Ty Liotta is trying to help his colleagues see the marvelous product idea in his head. He grabs a pen and paper and sketches a rough cube with two cats inside. Then he draws Xs over the eyes of one of the felines. “They’re cute cats, but that one’s clearly dead,” he says, taking a loud slurp of coffee from a Mickey Mouse-shaped mug.

Liotta is head of custom manufacturing for ThinkGeek, and on this mid-July day he’s leading a design session for a potential product: the Schrödinger’s Cat Executive Decision Maker. It’s a 21st-century update on the old Magic 8 Ball. Ask a yes/no question, open the box, and an LED randomly shines on one of the plastic cats.

The gizmo riffs on the most famous thought experiment in all of quantum physics—a scientific paradox. Of course, famous in the field of quantum physics is, well, relative. It’s a safe bet that most people wouldn’t get the reference. But for the sort of science-savvy Poindexter who’d actually order something like this from ThinkGeek’s ever-expanding product line, the obscurity of the gag is its central appeal.

Liotta is a balding, bespectacled 40-year-old who favors jeans and shirts with collars. Given the sartorial standard here at ThinkGeek headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia, it’s like he’s wearing a three-piece suit. The others in the conference room, all in T-shirts and shorts, make up the in-house R&D team called GeekLabs. They finally get Liotta’s concept, but there’s still much to sort out before they send a rough prototype to their manufacturer in China. Should the kitties emit a sound before you see the result, or would that betray Schrödinger’s theory of quantum superposition? “If meowing is observing, is that determining the state?” Liotta asks as he takes another long, loud swig of coffee.

It’s a weighty question for such a silly product, but it illustrates perfectly why ThinkGeek has become so popular. The company makes toys for adults, novelties designed to appeal to both your inner child and your inner grad student. These dorks have been retrofitting classic novelty items with a veneer of obsessive dorkiness for more than a decade, lavishing so much care and imagination and wit on their products that they sometimes seem more like conceptual art than cubicle kitsch.

As Liotta wrestles with the finer points of quantum entanglement, the four other team members weigh in. Then, over the next hour or so—it’s hard to be sure how long, because the desk clock displays time in Unix epoch format—they run through a dozen other products the company hopes to have ready by October. There’s a pizza cutter shaped like the USS Enterprise , a T-shirt with a built-in spy-cam, and a bacon plushie. A prototype of the cuddly cured-pork product has just come back from the factory. Liotta squeezes it and hears his own prerecorded voice blurt, “I’m bacon!” He frowns: “It needs to be more plump.”

In the 11 years since it was founded, ThinkGeek has become a sort of Sharper Image for sysadmins. You may have read a post on Gizmodo about the company’s Ladies of Star Wars playing cards or seen its T-shirts emblazoned with the chemical structure of caffeine on The Big Bang Theory . You may have received one of its Starfleet hip flasks at an office holiday party or spotted an Albert Einstein action figure on a coworker’s desk. For its target audience—sci-fi addicts, practical jokers, anyone who has ever worn a calculator watch—ThinkGeek inspires an Apple-like level of cultish adoration.

The company derives its playful spirit from geek and hacker culture itself, injecting it into every aspect of its ecommerce operation. When you order a product, it arrives cushioned in air packs that purport to be filled with “free monkey breath,” along with documentation explaining how your purchase was prepped for delivery by simian cyborgs. You’ll soon be able to choose from two gift wraps—zombie or robot.

As it turns out, silly novelties are serious business. ThinkGeek did $50 million in sales last year. Most of that money comes from reselling cheap items made by outside companies. But as revenue has skyrocketed, ThinkGeek has begun selling in bulk and designing its own increasingly sophisticated products. Can a company maintain its scrappy oddball status if it becomes an etailing powerhouse? Ask the Schrödinger’s Cat Executive Decision Maker, which will be available in early 2011 for $25.

The ThinkGeek Video Library

ThinkGeek’s DIY video library is as engaging and entertaining as the products it showcases. Thanks to clever writing, high production values (well, above average) and deeply geeky in-jokes, it’s easy to lose an hour watching its online ads. Here are a few of our favorites.

