Used in religious ceremonies to honor the Aztec Gods for centuries
This man turned it into one of the most popular holiday gadgets of all time
You’ll find it growing wild throughout Central America, particularly in countries such as Guatemala and Mexico.
Salvia hispanica (it’s botanical name) is easy to spot too.
It’s a vibrant green plant with tiny bell-shaped, violet-blue flowers that form spikes similar to how wheat grows on stalks. Yet the plant can reach a height of five feet tall. And the leaves get as big as two inches wide.
And tucked inside the colorful flower are little seeds.
Bees and butterflies love the flower for the nectar it offers.
Humans like it too. In fact plant experts considered it a super food because of its high density of nutrients, especially antioxidants.
The ancient Aztec and Mayan civilizations ground up the seeds and used it as flour for baked goods, especially bread.
Historical documents, some dating back to the early 1600 show they even used it for medicinal purposes to aid in curing certain diseases and reducing inflammation.
And when they weren’t eating it, the plant was used during religious ceremonies as a way to honor the Aztec Gods.
Four centuries later, one man found a way to turn it into one of the most iconic gadgets sold during the holidays.
It’s so popular, about 25 million have been sold worldwide.
Disease, Death, and Automobiles
Born on April 14, 1932, Joseph Pedott had a rough childhood.
For instance at age 11 he suffered from rheumatic fever and spent several years at a convalescent home in Bartlett, Chicago.
Then when he was 13, his mother died from a cerebral hemorrhage. At 16, he ran away from home after a bitter dispute with his father and moved into a YMCA on Chicago’s North Side.
You could say Joseph’s situation seemed bleak. But luckily a Chicago based non-profit organization known as The Scholarship and Guidance Program provided him not only with money to help pay his living expenses but also a counselor.
That helped him finish high school and then actually attend the University of Illinois. And it’s here he met longtime friend Daryl Peters. The two partnered up to produce a weekly kids’ radio show for the Board of Education called Camping with Nature.
The show needed extra money to help offset the costs, so Daryl and Joseph took it upon themselves to go out and land paying advertisers. However, they discovered that some of those advertisers needed help creating ads.
That’s when the two came up with the idea to start their own advertising company, which they named Pedott & Peters. Not only did they create ads for the radio show, but they were drumming up other clients as well. In fact many of the ads they produced were television commercials for automotive clients.
And they were doing this while still in school. Monday through Thursday, Joseph would take classes at the university. Then on the weekends, he’d get together with Daryl and the two would make their television commercials.
Their advertising business actually did quite well. In fact they made so much money that Joseph used his share of the profits to pay his college tuition. And since he had gained so much experience in the advertising industry, after graduating from college he worked for an ad agency in Chicago for two years.
Then in 1958, he moved to San Francisco with a plan to start his own firm, Joseph Pedott Advertising & Marketing. It didn’t take him long to start landing local and national accounts.
A Hunting We Will Go
But a funny thing happens when you get super successful selling other people’s products … sometimes that’s just not enough to keep you happy. Over time Joseph began thinking “what’s the next big move in my career?”
For him, the answer was to actually own a product and control the whole process from manufacturing to distribution and marketing.
So he began the hunt for a product he could call his own. But finding the right product would take several years …17 to be exact.
It wasn’t until March 1977 that he’d stumbled across a product that would become all his. And he found it while walking the floor of Chicago’s McCormick Place, which was where the annual International Home & Housewares Show (IHHS) was being held.
The IHHS just happens to be one of the 20 largest trade shows in the U.S. It’s where manufactures and distributors gather to see the latest home and houseware trends.
The event first took place in 1902 in New York and steadily grew in attendance. In fact it grew so large that in 1949 the event was moved to Chicago’s Navy Pier because a bigger space was needed.
However by 1956 Chicago’s Navy Pier could only accommodate 649 exhibitors and that doesn’t even include the hundreds of attendees. So in 1961 the show moved a second time. Its new (and permanent) home would be Chicago's rather large exposition center, McCormick Place on the Lake.
And it’s here that Joseph met a man named Walter Huston. Walter was the head of sales for a drugstore chain.
Joseph was curious to know what kind of products sold best at the drug stores Walter represented. Turns out that one of their best sellers was a human head-shaped terracotta planter that, when filled with water and coated with a paste of the salvia hispanica seeds (also known as chia seeds), would grow a little patch of green hair.
The gadget was called Chia Guy. Although it sold well (mostly during the holidays) Walter was having a difficult time making money from his terracotta figurine. He was importing Chia Guy from Mexico where it was handmade by local residents.
