How Not to Miss Out on Your Own Invention – The Fidget Spinner Story

In 1997, an American inventor called Catherine Hettinger came up with a small spinning toy designed to help children focus and relieve stress. With admirable foresight, she filed a patent for her invention.

For years, nothing happened. Toy manufacturers showed no interest and by 2005 she had given up trying to commercialise it. Facing a $400 renewal fee she could not justify, she let the patent lapse.

Twelve years later, the fidget spinner became one of the best-selling toys in history. Hundreds of millions were sold worldwide. Catherine Hettinger received nothing.

It is one of the most striking cautionary tales in the history of intellectual property — and one that every innovative business should know.

What went wrong

The immediate answer is straightforward: she allowed the patent to lapse. Had she maintained it, she would have been able to assert her rights against manufacturers and retailers profiting from her invention and claim damages potentially far exceeding the renewal fees she had been unwilling to pay.

But the lesson runs deeper than that. Patents are expensive to obtain and maintain, and for an unfunded inventor working alone, the costs can feel prohibitive. This is precisely why a layered approach to IP protection matters.

The case for multiple layers of protection

A patent is only one form of IP protection, and often not the most practical one for early-stage innovators. In Catherine Hettinger’s situation, two additional rights could have provided meaningful protection at a fraction of the cost.

Registered design rights protect the visual appearance of a product — its shape, configuration and distinctive features. For a toy with a distinctive form, design registration would have been relatively inexpensive and straightforward to obtain, and would have given her grounds to challenge copies on the basis of appearance alone.

Trade mark rights protect brand names and distinctive identifiers. Had she registered “Fidget Spinner” as a trade mark at an early stage, she would have had a powerful tool to control how the product was marketed and to prevent others from trading on the name she had created. Trade marks can be renewed indefinitely, unlike patents which expire after 20 years.

Together, these three layers — patent, design right and trade mark — would have given her a much stronger position when the market finally arrived. Each provides a different form of protection and each fills gaps the others leave.

The broader lesson for innovative businesses

Catherine Hettinger’s story is unusual in scale but not in kind. The same pattern plays out repeatedly for innovative SMEs — a product is developed, IP protection is registered, costs mount, renewals are missed, and by the time the market catches up the protection has lapsed.

The lesson is not simply to maintain your IP rights, though that matters. It is to think strategically about what you own, how much it might one day be worth, and what it would cost to protect it properly relative to that potential value. A $400 renewal fee looks very different when you are a struggling inventor in 2005 and when you are watching hundreds of millions of your invention sell in 2017.

When protection is in place — the problem of enforcement

There is a second lesson in this story that is less often told. Even if Catherine Hettinger had maintained her patent, enforcing it against the hundreds of manufacturers producing fidget spinners across the world would have been a formidable undertaking. Patent litigation is expensive. International enforcement is more expensive still.

This is the gap that many innovative businesses fall into. They invest in registering their IP. They maintain their rights. And then, when infringement occurs, they discover that the cost of doing anything about it is beyond their means.

IP insurance exists to close that gap. It covers the legal costs of enforcing patent, trade mark and design rights against infringers — and defending allegations that you have infringed a third party’s rights. For a business that has invested in building an IP portfolio, it is the logical next step after registration.

Catherine Hettinger lost her invention to the market twice — once when the patent lapsed, and once when she lacked the means to enforce it. The first loss was a matter of resources. The second is a problem that insurance can solve.

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This article is provided for general information purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Readers should seek independent legal advice on their specific circumstances before taking any action.