Timmy O' Riley by L. Hadron and the Colliders

This homage to the Who features a full band of ThinkGeek musical instruments. In a word: epic. Tauntaun Sleeping Bag

ThinkGeek had to score a licensing deal with Lucasfilm to bring this product, one of its most famous items, to market. Rock Guitar Shirt Commercial

This composited video is the company's only on-air ad. It scored more then 5 million impressions on TV, according to Nielsen ratings. Star Wars Force FX Lightsabers

Thanks to heavily choreographed fight scenes and a dark, foreboding musical score, ThinkGeek may have made the best Star Wars movie since Episode VI . Dharma Initiative Alarm Clock

This April Fool's gag alarm clock that keeps the sky from falling was deemed too expensive to bring to market, despite popular demand. Dismember-Me Zombie Plush

The acting in this ad won't win any Oscars, but the plot and direction rank up there with any zombie movie we've seen. Oh, and the acting, too. Matt and the Tribbleocalypse

A practical joke featured one ThinkGeek employee on sick leave, and 600 squealing electronic Tribbles. Giant Bleeding Heart Gummy Candy

Forget flowers! The way to any geek girl’s heart is with a gory, bleeding gummy candy. My First Bacon

This bacon plushie - child's toy, mother's friend - was another ThinkGeek product that made the leap from April Fool's gag to product for sale. BeerBot Bottle Opening Shirt

What's more awesome than robots and beer? The answer is nothing - unless you can combine the two in T-shirt form. WiiHelm

Obviously, the big problem with the Nintendo Wii is that it requires way too much physical activity. ThinkGeek solved that for you with this gag product.

ThinkGeek started in 1999 as a side project of four friends who ran a dialup Internet service in northern Virginia. They made a batch of T-shirts with the goofy in-joke “Got root”? Like most of their subsequent offerings, it cleverly mixed the familiar with the arcane, mashing up the ubiquitous ad slogan for milk and the obscure IT term for administrators who have access to a computer’s root directory. The shirt sold well, and the quartet dreamed up some more. It soon became obvious that the profit potential of cotton tees outstripped that of dialup Web access.

The ThinkGeek founders came up with yet more avant-geek catchphrases— “Will work for bandwidth”, “Chicks dig UNIX”—and paid another company to put those slogans on shirts, mugs, and other swag. They also looked for nerd-friendly merchandise that they could purchase from distributors and resell at a profit: Caffeinated beverages, which were marketed as fuel for late-night coding sessions, were an early hit. “One of the first products we bought in bulk was a beverage line called X-Drinks,” cofounder Willie Vadnais says. “Some of the ingredients are now unlawful.” Vadnais took it upon himself to test the invigorating properties of each pick-me-up before his company distributed it.

At 40, Vadnais has shaggy brown hair and an unkempt beard that suggests Zach Galifianakis meets Jeff Lebowski. He explains how ThinkGeek, then one of many startups trying to sell stuff to the same emerging niche audience, was forever changed in September 1999, when it was first mentioned on Slashdot. Rob Malda, founder of the news site for all things nerd, raved about ThinkGeek’s merch, especially a beer mug etched with a snippet of Perl script. “Most of the geek sites just sell crap,” wrote Malda, aka CmdrTaco. “But most of this was actually clever.”

Overnight, ThinkGeek went from a dozen orders a day to 600. A month later, Slashdot’s parent company, Andover.net, came calling with a buyout offer. Vadnais figured that if he and his cofounders didn’t take it, Andover would buy one of his competitors and drive ThinkGeek out of business. “They didn’t come out and say that we’d be destroyed,” he explains, “but I kind of knew it.”

At that moment, ThinkGeek entered the hallucinatory dotcom boom. Its new parent company was soon bought by VA Linux, which was taking in $100 million a year selling PCs preloaded with the popular open source operating system. When VA Linux went public, its shares shot up nearly 700 percent to $320, the largest first-day gain ever.

