A hotel bellhop, a businessman and a toy that came back.

The Duncan name did not begin with the yo-yo’s maker but with the man who bought him out. The Strong National Museum of Play, which inducted the Duncan yo-yo into its National Toy Hall of Fame in 1999, tells the story on its induction page. It notes that versions of the toy are said to go back to ancient Greece or earlier in China, that several manufacturers patented improvements during an American yo-yo craze in the mid-19th century, and that Scientific American published directions for making one at the start of the 20th century — but it dates the story of the modern yo-yo to the 1920s. In the 1920s, it says, a Filipino bellhop named Pedro Flores caught the attention of guests at a Southern California hotel by playing with the toy on his lunch breaks, saw a business opportunity and began manufacturing yo-yos himself.

The museum says Donald F. Duncan — whom it calls the father of the Good Humor ice cream bar — first saw a yo-yo in California in 1928, and that a year later he bought Flores out. The company dates itself to 1929: its own website, read in October 2026, says “Since 1929, Duncan Toys has been putting smiles on the faces of its customers”. The Toy Book, marking the company’s anniversary in January 2019, also places the start in 1929, when it says Duncan “witnessed his first yo-yo return”, and describes the early business as a team of Filipino demonstrators carving wooden yo-yos in California.

The Strong says Duncan’s company won customers by staging contests in which yo-yo “champions” made the toy “walk the dog”, “shoot the moon”, “rock the cradle” and go “around the world”. The company’s own About page today looks back to the same picture, describing a line that runs “from schoolyard demonstrators selling hand-carved wooden yo-yos, to modern world champions touring the globe.”

Wisconsin wood, a slogan, then a supplier’s name.

The business moved east after the Second World War. The Toy Book reports that before Duncan introduced its plastic models, it moved to Luck, Wisconsin, in 1946 to make wooden yo-yos there. The Orlando Sentinel, writing in August 1997, also describes Duncan Toys as having been based in Luck, Wisconsin, in the early 1960s, when demand for yo-yos was at its height.

Television carried the name in that period. The Orlando Sentinel says Duncan had used commercials since the late 1950s, and the Strong says that in the early 1960s a national television campaign intoned the slogan “if it isn’t a Duncan, it isn’t a yo-yo!”

According to the Strong, high expenses and a trademark protection lawsuit put Duncan personally out of business in 1965, while his manufacturer, Flambeau Products, continued making yo-yos. The Orlando Sentinel adds that when the fad faded, Duncan was left with unsold stock and was forced into bankruptcy, and that the Duncan name was bought by one of its suppliers, Flambeau Products, based in Middlefield, Ohio. Flambeau’s own company history, archived in 2014, lists the date: “1968 Flambeau purchases the Duncan Toys Company.” The same page says Flambeau was started in 1947 by W.R. Sauey and his brother Ed, who named it after the Flambeau River, and that its first product was a fishing lure.

Design and documentation.

Kites and yo-yos are among the simplest objects in the toy trade: a frame and a sail on a line, or two halves joined by an axle and a string. Yet the names behind them range from small workshops and specialist shops to companies that sell through toy chains, sports retailers and their own websites, and some have changed hands more than once along the way.

These are toys that are meant to be performed. Kites are flown in public, on beaches, fields and at festivals, and yo-yos are thrown in front of friends, teachers and contest judges, so their brands often travel through demonstrations, events and the people who use them as much as through packaging. Colour, a clear name and a recognisable shape do much of the work when the product is seen in motion or at a distance.

Each guide separates what independent, dated sources record from what the company says about itself — who started it, who owns it now, where its products are designed and made and how its look has developed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From a Flambeau division to a full skill-toy range.

Under Flambeau, Duncan became a division of a plastics company. The Orlando Sentinel described Duncan Toys Co. in 1997 as “a division of Flambeau”, with a yo-yo plant in Columbus, Indiana. It reported that Flambeau had hired Michael Caffrey, a former Duncan demonstrator, in 1993 to market the brand. Caffrey, the paper said, had been hired by Duncan as a yo-yo demonstrator after high school, when the company sent demonstrators from town to town to perform tricks and sell yo-yos, and he had later owned a rival yo-yo company, Yomega, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Under Flambeau he cast 13- and 14-year-olds in its commercials and set up a school programme called “Teaching Science With the Yo-Yo”, developed with a college physics professor and a middle-school science teacher. The Toy Book described Duncan in 2019 as “Ohio-based” and named Flambeau Inc. as its current owner, saying the company had eventually moved out of Luck after the 1968 purchase. That year, the magazine reported, Duncan marked its anniversary with monthly limited-edition yo-yos and the World Yo-Yo Contest was held in Cleveland.

The range today reaches beyond the yo-yo. The company’s website, read in October 2026 and signed “Duncan Toys Company”, sorts yo-yos from beginner to expert and offers a customised yo-yo service alongside outdoor toys, discs, footbags, tops and gyros, kendama and juggling sets. It also runs a sponsored player team, Team Duncan, and contest programmes for scouts and families.

For a design guide, Duncan shows how a brand can be carried by performance as much as by a mark: contests, demonstrators, trick names and a slogan that tied one word to a whole toy, kept alive under a new owner after its founder left. Compare the trick-driven newer maker in our YoYoFactory brand guidelines and the Pasadena slingshot name in our Wham-O brand guidelines. For this guide we use contest red, spotlight gold and television navy with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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