Carlton Calvin: how a toy-craze veteran built Razor into an enduring brand

Executive overview

Carlton Calvin spent years riding and crashing with toy crazes — pogs, scorpion slammers, yo-yos, fingerboards — before stumbling onto the Razor scooter. Each craze taught him the same lesson: demand saturates faster than anyone admits, and the market stops cold.

Razor was bigger than anything before it, selling a million units a month at peak. It collapsed just as fast. What saved it was refusing to shut down, waiting for the natural turnover of new young customers, and pivoting from craze to brand.

Owning the brand — not just participating in someone else's craze — is the only way to survive the crash.

From law school to scorpion slammers

• Carlton left law to pursue children's books; illustrators working on pogs pulled him into the toy business instead
• Spotted the scorpion slammer idea at an Arizona rest stop — embedded dead scorpions in polyurethane discs as pog slammers
• Spent six months in a Pasadena garage figuring out how to desiccate scorpions and cast them in shatterproof polyurethane
• First sale: 200,000 units at $3 each, $75,000 deposit on the spot from a toy distributor who saw six samples
• Sourced scorpions from China (7 cents each); ran a handmade factory of 75 workers in Southern California
• Delivered the last unit the same day the pog craze died — leftover inventory tied up all his profits

Reading crazes, riding yo-yos

• Saw yo-yos being sold in a non-toy shop — recognised it as a craze signal
• Embedded scorpions in yo-yos to use surplus stock; accidentally caught the biggest yo-yo craze in history
• The "Brain" yo-yo (auto-sleeping mechanism) caused the explosion; Carlton's scorpion version rode the wave
• Hired a sales manager who built a nationwide rep network overnight — the move that transformed the business
• Sold millions of scorpion yo-yos globally; revenue far exceeded what he would have earned as a lawyer
• Moved into fingerboards (miniature branded skateboards) using the same playbook — lost market share to Tech Deck via IP pressure

Launching Razor in the US

• Read an LA Times article about adults in Tokyo riding Razor scooters; originally planned to make miniature versions
• Shifted to importing the real scooter — first time he aimed to own a craze rather than participate in one
• Partnered with Robert Chen (folding bikes, Cerritos warehouse) and Gino Tsai (inventor, Taiwanese factory) — no capital required upfront
• Retailers paid COD during peak demand; that cash flow financed the entire operation
• Flew to Toys R Us New Jersey HQ with a scooter; they were in within a month
• Renamed the company Razor USA; built a full team (president, VP sales, VP marketing) from a base of three people
• Launched June 2000 at $100–$140 retail across Toys R Us, Walmart, Target, Dick's, Sports Authority, Sharper Image

The peak and the crash

• Sold one million scooters a month from launch
• Broad appeal: light aircraft-grade aluminium, polyurethane wheels, foldable, used by adults and children
• New Yorker cover of a man on a Razor scooter; adopted in Silicon Valley — cultural penetration beyond prior crazes
• Filed patent and obtained a preliminary injunction against knockoffs; knockoffs still flooded the market
• Combined Razor and knockoff sales saturated the US market — every child aged 5–12 who wanted one had one
• Spring 2001: sales went to zero overnight; retailers demanded returns on inventory already paid for
• Carlton held a warehouse of one million unsold scooters; Gino absorbed part of the loss on manufacturing costs

Surviving the collapse and rebuilding

• Carlton's instinct: fire everyone and run it himself, as he had with every prior craze
• Robert Chen persuaded him to keep the team and have faith in the brand
• Key insight: four million new five-year-olds entered the market each year — the brand had a permanent replenishment cycle
• Within eight months, steady reorder volume of two to four million scooters a year resumed
• Began "razorizing" classic kids' products — updated pogo sticks, big wheels, tricycles in aluminium under the Razor brand
• Toys R Us backed the full line; if a product went on TV, the retail triad (Walmart, Target, Toys R Us) would support it

Electric scooters, Ripstick, and the hoverboard

• Launched electric scooters around 2005 — battery-powered from the ground up, not bolt-on motors
• Electric line expanded into dirt bikes, go-karts, ATV-style ride-ons at toy price points
• Ripstick (2006): spotted five neighbourhood kids on a waveboard, called the inventor, put it in Toys R Us and Walmart — sold out
• Electric products harder to knock off than manual scooters; technology barrier replaced patent protection
• Hoverboard (c. 2015): inventor Shane Chen; Carlton initially passed, then signed when organic momentum was undeniable
• Hoverboard became the second major cultural moment — Justin Bieber, Jamie Foxx on The Tonight Show; peak revenue year for Razor
• Loss of Toys R Us to bankruptcy was the single biggest structural blow; no replacement filled the gap

Current state and what comes next

• Best-selling products today: electric motorcycle and electric scooter, then manual scooters
• Tariffs on Chinese goods hitting hard in 2025–26: prices up at retail, unit sales down, margins compressed
• Responding by shifting production to Vietnam and Thailand; described as "running around like a chicken with its head cut off"
• Exploring AI-assisted trend detection — algorithmically finding the next craze early, the way Carlton did intuitively
• Carlton is 63, looking to pass the company to the next generation; children not interested (want to make films)
• Company remains privately owned; goal is for Razor to outlast its founder