VA Linux had big plans for its little subsidiary. “All of a sudden we had people telling us how to run the business,” Vadnais says. If ThinkGeek was selling novelty accessories, why not sell keyboards and monitors as well? “It was worse than that,” Vadnais says. “They wanted us to sell VHS players.”

But VA Linux cratered before it could turn ThinkGeek into Best Buy. As the dotcom bubble burst, the parent company’s share price plummeted. It scaled back dramatically, abandoning the hardware business to focus on its open source software repository, called SourceForge, and media properties like Slashdot and freshmeat.

Meanwhile, ThinkGeek kept plugging along. It stopped selling boring hardware like VCRs and keyboards and hit trade shows in Hong Kong and Tokyo to look for even more bizarre products. At the same time, the term geek began to morph from epithet to honorific. There were more and more IT workers out there, all toiling away in sterile, depressing cubicles just begging to be decked out with some trace of humor or personality.

A decade after being acquired, ThinkGeek is by far the most profitable division of its parent company, which tellingly renamed itself Geeknet last November. The stock ticker symbol changed from LNUX to GKNT. It faced the prospect of delisting in August; at that time you could buy half a dozen shares for less than the price of a ThinkGeek titanium spork ($9).

Today ThinkGeek has 51 employees. Single-day orders occasionally top out at $1 million, and an astonishing amount of that product is caffeine. You can purchase it online or from the mail-order catalog in the form of mints, candy, gum, jerky, sprays, capsules, chews, cookies, and powders, as well as in lip balms, brownie mix, and soaps (liquid and solid). The company has thus far pushed more than 1 billion milligrams of the stimulant. But don’t take our word for it—check out the running ticker at thinkgeek.com/caffeine.

These days, Vadnais has curtailed his intake to just two cups of java a day. “The effect isn’t as joyful as it once was,” he says. He’ll still sample new products, like the Ghostbusters Stay Puft caffeinated marshmallows. But he leaves most of it to ThinkGeek’s caffeine buyer. You can’t run an empire efficiently when you have the jitters.

ThinkGeek Originals As the ecommerce site has grown, it has financed its own R&D, designing ever-more sophisticated products for its nerdy audience. 1. Linux Fish (1999)



Still a best seller, this stick-on car ornament takes the Christian fish and its Darwin retort into the digital world and lets geeks declare their own articles of open source faith. $3 2. USB Snowbot (2006)



The company’s first stab at electronics, this USB toy has a scrolling Cylon eye that users can toggle between red and blue. $12 3. Bluetooth Retro Handset (2006)



ThinkGeek’s first phone accessory was a wireless handset that even Don Draper could love. $30 4. 8-Bit Tie (2007)



This pixelated polyester neckwear began life as an April Fool’s Day put-on. So many people wanted it that ThinkGeek turned it into an actual meatspace clip-on. $15 5. Bliptronic 5000 LED Synthesizer (2009)



A generative music player with switches and flashing LED lights that let you daisy-chain a string of beeps and bloops. $50 6. Electronic Rock Guitar Shirt (2009)



Put on this wearable ax and crank out major chords that others can actually hear, thanks to a mini amp that clips to your belt. $30 7. Tauntaun Sleeping Bag (2009)



It has no sophisticated circuitry, but this Star Wars -themed product showcases another of ThinkGeek’s emerging skill sets: licensing. $100 8. Schrödinger’s Cat Executive Decision Maker (2011)



Open the box and an integrated circuit decides whether you see a live cat or a dead one. $25

The first thing you notice about ThinkGeek’s office is how dark it is. All of the overhead lights are switched off, so the primary illumination is from the staff’s monitors, making the action figures that adorn every available surface look eerie and menacing. “Geeks don’t like the light,” ThinkGeek president Caroline Offutt says. Her background is in mail-order marketing, but she has worked alongside these Morlocks for five and a half years now and doesn’t mind the gloom.

Initially, when execs from the parent company visited, the lights were switched on for them. But there’s a growing respect for the most profitable arm of the business. Now when board members visit, they let their eyes adjust to the dimness.

