The Thing That Would Not Die

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Lowe, 40, is firmly grounded in the tail-end baby-boomer demographic his company serves. He grew up in Cassopolis, Mich., which everybody calls Cass, amid the richest cultural influences of the '60s: Mad magazine, monster movies, and good old-fashioned network television -- oh, yes, and social protest and the Vietnam War. His father was the well-known entrepreneur Edward Lowe, inventor of kitty litter (somebody had to) and, by a number of accounts, a my-way-or-the-highway kind of guy. Lowe grew up mostly in the care of his mother, who, wonderfully, did not throw away his old toys.

Never straying from his midwestern roots, Lowe graduated from Miami University of Ohio, earned his master's in marketing at DePaul University in Chicago, and married his high school sweetheart. He sold for a food broker and did marketing work for Domino's Pizza, but the corporate life was not much fun. "I was tired of being told what to do," he says.

In 1987, in Dundee, Ill., Lowe started his first company: Safe Care Products. Financing the effort with his own savings, Lowe was the company at the beginning. From his basement he developed products he knew he could sell to mass merchandisers. He had one hit toy -- a Velcro football called the WhattaCatch -- but most of his 30-some products were anonymous, you-never-thought-you-needed-it-until-you-saw-it-on-a-store-shelf items, such as a bathtub cushion and a Nintendo video-game lock called HomeworkFirst. The best stuff was yet to come.

By the early 1990s, Lowe's generation was rediscovering the toys they thought they had outgrown. In those pre-eBay days, the bible of this loose society of arrested adolescents was a magazine called Toy Shop, filled with classifieds featuring goodies from the preceding 40 years or so. Reading it, Lowe noticed that a lot of the stuff he had played with when he was a kid was selling for big bucks.

That demand looked like one hell of an opportunity. Take Hot Wheels, for example. Introduced by Mattel in the mid-'60s ( You can tell it's Mattel. It's swell!), these little die-cast cars were engineered to roll freely and fast. They were a sensation -- and still are. Although new Hot Wheels are on store shelves, some versions from the '60s command hundreds of dollars each.

Down in his mother's basement lay all the toys Lowe had discarded back when he discovered girls, including about 50 Hot Wheels and 8 cars from the Johnny Lightning line. He initiated a trademark search. Mattel had a death grip on the Hot Wheels name, but the Johnny Lightning name had been abandoned years before.

"Polar Lights is very special to me. ...You've rekindled the joy I once felt when buying these kits. ...You're the only company who I feel a part of." --Lou H.

Through an ad in Toy Shop, Lowe says, he bought a collection that included 30 original Johnny Lightning cars. He brought the swag to Wal-Mart, notorious for being tougher than the A-Team when it comes to taking on new products. "Whattaya got here? A flea market?" the buyer roared. "I'll give ya five minutes."

Lowe explained that he was going to re-create toys from the '60s. "I was there for an hour and 15 minutes, explaining what my plan was," he says.

Wal-Mart bought in. Toys R Us did, too. Lowe was ready to rock. He sent his original Johnny Lightnings to China with a simple directive: copy these. And in 1995, Safe Care was reborn as Playing Mantis, a name he chose to be clever and kid friendly. "I always liked playing with praying mantises when I was young," Lowe says, illustrating the difference between a Cass native and, say, some kid from Brooklyn.

Lowe has always had one measure for deciding which products Playing Mantis will pursue: "If it isn't cool, we won't do it," he says. He means it, too. This is his company all the way; he owns it free and clear. There isn't even any long-term debt ("Just a working line of credit," says chief financial officer Randy Miller), so the company has the resources to choose and develop its own products. "Being private is an important advantage. We can do what we want," Lowe says.

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