Addictive craft kit is flying off the shelves

For Canadian parents, there was only one problem with Rainbow Loom, the new craft craze that features an easy-to-use-loom and rubber bands in a variety of colours that can be woven into bracelets and more: You couldn’t get it. While the fad—invented by Cheong Choon Ng, a former Nissan engineer and father of two, in the basement of his Detroit home—spread across the U.S. over the past year, Canadian retailers waited. Jon Levy, co-founder of Mastermind Toys, with 28 stores across the country, was the first to get the kits. He put in a call to Ng in February. “He told me he couldn’t fit me in,” Levy recalls. “I had to convince him we were a notable retailer. I said, ‘Well, when can you fit me in?’ He told me possibly in May and my heart just started to flutter.”

Levy put in a huge order. “Choon was frazzled because he couldn’t keep up with the demand,” he says. “I wired him the money up front. I sent a truck. I told him he didn’t have to think about a thing.” Levy picked up his first shipment and put them on the shelves on a Monday at the start of the summer. By Wednesday he was nearly sold out.

The genius of Rainbow Loom ($20 for the kits, $4 per pack of refill elastics), says Grant Chapman, vice-president of IndigoKids, is it’s customizable, tried and tested—who doesn’t remember friendship bracelets?—and has “ongoing and evolving playability.” Both boys and girls love it. More than 10,000 photos are tagged #RainbowLoom on Instagram and an instructional video on YouTube has received almost five million views. IndigoKids has chosen Rainbow Loom as a top-10 toy for the holidays. Sales have been “explosive” since they brought it in recently, Chapman says.

Liisa Siskland went to Toytown in Toronto on a delivery day to pick up refills for her 11-year-old. “They had mountains of them. I went back the next day and there were only two packages left,” she says. She sees it as a great babysitter. “I actually took my daughter to my gym. She just sat in the waiting area doing Rainbow Loom, and didn’t even know the time had passed when I came out.”

“I just thought they were hair elastics,” says Katie Dolgin, who runs a recruitment firm. “I bought two sets before my son went away to camp. I didn’t know what I had started.” She now has bracelets, rings and key chains in cobra, butterfly and fishtail stitches.

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Whether they are just elastics is now the subject of legal proceedings. In August, Ng filed suit against several parties including Zenacon, the Miami-based company that makes FunLoom, claiming Rainbow Loom’s trademark for its C-shaped fastener is being infringed. He’s also suing Toys “R” Us, which carries a kit made by another competitor. “I made this famous,” he told the Wall Street Journal. He may be right; elastic weaving kits have been around for years but most don’t command the cultish devotion that Rainbow Loom does. Ng says he’s sold more than a million.

Customers and retailers keep clamouring for more. At Type Books in Toronto, co-president Joanne Saul received a frantic call a few weeks ago from the store’s co-owner, Samara Walbolm. “She was like, ‘You have to call this number right now!’ I was actually worried. I thought there was some sort of emergency. But the number was for a distributor, because finally there is a distributor for Canada,” she says. Saul says customers started asking for Rainbow Loom a couple of months ago. “I’d never heard of them. I immediately tried to get them in but the company told me they couldn’t consider new retailers.” Now she sells dozens of kits and many packs of elastics a day. Some people buy eight kits at a time, for gifts.

Carolyn Kates of Zibbers Inc., the Canadian distributor, says the item is keeping some specialty toy stores afloat—it’s not offered at big stores like Wal-Mart and Target. “We just started distributing them in Newfoundland and Winnipeg,” says Kates. “I tell store owners who have never heard of them, ‘Trust me. Just put up a sign in your window that they are coming in. It’s not a fad, like Silly Bandz. This has legs.’ ”

As for Levy, he’s not just a retailer; he’s also a fan. He recently gave his niece a Rainbow Loom set. “She started at 11 a.m. and we saw her next at 4 p.m.”