Archie's designs and manufactures their own. "If you don't think the rubber chicken is funny, then I don't want to know you," he said.Īhh yes, the rubber chicken. There is one item at Archie McPhees that Pahlow favors more than any other. "I have had an incredible rich and lucky life to indulged such a ridiculous predilection of absurdity and funny and goofy things year after year after year and make a living from it," Pahlow said. "We made this armadillo purse," Pahlow said. Pahlow, David Wahl and their band of eccentric curators of the ludicrous, the curious and the peculiar have designed more than 3,500 products and one of each of them is stored. He started it in 1983 and used to walk around with bags of strange toys selling them on the street. It's a really deep personal thing for me." "It's about finding some kind of comfort and pleasantness in an absurd and difficult world. "That is an interesting question," Pahlow replied. "What is this store really all about, anyway?" I tried. What exactly do you ask a guy who gave yodeling pickles to the world? "I think I am a terribly humorous guy, but others find me almost abnormally introverted," Pahlow said. Touring Archie McPhee with the man who created it all is an experience. "I came in to buy a Ruth Bader Ginsburg air freshener for my car," said one customer. for your fingers, lobster claws, crazy hats - all kind, two-headed babies, punching nuns, and bacon flavored floss. "It's iconically Seattle to us.," said one woman.Īrchie McPhee is known for, among other things, its light-up unicorns, cat masks, little hands and feet. The man presiding over this theater of the absurd is Mark Pahlow, and the ideas that make it out of the brainstorming sessions end up in what has to be the oddest toy store in all the world. "Just so we are clear, this a regular pickle, but it is inhabited by a ghost," one said. It's a Claw-n ornament."Īt one point, the idea of a "haunted pickle" is thrown out. I don't know what it looks like, but a straw with a claw on it. Mark Pahlow with Gibson Holub and David Wahl, Who Would Buy This? The Archie McPhee Story, Seattle: The Accoutrements Publishing Co., 2008, ISBN 978-0-978.What in the world is going on behind the scenes at the Seattle institution known as "Archie McPhee"? Well, sheer lunacy and joy.Ī brain-storming session at the company is anything but ordinary.In 2018, Archie McPhee opened the Rubber Chicken Museum inside its Wallingford location. In June 2009 Archie McPhee moved from its Ballard location to Wallingford, a Seattle neighborhood on the other side of Phinney Ridge, west of the University of Washington. Pearl later posed for a 13 cm hard plastic doll, and librarians from all around the world registered their dismay at its "amazing push-button shushing action!" Īrchie McPhee has since been featured in Scientific American's "Technology and Business" review and Time magazine's fifty coolest websites of 2005. In 2002, Nancy Pearl told Pahlow over dinner that librarians like herself "perform miracles every day". Its kitsch appeal received further national attention from the Librarian Action Figure. It became a popular Seattle tourist destination while maintaining enough countercultural credentials that Ben & Jerry's Wavy Gravy ice cream was introduced at a party on the premises in 1993. The company's line expanded from rubber chickens to glow-in-the-dark aliens, bacon-scented air freshener, and hula-girl swizzle sticks among other items. Begun in the 1970s in Los Angeles as the mail-order business Accoutrements, in 1983 it opened a retail outlet dubbed "Archie McPhee" after Pahlow's wife's great-uncle. Archie McPhee is a Seattle-based novelty dealer owned by Mark Pahlow.
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