The Man Behind the Bandz

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These days, Croak is creating jobs in a place that's desperate for them. Once dominated by auto manufacturing, the Rust Belt city of roughly 300,000 now has an unemployment rate of 12%. Croak's office staff has grown from around 20 people to nearly 70 in the past year, and there are approximately 200 salespeople working around the country. (BCP's factory in China—Croak won't say where it is—also brought in 700 new workers in the past five weeks.) With the momentum continuing to build, Croak is recruiting people through Craigslist to take phone orders, maintain the Silly Bandz website, and deal with shipping to homes, toy stores, and, soon, Macy's (M). After the local newspaper, The Blade, ran a story about Silly Bandz, so many people came to the office looking for jobs that Croak had to lock the doors. One night, behind on a deadline, he put up a post on Facebook and 20 people arrived to help within an hour. Jared Hissem, 28 and married with a young child to support, was holding down two jobs, doing data entry at a market research firm, and working behind the counter at KFC (YUM) when he saw one of BCP's postings. A couple of days later he had quit his other jobs and was taking orders over the phone for Croak. "I had never heard of Silly Bandz until I got hired here. Now I love them," Hissem says. "And it's a laid-back work environment, with the music and all. I haven't left once in a bad mood." Another new member of the workforce, a 23-year-old college graduate named Marcus Ahle, started as a Web programmer in mid-May after searching for work for months. "I'm not worried about the fad ending," he says. "I'm just thankful to have a job in this economy." Until recently, Croak's workers were bringing hundreds of boxes of Silly Bandz a day to the post office to be weighed and stamped. The postmaster just asked Croak to get his own metering machine. He's not sure if he can keep up: "The demand changes every day. Supply-and-demand issues are good, though. It builds the anticipation and hype. A little scarcity is good."

Just 40 minutes into an interview in his cramped office, Croak starts to look anxious; he wants to see how things are going in the warehouse. "We have huge deals that are going to be national news," he says, "but I can't share them now. They're reaching out to us. We're reactive, not proactive." Although Walt Disney (DIS) has signed up with a competing brand, Character Bandz/Forever Collectibles, there are plenty of other licensing possibilities for Silly Bandz, from the Simpsons characters to Dora the Explorer. "Let's just say that the best names and icons in the United States will be represented by Silly Bandz in the coming weeks," Croak says. He has just introduced a UV-activated beach pack that changes color when the temperature rises. And he lets on that he's going to put out his first celebrity pack, with a basketball player he won't name, as well as backpacks and notebooks for the new school year. He says he has been talking to the owner of an amusement park and to the YouTube rapper.

Croak envisions an empire of Silly Bandz, but if that doesn't quite come to pass, he says he'll be fine with it. "This is proof that the American dream is still alive. Beanie Babies are not the must-haves anymore, but people still buy them. If Silly Bandz turns into that, it's a great place to be."

Susan Berfield is an associate editor at Bloomberg Businessweek.

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