Case Histories

DoodleTop ©

The DoodleTop was my first experience in bringing a product from the kitchen table to global distribution. It came about when my 19 year-old Nephew, Stephen deZordo and I were playing the game Candyland with my pre-school sons. My sons kept disrupting the game by spinning a top on the board and my nephew said, “what if that drew?” I looked at the action of the tip of the top and noticed that it was slowly moving around in a pattern. I took out my drill and drilled out the tip of the top and replaced it with a ballpoint pen tip and then a marker tip. When we spun it, it created a crazy spiral type design that was hypnotizing. We pretty much thought of all the variations that night and in the morning when my kids came down and started fighting over the top I knew we had something.

That day I went out and bought a drill press and a bunch of wooden tops and Crayola markers and started drilling out the tops and using the marker caps and nibs and reservoirs from the markers to make small pens that fit in the tops. We had our first working prototypes and they actually worked pretty well. I tested them with a bunch of kids and parents and found that absolutely everybody loved them. I knew of a patent attorney in San Francisco that had filed a trademark for me and showed him what we had. He agreed to do a patent search and followed it up with a patent application. As soon as I had the patent application filed I sent samples off to Binney and Smith, owners of Crayola, and Mattel and Hasbro, the giants in the toy business.

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