Gary Dahl

Gary Ross Dahl (born December 18, 1936 – March 23, 2015) was an American businessman and advertising director. He founded and created the collectible toy Pet Rock; smooth stones from the city of Rosarito, Baja California, Mexico. in the mid '70s which was successful enough to make him a millionaire.

Dahl was born on December 18, 1936, in Bottineau, North Dakota, and raised in Spokane, Washington. His mother was a waitress and his father was a lumber-mill worker. He studied at Washington State University. He worked as a freelance copy editor.

Pet Rock

By 1975, Dahl was living in Los Gatos, California, and still worked in copy editing. His wife, Marguerite Dahl, once mentioned to him that she wanted to have a cat to keep her company while he was at work. He explained that having a pet was a lot of work, and he would rather her take care of a rock. His wife then found a rock outside the house and painted it to resemble a miniature cat. When Dahl came home and noticed his wife rocking back and forth with her pet rock, a light bulb went off in his head and he thought of creating collectible toys made with rocks, as a joke. Putting on his marketing hat, he believed that a "pet" that required no actual work and no real commitment may resonate with the self-indulgent '70s. 

Dahl began selling the rocks in August, and two months later was reportedly selling 10,000 a day, in the lead-up to the holiday season. By September 1975, his pet rocks were available at Neiman-Marcus in Dallas and advertised in the catalogs of Bloomingdale's in New York. He sold an estimated 1.3 to 1.5 million rocks. The craze made Dahl a minor celebrity; it was widely covered in the media, he was on The Tonight Show twice, and received so many calls he later said he “taught my P.R. guy to impersonate me so he could also answer my calls.” The fad only lasted about half a year, and by February 1976 the rocks were not selling well, but that was enough to make Dahl a millionaire.

Dahl eventually did buy a young cat for his wife.

Later career

From the proceeds of his "pets," Dahl opened a bar in Los Gatos, California, named Carrie Nation's (named after the famous bar smasher). He later attempted to follow up this success selling "Sand Breeding Kits" and "Red China Dirt," ostensibly a plan to smuggle mainland China into the US, one cubic centimeter at a time. These novelties failed to attract as much interest as the Pet Rock.

Dahl's agency, Gary Dahl Creative Services, in Campbell, California, specialized in electronic advertising. He wrote and produced hundreds of television commercials and thousands of radio commercials for a wide variety of businesses, including financial, automotive, wireless, education, retail, high-tech and dot-coms.

In 2000, Dahl won the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, the San José State University–sponsored competition that awards authors for crafting particularly bad "purple prose." He defeated over 4,000 entries from all over the world. Dahl's winning entry:

The heather-encrusted Headlands, veiled in fog as thick as smoke in a crowded pub, hunched precariously over the moors, their rocky elbows slipping off land's end, their bulbous, craggy noses thrust into the thick foam of the North Sea like bearded old men falling asleep in their pints.

In 2001 he published Advertising For Dummies.

Dahl lived in the hills above Los Gatos and owned another house in Milpitas, California.

He died on March 23, 2015, in Jacksonville, Oregon, of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

• Dahl, Gary (2007). Advertising For Dummies. For Dummies. ISBN 978-0470045831.