Cooper Hewitt says...
Founded in the 1970s by Mark Pahlow as a mail-order business operating out of his Los Angeles apartment, Accoutrement’s early product lines included rubber lizards, acupuncture dummies, and other novelties sold in bulk to retailers. As a child, Pahlow found himself more interested in the ads for novel consumer products that he found in his comic books than in the illustrations, and today he and his staff still look to kitsch and commercial design from the 1950s and ‘60s for inspiration, billing themselves as “outfitters of popular culture.” Pahlow relocated the business to Washington State in the 1980s. In 1983 the company’s brick and mortar opened in Seattle as Archie McPhee, so-named after Pahlow’s great uncle, a jazz musician and practical joker; Accoutrements decided to nominally distinguish its retail store from its wholesale business to garner name recognition. Archie McPhee continues to serve as a retail outlet while the Accoutrement’s design and customer service teams are located in nearby Mukilteo, where 25 employees oversee operations in a 60,000 square foot warehouse. Manufacturing largely takes place in China and a majority of Accoutrements’ products are plastic. The company’s catalogs have been collected by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, and in 2008 Pahlow himself drafted a corporate history entitled “Who Would Buy This? The Archie McPhee Story.”
