Bursting their balloons … neatly
Israeli toy designers combine creativity, precision, and joy
It’s a small world, and the Israeli world is smaller still. In this tiny country, everyone knows virtually everyone — or at least knows someone who knows someone.
My brother David Klein is a patent attorney in Rehovot. He works with brilliant toy inventors such as Yair Shilo, winner of the 2024 Toy & Game International Excellence Innovator of the Year award for his Power Saber automatic retractable and extendable light saber. Another pair of clients, Liran Ganor and Yigal Livne, were nominated for the same award for their Nerf Better Than Balloons creation.
Israel has an active community of toy and game designers. People across the world enjoy Israeli-invented games such as Guess Who? and Rummikub. But again, because this is a small country, toy design isn’t a fulltime profession. Mainly, Israeli toy innovators are industrial designers, graphic artists, electrical or mechanical engineers, software developers, or chemists.
David’s contacts and my journalistic curiosity led me to visit Liran Ganor’s home in a suburb of Netanya. There I also met his father, Michael “Miki” Ganor, and his sometime business partner, Yigal Livne.
In 1973, Miki founded industrial-design and engineering services company DSE. Its long and impressive client list includes the Keter plastic furnishings empire, Amcor, Alma Lasers, and NVIDIA. Liran works with his legendary dad in product development — and in a shared sideline, toy design.
Starting in 1998, the Ganors co-created many popular and award-winning handheld Tiger Electronics games, including Lights Out and Pooh Learning Theater; board games such as KodKod Logiktown; Kinder Surprise toys; and more.
At international toy industry shows, Liran said, he and Miki see “a lot of nice young inventors rolling suitcases full of concepts. We bring maybe two ideas that we think have the best potential. If one idea makes it to the market in five years, it’s a wow.”
I asked him the story behind Nerf Better Than Balloons, introduced last year by Hasbro.
Liran laughed and pointed past his patio doors. Several years ago, he related, he was puttering outside when suddenly his little girl began lobbing laundry detergent pods against the garden wall from an upstairs window.
His daughter’s delighted reaction as the pods burst upon contact gave Liran an idea that gradually took shape as a water-balloon product with a twist.
Better Than Balloons is a sheet of self-sealing pods that kids can fill quickly with water, separate, and then throw, pop, or stomp. The key differentiator is that the burst pods stay in one piece for easy cleanup.
The product is simple to describe and to use, but it wasn’t simple to design. For that, Liran turned to Yigal, a mechanical engineer who has collaborated with Miki for some 40 years.
Yigal’s achievements span the worlds of high-tech, robotics, aeronautics, printing, military equipment, medical devices, and consumer electronics. Developing toys was new to him, happily coinciding with becoming a grandfather.
“For an inventor in high-tech like me, toys are a completely different challenge, and I’m still learning how to think differently,” Yigal said.
When he’s engineering a lifesaving technology — such as the FDA-approved proton therapy machine for Israeli company P-Cure — extreme accuracy is the make-or-break factor.
When engineering playthings, however, the make-or-break factor is the product’s “magic” vs. its retail price point. Toy giants such as Hasbro, Mattel and Spin Master seek products priced attractively enough to sell millions of units.
To illustrate this point, Miki showed me Tiger Electronics’ Lights Out handheld game, “our first, most famous and successful toy.” It was under development by an Israeli group for seven years before DSE came along and found a way to make it affordable for the mass market.
“People look at toys and don’t see what goes into it,” Liran said. “It’s a different way of thinking and creating.”
To make the water balloons quick to fill, leakproof, and easy to burst, Yigal invented a three-layered pod with the middle layer featuring a one-way valve.
After two years of development, including manufacture of a proof-of-concept prototype in China, Liran described the product to inventor relations teams at toy manufacturers. An immediate response came from the senior director of product development at Hasbro, which coincidentally had been searching for an innovative water balloon idea.
“We fell into the right spot. Timing is everything,” Liran noted.
Hasbro liked how Better Than Balloons don’t break into tiny pieces all over the lawn, as regular water balloons do.
Another bonus: The patented disposable pod sheets are made from recycled materials and could be made of biodegradable materials in the future.
When I left the Ganor home, I carried with me not only a pack of Better Than Balloons — you can find them at major retailers such as Amazon and Target — but also a lighter mood. Especially now, when Israel and its supporters across the globe are dealing with difficult life-and-death dilemmas, it helps to remember that Israeli inventors are dedicated to making the world better, brighter, and a little more fun.
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