Objects of Desire : Gotta have that portrait of Elvis? The ‘Star Trek’ chess set? The Franklin Mint is banking on our passion for collecting.
It is a typical Sunday in a typical town, somewhere near or far from here, and a typical couple (we’ll call them Tom and Toni) are poring over their newspaper’s Sunday magazine.
“Oh, honey,” says Tom. “What I really need is this Wings of Gold, Solid Gold Majestic Eagle, Genuine Onyx Ring.
“It says, right here, that it’s ‘the ultimate symbol of those things we value the most.’ ”
“What a good idea, sweetheart,” Toni replies. “You order the ring, and I’ll order the First Officially Authorized John Wayne Collector Plate. He ‘began as a movie star,’ you know, ‘and became a legend.’ He was ‘loved and respected around the world as the symbol of America at its very best.’ ”
Tom and Toni, as we mentioned, are Typical. They collect. And here at the Franklin Mint, where more than $600-million worth of collectibles were sold last year, this practice makes for a truly happy habit.
“I believe that everyone collects,” says Lynda Resnick, who co-owns the Mint with her husband, Stewart. “I think collecting is in our blood as humans.”
For the Franklin Mint--a 27-year-old company that has no connection with the U.S. Mint--this passion to acquire translates to a wildly successful direct-mail business specializing in what Lynda Resnick describes as “things people want to need.”
Skin-care products are among the latest offerings from an inventory that also includes sculpture and soup tureens. There are $100 miniature Rolls-Royces, a desktop Gold’s Gym, replicas of characters from “Gone With the Wind,” urns patterned after rare Chinese porcelain, Arthurian swords, a $495-Monopoly set and a $960 “Star Trek” chess set. Stravinsky’s “The Firebird” suite hums forth when a golden $4,800 Faberge-type egg is opened. A “Teddy Bear’s Picnic” collector’s plate might cost in the neighborhood of $25. A diamond-encrusted “Star of the North” wristwatch is yours for $10,000, no credit cards accepted.
In honor of the Mint’s recent licensing agreement with Graceland, an Elvis portrait in a blue suede frame will soon be released. A licensing accord with the Vatican is so new that no one at the Mint will say just which works of art are slated for reproduction. (Your own Pieta? A Sistine Chapel ceiling, available in 33 monthly payments?) Masterpieces from the Louvre have also been replicated, such as the cobalt blue “Winged Victory” that stands guard outside the Mint’s executive offices.
The push to bring “affordable art” to consumers around the world makes this vast complex on a rural road outside Philadelphia feel like a high-stakes Santa’s workshop. The 1,500 employees are casually clad, but they radiate relentless intensity, like so many busy elves.
The Mint is Madison Avenue and an assembly line, all wrapped into one. It is artists and advertising specialists, photographers and “price point” experts. A cheerful team spirit blends with a sense of in-house competition--a high school without the cheerleaders. In 1992, these combined forces introduced about 400 new objets --one for every day of the year, and then some.
The stepped-up pace of production reflects the apparently endless entrepreneurial energy of part-time Angelenos Stewart and Lynda Resnick, who purchased the Franklin Mint from Warner Communications in 1985 for $167.5 million. The company, founded in 1966, had failed to prosper under Warner, which acquired it in 1981. (The Mint had also had a run-in with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which charged that top officials profited in the late 1970s by selling stock before damaging financial news was made public. The officials were ordered to turn over profits that the SEC said they had made illegally.)
The Resnicks had tracked the Mint for several years. From her office in Los Angeles, Lynda Resnick recalls how “I used to say to Stewart, ‘Let’s go into competition with them. We could do it so much better.’ ”
Her husband’s response: “You know, start-ups are such a pain, honey. Let’s just buy it.”
For Lynda Resnick, this decision turned out to be a sublime business opportunity.
“I feel like everything I ever did in my life led me to the Franklin Mint,” she says.
The Resnicks came to the Mint armed with buckets of money and a mandate to transform it from a sleepy purveyor of coins and Hummel-like statuary into what they regard as a major aesthetic empire. While they have been known to compare their corporate mission to that of the Medicis, who subsidized Renaissance artists, the Resnicks also liken their undertaking to the 19th-Century studio of Louis Comfort Tiffany.
With business acumen honed by decades of individual and joint successes, Lynda and Stewart Resnick work in adjoining offices here, and operate as corporate extensions of one another. At the Mint, their names are invoked in reverential tones, and usually in a single breath--”LyndaandStewart”--as if they were one person.
“I’ve always said that Stewart and I together make one perfect person,” Lynda Resnick says. “We’re like little salt and pepper shakers.”
This image might conjure up notions of Ma and Pa Kettle.
But “it would be silly to say they run a mom-and-pop organization,” says Scott Schaefer, a longtime friend who serves as the Resnicks’ personal art adviser. “But it’s very much a hands-on operation.”
Or, as Jack Wilkie, a Mint vice president, puts it, “She’s the marketing and aesthetic genius. He’s the financial and organizational genius.”
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Stewart Resnick worked his way through UCLA by scrubbing windows. By the time he was at UCLA Law School, he was prospering as head of an office cleaning company. When in residence in Beverly Hills, the man who once washed windows holds forth from a cream-colored chateau on Sunset Boulevard.
Raised outside Philadelphia, Lynda Rae Resnick was 19 when she started her own advertising business. Ten years later, she set up her own interior design firm. Both enterprises earned acclaim. Just weeks ago she was selected outstanding businesswoman of the year by the Los Angeles Advertising Women. Art & Antiques magazine has also named her one of the top 100 collectors in America.
