Entrepreneur Hits Road To Push Pricey Pogo
The man who can jump 8 feet high on a pogo stick was bouncing through San Francisco, on a mission. The mission is to figure out if the world is ready to spend $380 on a pogo stick.
Brian Spencer has sunk a good chunk of his life savings into designing, manufacturing and promoting what appears to be the world’s most expensive pogo stick, a high-tech tube of space-age plastic that gets its bounciness not from a metal spring but from compressed air.
The way Spencer promotes the Vurtego Pro Custom, which looks more like a jackhammer than a toy, is to climb on it and bounce around parking lots, off walls and over not-too-tall fences.
The inspiration came from his father, a retired aeronautical engineer, who grabbed a pencil late one night and doodled the design on a paper napkin.
The two of them cobbled a prototype together at the family metal shop, filled it up with a bicycle pump, and then Spencer starting bouncing and has barely stopped. He began selling them online this year and hit the road with his stick, roaming the country and planting seeds like the guy with the apples.
Photo by Chronicle/Frederic Larson.
Jon on December 7th, 2006 3:31 pm
Eight feet jumps??? Just wait for the class-action lawyers to start circling this one.
Leave a Reply