Carlton Calvin: Razor. The wild rise, collapse, and reinvention of a mobile toy empire.

Wait, so in June of two thousand you were selling a million a month? Yes. And January of two thousand one You couldn't sell one the s the sales stopped? Yes. Doesn't make sense. It makes no sense. It doesn't make sense unless you understand crazes. It's happened to me so many times.

And No matter how many times the retailers go through this, no matter how many times I went through this, everybody's thinking to themselves, this time is different. Yeah. Like this time, it's gonna sell a million a month for the next three years. And they can't even just do simple math that there's not that many people. Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements. they built.

I'm Guy Roz, and on the show today, how Carlton Calvin helped turn a craze into a classic toy and built a massive company around scooters, hoverboards, and bikes. Razor. In the summer of two thousand. Kids all across the US couldn't get enough of one thing. Scooters, but not the clunky ones you might remember. These were sleek, made from aircraft grade aluminum.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript, segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

10 free credits is 10 episodes like this one a month. Episodes nobody has transcribed yet cost their length in hours, because we have to actually transcribe them.