Like many American couples, retired policeman Don Perlow and his wife Lynda are avid collectors. Their particular passion is for leprechaun figurines called Finnians. There are three glass cabinets crammed full of Finnians in the hallway and the living room of their Leesburg, Florida, home.
Packed together on the shelves are Phil the Fiddler, Chalky White, Mick Weed, Danny Boy, Green Fingers, Moore the Merry, the Rolling Tones, Riverprance, the ShamRockers, Father Devine, and dozens more, including loving, clever, golfing and drinking Finnians, and Finnians for anniversaries and birthdays and for Mom and a new home.
The Perlows' craze for the smiling gnomes in green buckled top hats began 12 years ago when Mr Perlow bought a Finnian for his wife in the Irish Elegance souvenir shop at 17 Singer Lane, Smithtown, New York. She loved it.
"Her mother was Irish, called McQuade, and Ireland was all she talked about," he explained, adding, "I'm of Russian origin myself; I had to fight for acceptance." He began to look for more, especially as "every time I brought one home she was like a little child on Christmas morning". It became an obsession. He and Lynda have now assembled more than 130 different Finnians, including three early clay models that the Dublin manufacturers don't even remember making.
Inspired by their hobby, the couple went to Ireland for the first time last year to meet the man responsible for the Finnians, Mr Declan Fearon, who is founder, managing director and designer of Blarney Stone Enterprises. "I felt I was going back in time," said Mr Perlow of his three-day trip. "We sat there and studied the faces of men by the roadside, and I could see the faces in the figurines."
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and many Irish people would regard the Finnians as Paddy-Irishry, perpetuating an old Barry Fitzgerald-begorrah stereotype of the Irish. But the figurines have found a niche market as collectibles, proving that there is still room for innovation in the old, old Irish economy, particularly when it comes to the United States where sentimentality sells and everyone has an Irish granny.
"The first thing Americans say is that they are cute," said Mr Fearon, during a recent visit to New York, where Blarney Stone Enterprises operates out of the Fifth Avenue offices of Enterprise Ireland. "What saves them from Paddy Irishry is that they are clever and funny." They are also very profitable. The figurines cost £24.95 (€31.68). Turnover has soared from £300,000 in 1995 to a projected £2.4 million this year. The company had earlier anticipated £3 million in sales in 2001, but the foot-and-mouth outbreak scared off many American tourists from visiting the Republic. This affected growth, which depends a lot on visitors buying a Finnian as a present before going home and starting a follow-through collection, said Mr Fearon.
"We have the fastest growing collectors' club in Europe with 34,000 registered members and it is growing by 10,000 a year," he said, adding that many orders come from their website, www.finnians.com. "We are known for bringing the leprechaun back to life. We are a recognised brand in the majority of retail stores that sell Irish goods globally and we have taken orders from places like Slovenia, Portugal, Hong Kong and Argentina."
The idea of capitalising on the Blarney Stone came to Mr Fearon on a visit to Blarney Castle in Co Cork 15 years ago. He located the open-cast quarry used for the castle at Starch Hill on the 900-acre farm of John O'Connell. At first he tried selling bits of quarry stone under glass domes or as book-ends. This was a spectacular failure, and ate up hundreds of thousands of pounds of personal funds from his day job - setting up Ladbrokes betting shops all over the Republic.
"The stone fragmented, the pieces didn't suit the retail market and in America all doors were closed on us," he said. "I would travel thousands of miles to attend shows and get no orders. Then we thought - what if we had a figure holding the stone? And we came up with the idea of Finnian, guardian of the Blarney Stone. It suddenly took off."
He got a sculptor friend, Doug Harris from Dallas, to make the first clay figures. His wife Camilla began writing biographies and messages sold with each object. The words accompanying a figurine called Charlie are typical (and could be the tongue-in-cheek company motto): "Ye might laugh and snigger but you can take it from me, when you're under pressure or in a sticky situation, there's no better friend than a load of blarney."
Each "luckstone" comes with a certificate signed by Dr John Jackson, former curator of the National Museum, confirming that the stone is cleaved lower carboniferous biomicrite from Starch Hill quarry. "We are a bunch of amateurs and we've done something the way we thought it should be done, not by any text book," said Mr Fearon, whose company employs 36 people.
The trick is to keep producing new figurines to keep collectors like Don and Lynda Perlow interested. New lines include golf figurines called "the Masters", and hand-painted "telltale teapots" in the shape of cottages in the village of "Ballykettle".
Next will be a battle for the Irish Santa market. Irish Santas are popular in the US but are all British- or American-made, said Mr Fearon. The Massachusetts firm Possible Dreams, for example, makes 1,400 different clothique Santas, of which 60 have an Irish "accent". "Ours will be different," he said. "They will be more Disney and more comical."