They had a spokesperson who negotiated deals on their behalf, but one that was not good for the residents or Walter. He was taking a large share of the money that was meant for the workers. And sometimes Walter would receive large batches of the figurines and other times, he received very few.
Walter was losing roughly one dollar on every sale.
Joseph knew instinctively he could sell Chia Guy in larger quantities and make money. So he offered to buy the existing inventory along with the rights to the product for $25,000. For someone who was losing money, this was the perfect deal. Walter signed the papers right away.
Slurred Speech for the Win
To make sure the gadget was all his, Joseph filed a trademark registration on Monday October 17, 1977.
The next thing Joseph did was pay a visit to the little village of Oaxaca, which is located outside the center of Mexico. There wasn’t much to the village, in fact there was no electricity, and residents lived in huts.
The people who made the chia figurines used an old kiln that was heated by coal. Joseph also found out that the men worked only on a few days during the week. Whenever they weren’t making the figurines, they were out chopping down agave plants to make tequila.
Of course they also drank the tequila, which meant no work got done until they sobered up. Sometimes the women would fill in until their husbands were ready to get back to work.
Joseph renegotiated the deal directly with the workers, cutting the spokesperson out completely. If they made larger batches of the figurines on a regular basis, they’d be paid more money.
He bought them more updated supplies and also had pipes installed so they could heat the kiln with gas instead of coal.
Now that he had a better deal in place, it was time to focus on marketing the figurines. For Joseph, it was now a matter of coming up with some kind of catchy phrasing that people could easily remember.
Fortunately it didn’t take long for that to happen. He was out with a friend at a bar having a few drinks. You could say his friend had one too many because when he tried to pronounce chia, his speech was slurred.
Chia came out as “Ch-ch-ch-chia!”
Joseph’s advertising instincts immediately kicked in. He told his friend, “Hey, that is catchy. I’m going to use it.”
Here a Chia, There a Chia, Everywhere a Chia
Although Joseph kept Chia Guy as part of his new line of terracotta figurines, he also added ones that looked like animals including a ram and a bull.
With his chia figurines ready to be sold, he filmed a television commercial using the “Ch-ch-ch-chia” jingle.
But he didn’t release the commercial right away.
Nope, he waited until the Christmas holiday was approaching. He remembered that Walter had told him the figurines sold best during the holidays.
By the fall of 1981, Joseph was ready to air his television commercials. And from the moment the first commercial aired, Walgreen’s, one of Joseph Pedott’s main clients, couldn’t keep the product on the shelves.
Chia Pets were selling out like crazy. Suddenly everyone wanted a chia pet. It’s reported that the company sells approximately 500,000 every holiday season.
And nowadays you can buy almost any kind of chia figurine you can imagine including a turtle, pig, puppy, kitten, frog, and hippopotamus. There are even cartoon characters such as Garfield, Scooby-Doo, Looney Tunes, Shrek, The Simpsons, and SpongeBob.
Heck, you can even buy a Bob Ross chai figurine, a Willie Nelson, a Richard Simmons, and a pee-wee Herman version.
Amazingly, the Chia Pet has withstood the test of time for more than four decades.
“Ch-Ch-Ch-Chia!” is arguably the most successful TV commercial jingle of all time.
Catching The Clap
But there’s more … lots more to Joseph’s story.
You see Dear Reader, Joseph Pedott was on a mission to own more than one successful product.
Known for being a great marketer and commercial television producer, two inventors from Canada approached Joseph with a prototype of an electronic devise with a sound filter inside that when activated could turn lights on and off.
They called their gadget The Great American Turn-On. After seeing the product, Joseph’s tingly marketing sense took over. He knew this was the perfect product and bought the rights to own it.
Then he also changed the name of the gadget to the Clapper. Some people warned him against using that name because it sounded too much like a venereal disease.
But Joseph disagreed. He knew that once people saw it in action, they’d be wowed by how easily the lights came on and went off with one clap.
But at the time, the gadget had one problem—it kept blowing out television sets.
So Joseph hired a couple of engineers to redesign the device and fix the problem of it blowing out TV’s.
Now the only other thing to do was of course come up with a jingle. So he thought why not create one that simply describes what the gadget does, something simple, something easy to recall, something like … “Clap On! Clap Off.”
Since its debut in 1990, over 7 million Clappers have been sold.
Today the Chia Pet and the Clapper are considered American icons. The prototypes of both products are part of the Smithsonian Institution’s archives; their accompanying documents are in the Library of Congress.
Joseph fulfilled his dream of having his own products and made himself a small fortune doing it.
Awesome Quotes by Awesome People
“The only thing that will stop you from fulfilling your dream is YOU.”— Tom Brady
Right? All it takes is just one good idea.
So simple an idea! Great story!