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BUSINESS THE GREAT DALLAS SWINGSET WAR

By Skip Hollandsworth |

A swingset war is raging through the back yards of Dallas. That’s right. The local swingset manufacturers are spying on one another, hiring engineers to study each other’s products, and spreading nasty news about their competitors to unsuspecting young parents who just thought they were out to buy something for their kids to climb on.

“This is hardball,” says Debbie Monaghan. owner of Dallas Custom Swings and instigator of much of the feuding. Monaghan. a pleasant, energetic mother who wears cute red tennis shoes to work, is the daughter of the famous airline entrepreneur Lamar Muse, so she’s sat on the lap of the man who taught a lot of people how to play tough. “All my competitors hate my guts,” Monaghan says. “But that’s the swingset business.”

And we’re talking about the top-of-the-line swingset business here-these swingsets are wooden, made of pressurized pine, and they have everything on them from little forts to slides to ladders and trapeze bars and rope bridges. Costing anywhere from $350 for the basic model to $5,000 for a customized look, these swingsets look like giant Tinkertoy constructions. They also all look pretty much the same-and those are fighting words to the swingset people.

The war began a year ago when Monaghan took out a newspaper ad that screamed, “Hogwash!” The hogwash, said Monaghan, was being pumped out by the other leaders of the Dallas swingset business. Yards of Fun and The Wooden Swing Co,, who she claimed had misled customers about the quality of their swings. She said her teeter-totters and monkey bars and sandboxes were built far better than her competitors. She even bought her competitors’ swingsets and displayed them in her own showroom to show customers how bad they were in comparison to hers-an act that sent shock waves through the normally placid swingset world.

“To be honest,” says Jeff Long, one of the owners of Yards of Fun in North Dallas, “customers don’t like her attitude. They consider her very non-professional.” Says Royce Piper, owner of The Wooden Swing Co., “I’ve had people in here that swear they’ll never buy another thing from that woman as long as they live. They can’t believe her tactics.”

But the others admit that they, too, send their secretaries or assistants into competitors’ showrooms to see what they’re doing. Long says he has hired engineers to do complete critiques on the competition “because the other companies are out to cut our throats.” Wooden Swing says it helps review the safety standards nationwide for swing-sets. Yards of Fun says it helped create the rules in the first place. Dallas Custom Swings says no one else even comes close to its safety standards.

They argue over everything- who has the best dowels (ladder rungs), who has the best ropes to swing on, who has the best “stretch gap” on the monkey bars. Monaghan has gone so far as to write critical remarks all over her competitors’ ads, which she then shows her own customers. “I’d never stoop to that woman’s actions,” says Piper. “It’s amazing.”

“Don’t let anyone tell you this is an easy business,” says Monaghan, who has a Master of Business Administration degree from SMU. “We’re in the business of making kids happy, and I’m telling you it’s hell out there.”

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