Gary Dahl Sold a Million Pet Rocks at $4 Each in Six Months

Gary Dahl was a 38-year-old advertising copywriter in Los Gatos, California, in 1975, drinking with friends at a bar one evening, when the conversation turned to the ordinary frustrations of pets. They had to be fed. They had to be walked. They could die. Dahl said, semi-joking, that he had a pet rock — and worked out, over the course of the evening, what selling one would actually look like. He spent the next several months building the package.

The finished product was: an ordinary smooth stone, sourced from Rosarito beach in Baja California for under a penny each; a corrugated cardboard "pet carrier" with airholes and a straw bed; and a 32-page Pet Rock Training Manual containing dry, deadpan instructions on how to teach the rock to roll over ("hold rock at top of incline; release") and play dead ("no further action required"). The bundle sold for $3.95. He showed it at the August 1975 San Francisco gift show.

The novelty press coverage went off immediately. Newsweek wrote about it. Johnny Carson made jokes on The Tonight Show. Department stores at peak ordered Pet Rocks faster than Dahl's small partnership could ship them. He sold roughly 1.5 million units in the six-month run-up to Christmas 1975 at a profit margin of about 95 cents apiece, becoming a millionaire by the New Year. By February 1976 the fad was over. Dahl tried follow-ups — "Sand Breeding Kits," "The Original Red China," a fully reusable Pet Rock — and none repeated the trick. The brand was dormant until Super Impulse acquired the rights in 2022 and revived Pet Rock for, of all places, the South Korean K-pop market.