The amazing story behind Egg Mazing: in conversation with craft-toy inventor Scott Houdashell

Thanks so much for joining me. I was enormously excited when you showed me one of your products in New York, Scott: Egg Mazing. I LOVED it!
Well, thank you Deej! It was good meeting you in New York.

Thank you! You’re the one person that seemed pleased to see me out there! So tell me: how would you describe the product?
The Egg Mazing egg decorator is a new way of decorating Easter eggs without the mess… Very different from the traditional dyes and vinegar. It’s a new way to put the creativity back in the kids’ and the families’ hands. As we like to say, “It’s all the fun without the mess.”

All the fun without the mess! I like that. And we’ll put pictures in this, but the product itself is an oval-shaped unit…
Yes, the original Egg Mazing is a base in which you can set a wooden or hard-boiled egg. It rests on four wheels… When you turn it on, the wheels spin and rotate the egg. The kit comes with colourful, fast-drying markers… When you touch one of those to the spinning egg, you instantly get line art on the egg.

Great description, thank you. And fun though the product is, I’ve got to tell you: I found it enormously therapeutic: I could’ve done that all day. How did the idea for this come about, Scott?
Well, I’ve spent most of my life tinkering in my workshop fixing things and building stuff out of wood or metal… I’ve always been good working with my hands and problem solving. At least I think I’m good at fixing things because it’s my phone that rings every time a friend breaks something…

Ha! You’ve made a rod for your own back!
Exactly. Yeah. That’s why I never got into roofing or concrete…

Ha!
Anyway, back in the Easter of 2015, I was with the family of my now business partner and best friend, Curtis McGill. We were surrounded by all of his kiddos: I’ve watched them grow up; I’m Uncle Scott to them. In fact, I even used to get their phone calls for projects at school… “”We need to build a solar system”, “We need a mock up of the Alamo!” But that Easter, I was at the kitchen table with all these kids. We’re making a mess with the traditional dyes and vinegar… And they’re getting bored just watching an egg change colour in a cup – which is how it’s been done forever.

So – well, you can imagine – the kiddos start going back to their phones and other toys. Then it dawned on me: if I could get these kids back to the table by spinning an egg, I think I’d really have something. So that’s when I had Christina – Curtis’s sister-in-law – round me up a hot-glue stick, an electric screwdriver, a fireplace starter and a spoon.

I love that this thought arrives fully formed with a check list! And when you say a hot-glue stick, that’s just a solid glue stick that goes in a hot-glue gun? You didn’t want the gun itself?
Right! Christina does craft things so I knew she’d have all that stuff in her house. She looked at me like, ‘You’re crazy… What are you trying to do?’, but she rounded it all up. And I took the fireplace starter, melted the top of the glue stick and stuck it to the end of an egg. Then I tightened the other end of the glue stick into the electric screwdriver…

Next, I had Curtis’s oldest girl – Cassidy – round up all the markers in the house. When she came back, I called all the kids over to the table as I kind of set the egg on top of the spoon… Then I pulled the trigger and I said, “Cassidy, touch a marker to it!” And she did. As soon as the egg made a revolution, a line appeared – and all the kiddos were like, “I’m next, Uncle Scott!” So I started popping the eggs off the glue stick, reheating it and sticking on a new egg. And that is where the idea and the first Egg Mazing came from.

I LOVE that! What a fabulous origin story! It intrigues me actually, that you didn’t just think, ‘what’s the solution to this?’ You saw the solution in your head and knew exactly what components you needed for it. That’s unusual.
Yeah. Thinking back on it, I equate it to songwriting… Because I’ve played in bands my whole life and written songs, you know? And there’re some songs you sit down to write and – you’ve probably heard the phrase – they literally write themselves in five or ten minutes…

Right…
…others you have to put back on the shelf for a while. They take much longer. But this was one of those songs that got written pretty quickly as far as the concept and idea go. After that, it took very close to a year to get to a manufactured product. At the time, I was selling insurance in my own agency here in Texas. Adjacent to it, I rented a 20-by-20 shop in which I’d do woodworking and other little projects… Just to keep me busy or relieve stress; work with my hands, you know?

I do indeed.
So day one – after that Easter – I’d become a bit obsessed with figuring this thing out. I went into my wood shop and started building prototypes. One of the very first was a medicine cup that an egg fitted into. I hooked that up to a motor and glued gears on it; wired it up to a 9-volt battery. I could put the egg into that cup, spin it, decorate half of it, then take it out and turn it round. But I knew it wasn’t right. I knew it had to be something a three-year-old could do – and enjoy doing. So there was prototype after prototype after prototype.

