Advertising copywriter Gary Dahl was drinking with his friends at a bar in Los Gatos, California in April 1975 when he came up with the idea of selling rocks as low-maintenance pets.
He immediately went to work on making his idea a reality. He wrote a 32-page guide on the care and training of pet rocks, designed a cardboard carrying case with air holes to house the rock, and bought straw to provide bedding for each rock. To get the rocks, Dahl "went to a builder's supply store in San Jose and found the most expensive rock in the place — a Rosarita Beach Stone, which was a uniform size, rounded gray pebble that sold for a penny," says Virtual Pet.
Dahl unveiled his creation at gift and toy shows in San Francisco and New York, and the orders started pouring in.
From the Historical Dictionary of the 1970s:
Several major department store chains ordered the rocks, Newsweek magazine described the phenomenon, and Johnny Carson and the Tonight Show booked Dahl as a guest. In the month before Christmas 1975, Dahl was delivering more than ten thousand rocks a day, at a whopping $3.95 each. The fad died in the spring of 1976, but by that time Dahl was a multimillionaire.
Dahl used his profits to buy a bar in Los Gatos.
He tried to recapture the success of his Pet Rock with other inorganic novelties, but none of them took off.
From Wikipedia:
He attempted to follow up his pet rock success by selling "Sand Breeding Kits" and "Red China Dirt," ostensibly a facetious plan to smuggle mainland China into the US, one cubic centimeter at a time. These novelties failed to attract as much interest as the Pet Rock.
The Internet Archive has a scan of Dahl's original manual.
Dahl died in 2015. Another company purchased the rights to the Pet Rock and sells them for over seven times the original price.
Previously:
• Everything, even a rock, has some degree of consciousness
