Carlton Calvin says hacky sacks are coming back in a huge way, and Razor is already shipping them

Carlton Calvin says hacky sacks are coming back in a huge way, and Razor is already shipping them. Yes, that hacky sack, the floppy little footbag of dorm quads, skate-shop counters, and guys named Brent who owned hemp necklaces before LinkedIn ruined everyone.

The claim landed on How I Built This like a dispatch from the part of the mall you thought had been demolished. Carlton Calvin, the Razor founder who turned collapsible aluminum scooters into a turn-of-the-century retail fever dream, told Guy Raz that his company still sells close to a million of the original kick scooters a year. Then he offered the kind of product-trend aside that sounds ridiculous until you remember who is saying it.

One that’s probably, people already know, just burst, like maybe two months ago is hacky sacks are coming back in a huge way. And Razor already has hacky sacks in the, you know, in the store start shipping this week.

This is the whole Calvin thing in miniature. He doesn’t present trend spotting as taste exactly. Taste is too dignified. This is more like a raccoon sense for shiny consumer motion. A thing twitches in Japan, on a schoolyard, in a toy aisle, in some unholy TikTok runoff pool, and Calvin wants to know whether it can become a box, a SKU, a warehouse order, a shelf.

The toy oracle is trying to write himself down

The funniest and most revealing part of Calvin’s appearance is that he is trying to turn his own weirdness into company infrastructure. Succession planning, Razor edition, is not just finding a CEO who understands margins. It is finding someone who can walk past the cultural lint trap and say, wait, kids are doing that again.

You know, I’m getting on in my years and I am trying to institutionalize at Razor my trend seeking abilities. I am actively trying to see if I can figure out how to teach people.

He even calls it, sort of, an algorithm. Not a software product, not a dashboard with eight pastel charts, more like an attempt to reverse engineer instinct before retirement eats the institutional memory. That’s the part that makes the hacky sack line more than a goofy throwaway. Calvin is telling us what his trend machine currently sees. The machine sees footbags.

Should you believe him? Partly. A founder sitting on fresh inventory has every reason to declare a comeback, and Razor selling hacky sacks is not the same thing as hacky sacks conquering America. But Calvin has earned a hearing because his career is basically an argument that toys don’t become classics by acting rational. The Razor scooter went from selling a million a month in June 2000 to being impossible to sell by January 2001, according to the archival clip Raz played. Fads don’t gently slope. They cliff-dive.

His actual religion is speed

Calvin’s advice to the callers kept circling the same belief: don’t worship the purity of the product, worship the motion around it. To the creator of a funeral-themed party game, he said licensing is possible but unlikely without much more traction. To a stationery founder, he pushed old-fashioned retail markets and sales reps, plus the deeply 2020s requirement that she put her face on camera. To a craft distiller trying to make the best bottled espresso martini, he heard one dangerous word in the background: focus.

The patent section was the bleak little business-school goblin hiding under the toy shelf. Razor had won a patent fight against copycats, but Calvin described the victory as spiritually satisfying and financially punishing. The courts can affirm you were right. They cannot necessarily make a tiny copycat rich enough to pay you.

So it costs millions and millions of dollars to do a patent case. And then you get nothing except helping to clean up the market.

That’s why his worldview keeps snapping back to speed, brand, distribution, and consumer trends. Patents can matter, especially against deep pockets. But for Razor’s corner of the world, a company survives by being first enough, fast enough, and recognizable enough that the copycats are chasing vapor.

Which brings us back to the hacky sack. The object itself is almost beside the point. What matters is that Calvin is still watching for strange little revivals before they are respectable. He is not saying, protect your genius in a vault. He is saying, if the culture starts kicking something around, maybe don’t stand there explaining why the old version was cooler.

I’m like, don’t fight the culture. Just like, because American Idol, you know, came out and, you know, did a, you know, singing contest on TV. You’ll notice there were 27 other singing contests that came out after them.