It was a practice that had started with hanging fake beaver tails from Model Ts in the 1920s. When the toy-which was marketed as Garfield Stuck on You-debuted in mid-1987, consumers were in the middle of a car decorating frenzy, having scooped up everything from Baby on Board signs to fuzzy dice to opinionated bumper stickers. It never occurred to me that people would put them on cars."ĭavis assigned the license to Dakin, a veteran manufacturer of plush toys that once employed future Beanie Baby ringleader Ty Warner. So I stuck it on a window and said, 'If it’s still there in two days, we’ll approve this.' Well, they were good suction cups and we released it like that. "It came back as a mistake with suction cups," Davis said. Davis wasn't too bothered since they adhered well to glass, he assumed people might want to apply it to residential windows. When he got the prototype back, the factory had made an error and placed suction cups on instead. In between, Davis had been struck with an idea for a product that promised to be significantly different than the T-shirts, posters, and calendars that were in wide circulation: the artist told mental_floss in 2014 that he took a plush Garfield and attached Velcro to his paws with the expectation people would be amused enough to hang him on their curtains. Although the syndicate owned those rights, Davis profited handsomely from them-and eventually had the capital to buy them outright in 1994 for an estimated $15 to $20 million. Creator Jim Davis was a former advertising agency employee who had very specific notions about what kind of comic strip character would be appealing to the same licensees who had made Charles Schulz a very rich man by marketing his Peanuts cast at retail.ĭavis knew items bearing the likeness of Charlie Brown were outsold by Snoopy, who made bestsellers out of everything from sno-cone machines to telephones: Garfield was a direct response to cat owners who might have felt slighted by the lack of a feline hero on the comics page.īy 1981, Garfield’s lasagna-smeared face was a big enough licensing success for Davis to start Paws, Inc., a business devoted exclusively to sifting through the merchandising opportunities available. Debuting in 1978, Garfield’s destiny as a merchandising phenomenon was no accident.
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