The parent company has upped its investment in ThinkGeek in the past year. “There’s new blood at Geeknet,” Offutt says, “and they have deep pockets.” The cash infusion is allowing Offutt & Co. to “invest ahead of the curve,” she says. ThinkGeek is now acting as a wholesaler—selling in bulk to shops that cater to a nerdy clientele—and also ramping up its marketing with search-based advertising on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

But the main evidence of the cash influx is the growing prominence of Ty Liotta and his GeekLabs team. Five years ago, ThinkGeek’s most ambitious in-house design was a chrome Linux fish that you could stick on your car (a riposte to the ubiquitous Christian ichthyicons). This year, the company will create about 30 original products, many with elaborate integrated technology.

ThinkGeek got serious about in-house product development in 2006, when Liotta designed a USB-powered snowman with robot arms and a glowing Cylon eye. It was such a success that Liotta was encouraged to make more and eventually hire his own team. The company’s R&D budget went from $240,000 in 2007 to $869,000 in 2009, financing increasingly ambitious electronic gizmos, from Bluetooth headsets to LED synthesizers. Last year, ThinkGeek unveiled the Electronic Rock Guitar Shirt. A thin audio sampler velcroed to the tee can be operated by pushing buttons on the frets and strumming with a magnetic pick. The $30 item was featured on the Today show and Live With Regis and Kelly on the same day last December. It became GeekLabs’ biggest hit, selling tens of thousands of units.

But the company’s greatest visibility comes on April Fools’ Day. That’s when ThinkGeek rolls out its most mind-bending merchandise—all of it fake. When the tradition started in 2001, the gag products were easy to spot: caffeinated meatloaf—yeah, right. But GeekLabs’ fake designs have become increasingly elaborate, the annual hoaxes suckering more and more people. If ThinkGeek sells a USB Cylon snowman, how far-fetched is it for the company to offer a USB fondue set or a USB tanning lamp?

This year’s big hoax was Canned Unicorn Meat, labeled “the new white meat”—a joke that prompted a cease-and-desist letter from the National Pork Board. ThinkGeek got plenty of snarky mileage from this development. “We’d like to publicly apologize to the NPB for the confusion over unicorn and pork,” the company wrote on its blog. “And for their awkward extended pause on the phone after we had explained our unicorn meat doesn’t actually exist.”

Mythical creatures aside, the April Fools’ Day offerings aren’t always purely fake. The holiday also serves as a focus group for real product concepts. If a prank item attracts sufficient attention on Twitter and the gadget blogs, ThinkGeek may actually go ahead and produce it. Take the Tauntaun sleeping bag, modeled after the creature that was sliced open at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back , complete with a lining that looks like viscera. The imaginary product generated so much interest that ThinkGeek was able to persuade Lucasfilm to license it. You can now bed down in the beast’s entrails for the low, low price of $100.

Back in the GeekLabs confab, Liotta takes another slug of coffee as he types on his MacBook Pro. “What happened to my shipment of mini unicorns?” he mutters. His latest project is making the Canned Unicorn hoax a reality. The ThinkGeek offering won’t be edible; open the lid and you’ll find bits and pieces of plush unicorns designed to look as though they’ve been through the abattoir.

ThinkGeek is also making some of its most technologically advanced stuff ever, including a two-octave keyboard T-shirt and an iPhone case with foldout Bluetooth keyboard. Still, sometimes the simplest products can cause the biggest hassles. It’s one thing to get the inspiration for a mold-breaking invention. It’s quite another to communicate the thing you see in your mind’s eye to others and then work with them to make it real.

Case in point: ThinkGeek’s manufacturer in China is having trouble grasping the latest toy design—an “action” figure based on the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey . The Chinese have written several times to insist that there must be some mistake with the specs—it’s simply a rectangular slab of black plastic. “We had the same problem with the USB pet rock,” Liotta says. True visionaries are rarely understood in their own time.

Contributing editor Mathew Honan (@mat) wrote about stunt books in issue 18.07.