If you haven't seen them yet, you will. Animal rubber bands are the hottest, latest pop craze in youth culture. While the product actually first appeared in 2002 from a different company, the phenomenon has created a manufacturer and retailer rush provide for the very high demand as quickly as possible. For now, one of the world's most lucrative product is an office supply!
The fad formally began five years ago in 2005, when the products notoriety grew on the Eastern coast of the United States and began to spread westward, captivating the attention and interest of school children, teens of all ages and even young college adults. While the fad is not restricted to youth culture (these bands have been increasing in popularity among working professionals and offices across America as well) the demographic driving the craze is largely people aged under 22 years old.
What is it that makes a simple animal shaped office supply so irresistible?
One could point to the wide variety of colors available, a range that continues to grow with the popularity of the products themselves. Likely, it is the novelty of the animal shapes themselves, the selection of which is also expanding rapidly and as of this writing includes dinosaurs, crustaceans and other sea creatures, common zoo animals, ordinary every day house hold pets, birds, reptiles and even bugs.
Even so, the most prominent factor of the bands' success seems to be the very forgiving elastic limit of the band's material--which, unlike the name suggests, is not exactly rubber.
The bands sold during the early years of the new millennium were not very spectacular; they were manufactured from the same material as other ordinary office rubber bands and were not particularly more durable than their traditional counterparts. The animal bands of today, however, just as those that hit stores in 2005, are made out of a crucial component for their famed durability: silicone.
The silicone in these bands are what permits the product to stretch out farther and stay that way for longer periods of time without compromising the overall shape of the band. It also makes it more durable, resilient and prone to a longer use life.
In fact, part of the newer bands' appeal is the fun of stretching them out and watching them pull back into their perfect prior shape, which they can maintain even after multiple periods of use. While they may look childish, they can actually handle the jobs of ordinary bands very well, in some cases, better than the more conventional variety.
Many in the children's products industry have likened the animal band craze to the very similar beanie baby fad of the nineties, which spread to a world wide phenomenon in just a few short months.
Due to this explosion of popularity, competition between manufacturers has been fierce and unrelenting, pushing the quality of similar copy cat products to their best in the process, and the consumers don't really seem to distinguish between brands. This fact is wonderful for competing retailers, whose concerns lie with keeping their shelves stocked with a product known to sell out hours after a new shipment has arrived.
The powerlessness of the brand in this instance is peculiar, but has its ties to the history of the bands the current major vendor is not the one who first created the product; and the nature of the product: simple to recreate. So many competing companies have surfaced in such a short time that the public has yet to find appreciable differences in quality or variety.
For many industry insiders, the predicted market saturation of these bands seems inevitable in this economy. For consumers, that means post fad discounts--not a bad ending to this products notoriety, considering they are just as useful whether they're popular or not.
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