product-management

Fidget spinners. Unless you’ve been living under a rock or on another planet, you’ve probably heard of the fidget spinners. Within a few months of its release, the small toy has taken the world by a storm, stealing the spotlight from the rest of the world.

Videos, articles, and talk shows are featuring users from different age groups. Parents are showing concern, kids are having the most fun with their time, schools are banning the device, and the dilemma goes on.

But if we take a step back and analyze this new craze, it actually is not that much of a mystery.

The origins

It started when mother Catherine Hettinger, 62, decided to create the toy for her two children (one autistic and the other dyslexic) to help them better concentrate. The small simplistic gadget was meant to help children with concentration disorders like ADHD. It did start, however, somewhat of a debate on the real utility of the toy.

People are considering the fidget spinners from very different perspectives.It is seen as:

a toy,

a stress-relief tool,

a classroom menace,

a treatment for ADHD, and

a possible salve to smartphone addiction! 

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Why did it go viral

Many adopters think that the spinners are great at achieving what they were invented to do: help kids with conditions such as ADHD to focus or sit still. The product, however, goes a bit beyond that.

Justine Pryce from Toys R Us said: “ Fidget Spinners are a craze that has taken the UK by storm in the last few weeks – they are hugely successful.

”Some say it’s a cure, others say it’s a distraction. But does it really matter? People are still buying either way! Be it to concentrate, to see what the hype is all about, or to just goof around. Some are even coming up with very innovative ways of using this new-found obsession. Videos where people are using fidget spinner as a guitar pick are going around the internet. Some even built new mechanisms around it!

The whole purpose of the toy and the theory behind it faded as soon as it met the human creativity. THAT is the milestone that makes products timeless. It is when the normal person finds such comfort in using a product that he goes beyond it and takes it to a new level.

Building a product that solves a global problem and goes viral is the dream of every startup. But such perfect moment cannot be easily reached which is why the majority of startups fail too often to build the ideal product for their users.