About 20 years ago, the Resnicks combined personal and professional forces. It was a second marriage for both, and between them, they have five children from their previous marriages. Among their first joint business efforts was Teleflora, the flower-by-wire service.
The Resnicks also own American Protection Industries, an alarm company. Another Resnick holding, Roll International, is among California’s largest agricultural ventures, accounting for many of the almonds, pistachios and olives produced in the Golden State.
Together, they serve on the board of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Stewart Resnick, a committee member at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, collects Old Master sculpture from the 16th to 19th Centuries, according to Schaefer, a vice president at Sotheby’s in New York. Lynda Resnick, who is also on boards at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, collects French and Italian paintings from the 17th and 18th Centuries. Jean-Honore Fragonard is among her favorite artists.
Wilkie, who joined the Mint two years after the Resnicks took over, says it is impossible to exaggerate the degree to which they have remolded the operation. The company founded here in the Delaware Valley, opposite the Wa-Wa Dairy, had ingots and numismatics as its focus. A few foreign governments had currency printed at the old Franklin Mint, and sweepstakes tokens were also manufactured.
At that time, says Wilkie, the Mint’s “customer-base profile” probably would have shown that an average buyer was female, was 55 or older and had an above-average income. Under the Resnicks’ influence, “our age has been driven down to about 42 or 43,” Wilkie says. Female buyers continue to outnumber males and their income remains above average.
“As the business grew and evolved, the product evolved,” Wilkie explains--to the point where coins represent less than 3% of the Mint’s total business. To accommodate the growing product line, the Resnicks also expanded the Mint’s manufacturing facilities. Items sold by the Mint are now made in Los Angeles, China and Malaysia, as well as the plant here.
The “constantly evolving” scope of the product line makes the focus of the Franklin Mint difficult to pinpoint, Wilkie agrees. And while “you’d be hard-pressed to pick up any magazine and not find a product made by the Franklin Mint,” Wilkie says, “most consumers are only seeing a glimpse of it.”
About half of the Mint’s 10 million buyers come from the United States. All Mint customers are immediately assigned a profile describing their hobbies and collecting preferences. These buyers then receive “targeted solo mailings” informing them of specific products that may not be available through the more generalized advertising campaigns. They also may be sent more detailed descriptions of certain products. Collectors’ groups, which number in the hundreds in this country, may get product-specific videotapes as well.
Mint purchasers also receive what is known as “collateral”--a complete description of the product that Wilkie says “helps a person to appreciate what he has just purchased.”
As vice president of the Mint in charge of company services, Ed Trautman, has been telling the story behind the products for close to 30 years. Trautman writes the Mint’s ad copy--one of its most visible forms of public awareness. Occasionally, he admits, this job takes on almost awesome qualities, as he ponders the possibility that generations yet unborn may one day treasure the collectibles he is extolling today.
(In 1978, “60 Minutes” ran a segment on the resale market for collectibles, focusing on the Franklin Mint. At the time, one company official said the report was “very damaging.”)
Maureen Drdak, an artist at the Mint since 1976, sees her work in a more pragmatic light.
“I was trained in fine arts,” she says. “But a fine artist has to eat.”
Drdak insists that the caliber of her work is undiminished by its mass-produced nature. Still, she says, “I do not become personally involved. I am trying to satisfy the needs of collectors. I’m very clear on that.”
Drdak and the 100 or so other artists who work on site (worldwide, the “network” of artists who do work for the Mint numbers about 2,900) remain equally accountable to the Resnicks. Specifically, Lynda Resnick personally oversees the design and development of every item produced by the Franklin Mint. She retains final right of veto or approval at any stage of production.
“Lynda could say anything,” Wilkie says, his voice filled with respect. “And often does.”
One thing Lynda Resnick does say frequently is that even in a difficult economy, luxury is a relative concept.
“Here’s a housewife in Des Moines and she sees this ad for Scarlett O’Hara in the beautiful green dress, from when she cut up the draperies,” Resnick says. That housewife may need to buy sneakers for the kids, “but if she buys this $395 doll, it’s only $30 a month.” Tightly corralled, the process of manufacturing and marketing each Franklin Mint product is efficient--and also costly. Most products have a nine-month gestation period. And with such a high volume of individual goods in development, “major, major bucks go into this process,” Wilkie says.
Because the company is privately held, no profit figures are available. But the $600-million figure cited for annual purchases in 1992--up from $350 million in 1987--would itself be considered major in many manufacturing circles.
But while profit is clearly never forgotten, a certain philosophy also permeates the Mint’s corporate psyche. Terms like “purchase motivation” or “perceived value” (meaning what a particular item means to a particular consumer) are at the heart of any discussion of “the collecting mentality.” Focus groups continue to explore the mind-set that drives people to acquire; sometimes, the Resnicks sit in on these meetings.
“I think there is this perception of collectors sitting at home and cataloguing things,” Wilkie says. “But it’s not like that at all. Collectors are everybody. They’re all of us.”
As editor and publisher of the Almanac, the Mint’s magazine for collectors, Barbara Cady has spent years corresponding with Mint customers. She has concluded that “part of the joy of collecting isn’t just possessing the object. It’s also knowing about the object, and sharing that knowledge. It’s become a form of self-education--and a form of socializing.”
Lofty ideals aside, the scope of the Mint’s business is so enormous, Wilkie says, that “we’re almost more of a leisure and entertainment company” than an empire based on collectibles. With the recent launch of a half-dozen Franklin Mint retail stores, and with plans for catalogues, clothing, a fragrance called “Extravagance” and other ventures, there seems little limit to the Mint’s potential presence.
“That’s the beautiful thing,” Lynda Resnick says. “The Mint is my life, and it reinvents itself every day.”
