Don Featherstone was born in Massachusetts in 1936. He always had a knack for art, particularly sculpture, and graduated with a degree in art in 1957.
In 1957, the plastics industry was expanding exponentially. The recently perfected art of injection molding made creating plastic products easy, quick, and cheap. • One plastics factory in Leominster, MA, employed 5,500 people, amounting to 80% of the city’s workforce. Union Products was adding new products as fast as they could be thought up. What they needed was someone who could sculpt the original molds out of clay. At the age of 21, Don Featherstone began working for Union Products.
Among the products that Union Products made were garden decorations, but all of them were flat, two-dimensional cut-outs. The bosses asked Featherstone to sculpt three-dimensional garden decorations. He started with a girl carrying a watering can and a boy with a dog. They asked him to sculpt a duck. Featherstone adopted a live duck as a model, named it Charlie, and released it in a local pond when he was done. Next, Featherstone created his most iconic product: a pair of pink plastic flamingos, one standing erect, one dipping down as if to feed, both standing on wire legs that sink securely into lawns. • Featherstone had never met a real, live flamingo before. Fortunately, National Geographic had just published an article about flamingos, so he had good photos to use as a model. It took him about three weeks to perfect the clay model. A steel mold was created for each sculpted bird, and they were mass-produced in polyethylene. He named the first flamingo off the production line Diego. He dubbed the species Phoenicopterus ruber plasticus.
The world’s first pink plastic flamingos went on sale in the Sears catalog in 1958, selling for $2.76 for a set of two. The product was not an immediate sensation. Yet, it grew on the American people, and soon pink flamingo lawn ornaments decorated lawns from coast to coast. Featherstone eventually added his signature to the butt of every flamingo to distinguish it from knock-offs.
Eventually, pink flamingos became part of a prank culture where people would put them on others’ lawns as a joke. In 1979, in Madison, Wisconsin, over 1,000 pink flamingos were placed on the lawn in front of the Dean’s office. Years later, the city of Madison designated the plastic flamingo as the city’s official bird.
Featherstone sculpted over 750 different items over the course of his career. Ironically, Charlie the Duck outsold pink flamingos every single year up until 1986. Even Featherstone’s swan-shaped planter often outsold flamingos. Yet nothing said “American kitsch” like pink flamingos. When the pink flamingo lawn ornament turned 40, it got a write-up in National Geographic, complete with a photo contest depicting pink plastic flamingos in their natural habitat. • Featherstone eventually became CEO of Union Products, retiring in 2000 after 43 years. Union Products closed in 2006, and another firm acquired the rights to continue producing the iconic lawn ornament. They still make 1,000 a day. Today, a pair of pink flamingos can be purchased online for around $20. • Until his death in 2015, Featherstone maintained a flock of 57 flamingos in his backyard to commemorate the year they were invented. Even today, visitors leave commemorative flamingos at his grave.
