So I guess “back in the day”, most (1A) competition yoyos were organic in shape, right? When did that end? Like, was there a particular year when V/H shaped yoyos took over as the predominant competition design shape?
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I’m sure @yyfben2.deactivated has some pretty good insight as to when the manufacturing end shifted focus
Probably around 2009 when yoyorecreation was becoming big
Could it have been in the waning days of the 888 popularity, the Super Star prominence and the rise of better bimetal designs 2011- 2012.
Just of the top of my head this may have been the beginning.
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Look at contest results.
Hirouki Suzuki and his success with Speeder could be a clear sign V had arrived… but it wasn’t an absolute change. Yuuki Spencer won in 2007 and more than 50% of the people in finals used an 888 which was definitely organic by todays definitions. H shape existed since 2006 too so in a world with H V and organic, Organic (and undersized) was still the choice of a large number of competitors.
looking at worlds in that era
2006 V (speeder)
2007 O (888)
2008 V/H (superstar)
2009 V Sleipnir
2010 W Northstar
more: Yoyo that won the WYYC - #7 by andy569
I would say, to this day there is no reason any contest couldn’t be won on an organic shape, Jensen/northstar, Genty/Replay kinda showed what practice can do and the right weight/design/style mix is more important than the shape label.
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Maybe my perception is off, but up until the pandemic inspired a resurgence of interest in organic designs, the marketplace was clearly, and quite heavily, biased towards V/H shaped designs. But when I look at collections containing older yoyos, and LF requests for older throws, there is a very strong skew towards organic shapes, indicating to me at least that organic was the “norm” at one point. I figure there was probably a crossover moment/year where the baton was passed from organic to V/H shapes as the predominant species in the marketplace.
sooo much overlap. I don’t think you will find a point. Especially when certain brands have ALWAYS been making organic yo-yos.
realtalk question…
When did it become cool for new brands to produce super generic looking organics rather than super generic looking V shaped yo-yos? That was pretty recent. The ‘NEW CONTEST FOCUSED DESIGN’ thing was getting really tired + boutique V shape yoyo were not selling…
I’m going to blame Jensen. Damn tastemakers 
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Sure, but at one time organics were king in the marketplace and now they aren’t. There must be a crossover point, or period. I mean, maybe it took several years where for a while they had equal market share, but there must have been a year when most of the top manufacturers looked at their annual books and noticed that V’s and H’s had eclipsed sales of O’s to the point that it made more business sense to focus on those rather than O’s so much.
Hitman was an organic. Speeder was a V. Dark Magic was (whatever you want to call it)
There was never a right answer and choice has always been delivered by the more prolific brands.
if your brand was 1 yoyo and you had to choose what it was I think Organic being THAT choice is a recent thing.
No contests may have been a big contributor… but also seeing ppl pay above the dollar resale on fairly traditional (Canadian) organics May just have been the reason
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I’m sure one could plot out the shapes vs years for big manufacturers and figure out when things really shifted. However, just for discussion, I think YYR and A-RT are respectively to ‘blame’ for leading the charge towards generic V and generic O, respectively (don’t get me wrong, I love both these makers).
Then, for fun, let’s pick 2011, the year of the CLYW Chief, as the strong inflection point towards V dominance (even though it’s an H, I guess).
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This is what immediately came to my mind
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Huh - I never really thought of the chief as h or v shaped. At the time it seemed organic, albeit with some contours. I do remember it feeling much larger than all my other throws.
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i would like to attribute this to that particular shape being popularized again by the SF Cadence. up to the poin that you can almost make a new category of “Cadence inspired” yoyos that fit that ever so popular W shape/ inverse round drop to the response area.
It’s worth to note that even if the Cadence popularized that shape, it was already well known from being derived from the CLYW Arctic Circle line.
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So the ND fits in the ‘cadence inspired category’ despite predating it by over 18 months?
Your text description of this shape even fits nd better than cadence. I see some clear YYR influences in cadence too.
Arctic circle has a lot of strong turning point influences I don’t see in the other two.
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this is just an observation really. Even if other models already had this shape on them prior to the Cadence (this is of course true), i think its safe to say that the cadence was wildly popular beyond anyones expectations, and that yoyos with this shape started coming out more since its release.
Er, the Cadence is a relatively new release (2018?). I remember watching the reviews of it when it came out (and then disagreeing with them when I got my hands on one myself), and I’ve only been yoyoing since around this time three years ago. The transition to V/H shapes as market leaders had occurred long before I came along, inspired as I was by Evan Nagao’s Nats winning performance prior to taking the world title with an extreme V shaped bi-metal that was really just an incremental step along an evolutionary design path firmly established by years and years of V/H shaped yoyos that came before.
What about the YYF Genesis era? I understand that that yoyo and its siblings had a huge influence on yoyo design and what people wanted to compete with at the time. Wasn’t that the first significant shift from the 888?
At YoYoFactory we had clear design ‘lines’.
G5, GM2, Genesis, Aviator, Super G, Shutter… easy line to follow right? Remember GM2 existed BEFORE 888. Players chose the direction (and history now suggests they went the wrong way).
In our design philosophy this all fit into a line that started with Severe in 2009
Severe took a turning point step and paired it with what became labeled as a W shape (which to us was the protostar/Northstar/rockstar/popsstar shape). From here we went through supernova, Space Cowboy, Paolista. From points along way we branched into czechPoint, edge line. Even though it kinda fit, Nate’s design herritage !
Nate joined Yoyofactory with his own design, the Lightspeed through chico yoyo company. We used that exact shape and payed cyyc on the d10. The
Was present in Lightspeed and continued into ND, which has now been sold consistently in various forms since 2017 (ultra, Nd, biND, Damage + next one to come). I don’t think I’m arguing the ND is more influential than the cadence, I just think the cadence poorly represents the design trend you are trying to capture & ultimately, it’s all from Severe/supernova which was more successful than anything mentioned.
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This is definitely just an aside, but your comments on the Severe remind me of the good ol days of the YYF Blog (Countdown To Worlds Blog I think it was) where little 12 year old me refreshed constantly waiting for news and updates on new throws you guys were putting out. I’ll never forget the time I refreshed and saw the dark red acid wash Severe for the first time. Never had I wanted a yoyo more than in that moment.
I didn’t even realize until your comment how influential that yoyo ended up becoming. It’s so obvious to me now that so many throws used and still use an iteration of that great shape.
12 years later and I still gotta get my hands on one of those… Maybe a YYF x Recess rerun version? 
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