Trendsurfing: Scoubidous (The Times)

By David Rowan

Pack away those Game Boys and Yu-Gi-Oh cards: the latest playground craze involves nothing more than three-foot lengths of hollowed-out plastic string. They are called Scoubidous, and in the last six months, they have quietly become the new must-haves in primary schools across southern England. Children plait them, knot them, and turn them into anything from friendship bracelets to tiny dragons. And whereas most toy trends rely largely on marketing campaigns, this one seems to have spread entirely through word of mouth.

"You make keyrings with them, braid them and tie them in your hair, or turn them into little people," explains Claudia, a seven-year-old fan at Christ Church Primary School, in north-west London. Boys, too, have caught the bug, as Claudia's classmate Daniel points out: "You hook them to your bag zipper, and make inventions with them," he says. "Everyone has them. They come in all different colours, but the sparkly ones are the best."

But how did these 5p strings, an on-off fad in France since the fifties, suddenly become the year's unexpected hit among England's tech-savvy pre-teens? Trend Surfing decided to investigate. As we unravelled the plastic trail, we found our way to the Bristol offices of Amanda Miles, a promotional marketer more used to selling branded mugs and mouse-mats. Last autumn, on a hunch, Miles decided to start importing Scoubidous from the Continent. Since then, she claims, her company, Purple Rhino Scoubidou, has sold several million packs. "And it It hasn't even gone national yet," she says excitedly. "We have barely scratched the surface."

Miles has no children of her own, but she does have two 10-year-old twin sisters at a private school in Bristol. Last September, one of the girls' classmates brought in some Scoubidous picked up at a French market. "Everybody in the class loved them," Miles recalls. "My sisters asked if I could get hold of some. I phoned loads of toy shops here, but most had never heard of it. Then my family went to Spain for the weekend, and the toy shops there had all sold out. So I found the manufacturer, and decided to import them myself."

That was in October. At first, the UK toy buyers she contacted assumed she was selling Scooby-Doo merchandise, but they no longer need her to explain the difference. Each day now she has truckloads arriving to supply shops such as John Lewis and Harrods. "I spoke to so many toy shops, but they just weren't interested," she recalls. "Then all of a sudden, it went 'boomf' - and now everyone's jumping on the bandwagon."

There have been concerns in Europe about phthalates used in the manufacturing process, which a German consumer magazine claims could harm children who happen to chew the strings. "Codswallop," responds Miles. "It's been proven that there's no danger in our strands - but I can't talk for the cheap knock-offs selling in the pound shops." To what, then, does she attribute the strings' sudden popularity? "It's the creativeness and the coordination skills," she says. "Children have got to use their brains, and they get to make whatever they want, from earrings to helicopters."

There is also the matter of the secret Scoubidou language, which until now has never been revealed to the grown-ups. A bracelet made from interwoven blue and black strands signifies a muscle-man; an orange and white one suggests that the wearer is heartbroken. And green and white means "Be mine". Just don't say who told you.

(The Times, April 16 2005)