Not everyone embraced the plastic pink flamingo. Today they’re known as “Featherstones.” Avant Garde?

So in 1986 Featherstone inscribed his signature in the original plastic mold so people could tell the real from the knock-off. Imitation pink flamingoes began to challenge the primacy of Featherstone’s bird. Or to wear matching outfits with his wife, who made them by hand, from the late 1970s onward. He may have been the only corporate CEO to have 57 pink flamingoes in his yard. Don Featherstoneįeatherstone continued to design products for Union Products, and by 1996 rose to part-owner and chief executive officer. The next year, Tupperware started up in Leominster.

In 1937, Foster Grant churned out 20 million sunglasses. He then had a team of mechanics and engineers spend two years modifying them so they worked. He immediately ordered several and had them shipped to Worcester. In 1931 he visited a New York factory and saw an injection molding machine. A German-American named Samuel Foster started a company called Foster Grant. Then in the 1930s another invention put Leominster on the path of birthing the plastic pink flamingo. Then in 1901, Leominster’s largest plastic manufacturer, the Viscoloid Company, began making celluloid toys. Leominster really began cranking out combs, earning the nickname “Comb City.” A worker had to rough out the form from an animal hoof or horn, then cut the teeth individually. By 1853, 146 people in 24 factories churned out combs. Leominster’s small factories specialized in combs. It started when the Fitchburg Railroad came through Leominster, allowing manufacturing to flourish. The city, about an hour northwest of Boston, had long been an important center of plastics manufacturing. The year that Don Featherstone joined Union Products, Leominster had 60 plastics factories employing 5,500 people – 80 percent of the city’s work force. His wife, Nancy, added that people just thought they were pretty. “A woman could pick up a flamingo at the store and come home with a piece of tropical elegance under her arm to change her humdrum house,” he said. The Sears catalogue carried them, with the instructions, “Place in garden, lawn, to beautify landscape.įeatherstone once said they appealed to people living in subdivisions with identical homes. Sold in pairs, they went on sale in 1958 for $2.76. He designed the pink flamingo based on photographs in National Geographic Magazine. His inaugural efforts included a boy with a dog and a girl with a watering can. His job: designing three-dimensional animals. He then anticipated the career advice immortalized in the 1967 film, The Graduate: Plastics.įeatherstone went to work for plastics manufacturer Union Products Co. He grew up in Berlin and graduated from the Worcester Art Museum’s art school.

25, 1936, in Worcester, Mass., which is also, by the way, the home of the smiley face. “Part of the attraction of Don’s flamingos is that it’s hard to explain why they are fascinating or special,” Abrams told the BBC.įeatherstone was born Jan. Marc Abrams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research magazine, tried to explain their appeal. But somehow the plastic pink flamingo caught people’s attention in ways that nothing else did. The plastic pink flamingo wasn’t the only widely used product to come out of Leominster’s plastic factories (think Tupperware). Little did he know that the eye-catching lawn ornament would sell 20 million copies, inspire several films and become a cultural icon both loathed and revered. Don Featherstone made landscape history in 1957 when he designed the plastic pink flamingo for a Leominster, Mass., plastics company.

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