And at what point did you move away from that sort-of ‘spindle solution’ to something more secure, Scott? Something in the base…
Well, it happens that one of my insurance office managers had some kiddos she would bring in. One of them had a remote-control car that broke one day. After the tears stopped, I said I’d fix it. I never quite got back to that, but I was passing by it one day while trying to figure out how to spin this egg… And I saw the tyres on the RC. I just thought maybe I needed to build a prototype that has four tires spinning round with the egg sitting in the middle of them.

No way! I’m guessing the rest of that remote-control car didn’t last long?!
No, it didn’t! Ha! That first version looked like something from Star Trek: Enterprise… Only one of the wheels was motorised; it had rubber bands for tension. I mean, it was just a big to do! But I was getting closer, and I was changing prototypes so much; doing them, undoing them, messing with them. Then, one day, I turned the whole prototype up on its side so the wheels were spinning… I undid the tension on the top wheels and pulled them back on the little levers I’d built, and the wires accidentally touched the battery… Well, that was it! Just the two bottom wheels started spinning, and the egg was still sitting there. And I’m like, “How is that egg just spinning like that? How is it sitting there?” It was like when you realise you’re getting free cable, you know?

Ha! You didn’t wanna touch it!
Right! You don’t want to change the channel in case it goes away! Ha! So I didn’t want to touch it… I stared at it for five or ten minutes, trying to figure out how the egg was spinning on two wheels. Finally, I stopped it, and examined them. They were just soft, rubber tyres, but it turns out they had a little bit of curve on them. So in reality, the egg was touching at two ends on one side of the egg… And that’s when I realised the egg needs to be lying down and spinning on four wheels.

Oh, that’s great. A happy, happy accident!
Right. And you know, I might eventually have got there without the accident, but it happened and it got me there sooner. Then I was literally texting and calling everybody saying, “I figured it out!”

I just love your story, Scott. You’ve got a eureka moment, a definite vision… Then you’ve worked and worked and worked and worked designing and re-designing it. Then to top it off, there’s a good bit of luck coming in!
Exactly. Trial and error. And, you know, a lot of people ask my advice on how to do this; how to create an idea – and my number-one piece of advice is “Don’t give up.”

Which is not to say, “stick with something that isn’t working!“ Because it sounds like you persisted despite dozens of ‘not-quite-right’ prototypes?
Right. But if you really believe you have a good idea and it solves a problem, just be persistent. Don’t quit.

So you’ve got that to market… It’s brilliant… Everyone loves it! Easter is sorted. What about the rest of the year?
Ha! Well, almost immediately after I figured out how to spin the egg, my brain started working on how I could do it with a Christmas ornament – which is different because they have a stem on one end. So I had to redesign how a machine could hold an ornament. Of course, at the time, I didn’t know anything about retail or the toy business or where this was even headed. It was just where my brain was going… If I can do an egg this way, maybe I can do the ornament somehow.

Fantastic. I’m loving this, Scott. We do need to start wrapping things up, but I’m curious: what’s next for you?
Well, since then we’ve dipped our toe into Halloween. We have a do-it-yourself carving-and-stacking kit. It’s called the Stack O’Lantern… It lets you carve your pumpkins and stack them like a snowman; one on top of another. It comes with tea lights that shine down into the pumpkin so you’re not having to stick your hand down in a pumpkin to turn it on and off.

Great! That sounds most intriguing…
We also have another product called Cake and Bake Challenge Game. That’s a fun, family friendly race game. It comes with these colourful foam cake pieces. One way to play is to scatter all the pieces on the table… Everyone takes a cake card – then: ready, set, bake! Turn your card over and it has the layers of colour in the order in which you need to stack your cake. The first one to stack it in the right order rings the bell. It’s a fun game.

So with those last two products, you’re really starting to diversify. Great stuff! Well, I’ve really enjoyed this, Scott. Thank you. One last question: what’s the most interesting object in your office or on your desk?
Oh, wow, that’s a good question. Hmmm… I can show you something in my house – it’s here, above this bicycle table I built…

You’re going to show me something more interesting than the bicycle table you built?! Ha!
Ha! Yeah, because this is what I want to show you… It’s a Peanuts sketch by Charles Schultz. It’s an original, and a one of a kind; the only one in the world. He drew it in 1970 for the deacon of his church. They let it go out to the public about two or three years ago and I was able to obtain it. Another thing that’s special about it is that it’s one of the largest prints he’s ever drawn.

I was just about to say: that’s big for his stuff, isn’t it?
Yeah! It’s also the first time that he drew Woodstock and actually called him that because it was after the concert in 1969. Before that, he used to call Woodstock “Snoopy’s little friend”. But he’s named Woodstock here. So yeah… I think that’s pretty interesting!

And I completely agree! Wonderful. Thank you so much for your time, Scott. What a pleasure.

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