How One of America's Most Beloved Toy Makers Rebounded From Near Death
John Hinnen always wanted to make things. A born tinkerer, the son of Illinois spent the better part of his 20s designing toys and novelties in his parents’ garage. He created a line of greeting cards and peddled them all around downtown Chicago in his cowboy boots. He created an elaborate child’s educational toy that got good feedback but was so complicated to build that he couldn’t make the economics work. He had a little wooden toy that twisted from a heart to an egg that, he says, he “thought was the next pet rock.” It wasn’t.
Life would go on. He married. In May of 1989, he and his wife were expecting their first child. “I had to get real,” he says. He got a job at the Diamond-Star Motors plant in Bloomington. He had two more kids, bought a house by a park in Peoria. It was a happy life, though with a sacrifice: “I kind of put the dream on hold,” he says.
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Then he turned 50, and that unrealized dream began to gnaw at him. “I thought, If I get to 65 or whatever and never do anything with this, it’s going to be a bummer,” he says. He’d never stopped sketching ideas, but now he began in earnest -- designing games and dolls, and trying to sell them to the few toy companies that accepted unsolicited ideas. For this he received an inbox full of rejection letters.
Then, in 2015, his auto plant closed. Hinnen got a good severance package, but still: Change was in the air.
One day Hinnen was watching the movie Elf with his kids, and during the snowball-fight sequence -- when Buddy the elf turns back an ambush on his half-brother by firing off snowballs like a Gatling gun -- he had an idea. Hinnen and his youngest son, Nate, took a plastic bat they’d sawed the top off of for a previous invention, took it out to the snowy park, packed it with fresh powder and took turns swinging it at each other, unleashing “an arctic blizzard of snow crystals.”
Hinnen started getting excited. If tweaked and loaded with
