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.

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Authors: Mathew Honan

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