Once a 1970s fad, Pet Rocks now stretch from Seoul to Swifties

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Do you have rocks in your head? A blunt but fair query of freelance copywriter Gary Dahl, who half-a-century ago moulded a nugget of bar banter into “one of the most ridiculously successful marketing schemes ever.”

Dahl may not have had rocks in his noggin, but he certainly had them on the brain. As the progenitor of the “Pet Rock,” he brought to life one of the most pebble-dashed fever dreams of the 1970s, a decade previously noted for the dubious charms of lava lamps, hula hoops and mood rings.

Admittedly, no one was stone-cold sober when Dahl first floated his gravel-meets-golden retriever vision; indeed, it emerged from his pals’s beery bellyaching about conventional pets – ones that are not dredged from a quarry.

Dahl was hard up at the time – yet he was soon picking up the bar tab for his better-off pals. With the help of financial backers George Coakley and John Heagerty, he released his Pet Rock commercially in 1975 and became a millionaire “practically overnight.” It was, the adman later declared, the “punchline that turned into a payday.”

At one point, 10,000 pet rocks a day were rolling off store shelves. Selling for US$4 (roughly US$25 today), the stones were purchased for less than a penny each – sourced from a Mexican beach – and an estimated 1.5 million were snapped up during the fad’s roughly six-month lifespan.

It was a smash not so much because of the rocks themselves but rather the packaging. Each came with its own straw-lined cardboard box and a 32-page booklet – The Care and Training of Your Pet Rock – a witty parody of traditional dog-training manuals.

A “faithful, obedient, loving pet” was assured once the “awkward training stage” had been navigated. Cute tricks? No sweat. “Playing dead” was a specialty, and proper health care was vital as “visits to the lapidary can be very expensive.”

Leaving no stone unturned, the U.S. media – worn down by wars, inflation and orange shag carpets – gorged on the pet rock story, with everyone from Johnny Carson to Newsweek extolling the virtues of mineral companions. Time featured a pet rock on its cover, branding it “1 per cent product and 99 per cent marketing genius.”

In an obituary for Dahl, who died in 2015 at the age of 78, the Los Angeles Times said the fad simply tickled our funny bone: “It hit the market at an opportune moment. A president had resigned, the Vietnam War had ended and the nation was ready for a giggle.” As Dahl himself described it to the Oakland Tribune: “I packaged a sense of humour for a very bored public.”

It inspired a song by Al Bolt – I’m in Love With My Pet Rock – as well as Pet Rock T-shirts and Pet Rock shampoo, but by 1976 the gimmick had run its course and “people had moved on.”