toy inventions and I found two inventions from a guy named Howard Wexler in New York. And he was famous for inventing Connect 4. And I developed what's called blooming dolls, which was a doll that was a flower pot and it would turn into a puppet and then into a full doll. And it was really cute and a ball called crunch balls, which had little foam pellets in that tent material. And it was in between a balloon and a ball.”
2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was called Rainbow Toy Bars. Now that's one of there's two products in my life that were a difference maker in the world. The first one was the rainbow toy bars. Back then when my baby was, I forget it was the same baby, probably the same baby, between zero and six months old, we put them in a little seat that he'd sit on the floor or we put on a blanket on the floor. And in five minutes, he'd start to cry. And if I gave him a rattle, he'd play with it for a few seconds, but then he would drop it because he was too young to hold on to it. I came up with the idea and said, why don't I create a little swing that I can hang the toys down to the baby over his blanket and he could have visual stimulation. He could play with him when he lets go, they're still there. And I bought a bunch of white PVC to me, and we actually made special fittings that would fit the angle. And we made it so you push it together and it came with little plastic rings and hang rattles and toys like that.”
2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it had rubber feet on the bottom, so it made a very hard slide, and it wouldn't be necessarily an octagon. It might be many angles you could angle it, and the ratchet would hold it in whatever shape configuration. It was a cool idea, but the name was really...”
2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it was portable. Portable. It weighed eight pounds. It folded up like a suitcase in two seconds. It had ratcheted hinges. No bottom. And you could make it into any eight sided configuration.”
2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I went back to my partners and I had investors. And I said, I think I want to start this baby product business. And I remember one of them was really furious. And I said, now we've committed to this energy. And I said, no. And I stuck by my guns. And so while we still had the energy diminishing energy business, I developed this baby product called Crawlsface.”
2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. I saw that the energy prices were dropping, which were not ever expected. We thought it was going to forever grow. And I saw that the products were slowing down. And at the same time, I was in this apartment. And I had a six-month-old son who would crawl around the kitchen and bang his head against the kitchen cabinets and this and that. And I came up with an idea called crawl space, which was a little portable corral that opened up any eight-sided configuration. And it was at a time when the scissors, the wooden scissors gates and corrals were being outlawed because of danger.”
2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I remember staying up all night one night, and this was my beginning of a career as a semi-inventor and inventing products and coming up with a list of products, hot water heater insulation jacket was one. We made special fans. A lot of people were getting kerosene heaters and heating up one room to 120 while the rest of the house was cold. So I made these fans that would hang in the doorway to bring the heat from one room to the other, things like that. And it showed me that I could be an inventor. It's hard to believe you can do that until you actually do it successfully and sell a product.”
2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was just never the case. Even when I was a plumber in this Gurjif group, I was rich, you know, within the context of my life. I had a house and a car and a wife and I made much more money than everyone else in the group because I was in a business that you could charge a lot of money for. I never took a second to fear what am I going to do next or how am I going to make a living? And say, I can look back at it and say, well, why didn't I? I should have been afraid, but I just didn't.”
2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I got a job for a builder as a carpenter's helper. And eventually the group's construction company needed a plumber. So I went to become the new plumber. It turned out I was good at this stuff.”
2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so that became interesting and an important part of my life, and that is that when I grew up as a doctor's son and, you know, for the light bulb breaks, you hire somebody to screw it in. And so I grew up with virtually no skills or thoughts that I would have any aptitude for things like this. But the group there had to make a living. So a lot of the people came in were PhD, you know, all different walks of life joined this community. And to make a living, we either got generally got involved with some form of construction or we got into the arts and pottery and the likes. So I did a lot of the trades. I mean, I forget, I think the first thing I started off with was a record pair replayer man. That's when they had record players. And then I became a landscaper.”
2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The basic concept was that we as humans are asleep. We're basically given a name, we're trained. I mean, I became a Democrat or a liberal because my parents voted for Adelaide Stevenson. Neighbors across the street voted for Ike and they became Republicans. That we become basically trained and we live our lives and we wake up and we go do things. And his philosophy was more about waking up, about waking up to a deeper truth about ourselves.”
2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, since I was younger and in the hippie days from the LSD and that type of lifestyle, we started to develop an interest in something greater, more than meets the eye. And I got involved with the teachings of a spiritual philosopher named Gurjif.”
2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, this was before everything became so expensive in life. It almost would seem as if I'm a courageous person because I'm so willing to open businesses and this and that. And it really does come back to the value of starting my first business at five years old and having businesses successful all through high school. it became natural for one. And two is that by doing things little things successfully, I had confidence. I never thought about how can I do this as opposed to somebody who's got a wife and family, has been working at Procter& Gamble at a big company and they see some opportunity and they get mortgages they got to worry about in all of this. It was really natural. I'd go to flea markets and I'd go all over New England and I'd find these things for nothing. And be able to sell them for quite a bit.”
2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So one of the things I tried to do with every business was to become rich within the context of my life. So $6,000 is a college student at that point in my life. That was wealthy and I was able to do things I wanted to do that I couldn't do otherwise.”
2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I only had the store probably for six months And then I sold it to a friend of mine. The excitement of it wore off, but I took the money and I went to Europe for the summer, bought an MGB at the factory, bought a bunch of bell bottom pants.”
2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For my 19 cent earrings. Now, next door to me was a store called Stopping Shop. And they bought them also for 19 cents, but they sold them for 39 cents, you know, doubling their money. They sold nothing. Everyone bought my earrings at $4.99. First of all, people didn't believe you could get safe wires for $39 to put in your ears. But the reason I bring it up is it was a great lesson that I used for the rest of my whole business career, and that is that you set your price on what the market will pay, what's the optimum price for a market as opposed to what you paid for it.”
2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Started in the probably 63 or 64. The hippie movement, and they all started getting their ears pierced. It became very quickly a fad and a hip thing to do. And my thinking was the hip schools are all doing these, everyone's getting their airspares, it'll come to Cincinnati. So when I transferred there, I decided to open an earring store. Now, I knew nothing about earrings myself, but I found a little tiny shoe shine parlor on the perimeter of the University of Cincinnati. It was probably 10 feet by 18 feet. And I rented it, I went to New York with my mother. And we went to these stores, these distributors like on the second floors of these buildings, and I would buy all these earrings for 19 cents. So I bought a whole bunch and I took, I went to this store I rented. I put black velvet on the walls and I hung the earrings up. And it's an interesting thing because I charged $49.”
2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Effective. The water run right through the toothbrush and out the bottom. It would break in a month. And I went back to my partners and I said, if I continue to sell this, it will die. But the decision to throw those out was a hard decision, especially for a new company. And we had 400,000 of them in our warehouse.”
2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT