“Workers have to strap themselves in to get lifted up.”Īisle after aisle, thousands of McPhee products are cloistered in cardboard. “They had to get special forklifts,” Wahl said. Now he helps create what goes inside those boxes, which are stacked floor-to-ceiling in the towering warehouse of this Costco for connoisseurs of the strange. “I got a job packing boxes,” he said, “and I’ve been here for 21 years.” While looking for work, he saw a help wanted ad in the paper for Archie McPhee.

Years later his wife’s job brought them to Seattle. “I said, ‘I am going to work for that company someday,'” he recalled. He became an Archie McPhee fan after seeing a catalog in the 1980s as a kid growing up in the Midwest. Wahl, whose sideline is improv and sketch comedy, spells it flawlessly. “We changed the name of Accoutrements to Archie McPhee,” Wahl said, “because the name recognition is better and people have trouble spelling accoutrements.” The name Accoutrements remains an enigma. Shana Iverson, who oversees the store and wholesale sales, is the High Priestess of Rubber Chickens. The heart of the business - “the hub of money” - is here, said David Wahl, the Director of Awesome, while giving The Herald a tour of the Mukilteo warehouse. It’s for mail-order and wholesale supply only. You can’t just walk in here and buy a rubber chicken or 10. The general public doesn’t get this close. Patches socks.Ī small sign on the door of the Mukilteo compound says “Absolutely no soliciting. Most products are more benign, such as Jane Austen toothpaste, existential coloring books and J.P. “They sent up an Army truck and took them away,” he said. Then there was the time he got surplus wooden torpedoes to sell. Those guys don’t mess around,” Pahlow said. “The Secret Service showed up and said, ‘You aren’t allowed to do that.’ They showed up with guns. Such as when he bought bales of shredded money to sell by the bag. The Mukilteo compound has stayed off the radar, with a few exceptions.

His kids are grown and he has since moved back to Seattle. On a drive he discovered Mukilteo, and moved his family and the Accoutrements headquarters there. Love brought him to Seattle, and he opened the Archie McPhee retail store in 1983. It was my MBA in real life,” he said in an interview at his Mukilteo office that was so messy he wouldn’t allow photographs. “I figured out how things were bought and sold and what people wanted. He settled in California and started selling novelties. “Having been born and raised in Ohio, I understand boredom in a profound way,” he writes.Īfter high school, he hitchhiked through Europe and Africa, doing odd jobs to support his odyssey. The introduction to his book “Who Would Buy This?” begins: “Archie McPhee was created because reality just wasn’t living up to my expectations.”Īs a kid, he was fascinated more by the ads in comic books for X-ray specs and Sea-Monkeys than the cartoons. Or that his foot is the model for the tiny vinyl feet that go on fingers, another McPhee smash hit. If you met Mark Pahlow at a party or in line at the QFC, you’d never peg the tall, soft-spoken man as the king of freakish finger monsters. This is the company to contact if you need a lot of rubber chickens - fast. Some of the neighboring plants make parts for airplanes. Or what that word accoutrements even means. Most residents have no idea it’s there or what’s inside. Since 1996, the Accoutrements flagship has been tucked on 47th Avenue West in Mukilteo, a few blocks from the YMCA. On Trip Advisor, it is ranked 17th in Shopping in Seattle. The store relocated to Ballard and in 2009 moved to its current site on a busy corner on North 45th Street in Wallingford.

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