Its … Hoopnotic!

It goes around and around and around, like a hyp­not­ic spi­ral. Its the hula hoop, the 50+ year old chil­dren’s toy that is now the lat­est craze. And one per­son now has a hyp­not­i­cal­ly-iin­spired name for her prod­uct to catch that market.

I found out about this bit of hyp­not­ic word-play through an arti­cle in Forbes online. Its the newest fit­ness craze, weight­ed hula hoops, and was the idea of Gabriel­la Red­ding, CEO of Hoop­not­i­ca. Accord­ing to her, she lost 55 lbs using a weight­ed hula hoop and start­ed her own com­pa­ny sev­en years to mar­ket them. Now, with the increased celebri­ty fac­tor of hula hoops (every­one from Michelle Oba­ma and Bey­once to Ellen Degeneres and Liv Tyler are hula hoop­ing) plus the increased atten­tion to fit­ness, her busi­ness has bro­ken the $1 mil­lion sales mark. And she has plans to ride the cur­rent pop­u­lar­i­ty wave into the mass mar­kets as well as plan­ning to sur­vive the expect­ed change when the celebri­ties shift their atten­tion and the hula hoop los­es its novelty.

Com­men­tary: You find plays on the word ‘hyp­not­ic’ in the strangest places, from the names of cos­met­ics and per­fumes to imagery in adver­tise­ments but this one is one of the strangest yet pos­si­bly (because of the descrip­tion at the start of this post) one of the most appropriate.