By Kenneth R. Pybus
Originally Published in the Houston Business Journal, December 1, 1996
Paddy Gordon has always been a big fan of Mickey Mouse. And it’s a good thing, considering how much time she spends with Walt Disney’s premier creation.
The entrepreneurial Houston artist has designed boxes and books, desk accessories and pillows featuring the celebrated cartoon rodent and several of his animated associates for the Walt Disney Co. One of her latest creations, a plush leather chair and ottoman that features white shoes, gloves and black mouse ears, is included in Disney’s collectors catalogue and retails for a paltry $3,500.
“When you’re talking about collectors, you’re not just talking about a piece of leather,” Gordon says. “Hopefully you’re talking about an art piece. That’s what we’re focused on.”
Over the past 12 years, Gordon has gone from crafting wedding books and baby albums for Houston’s blushing brides and bouncing bundles to creating some of the most unique furniture sold by Disney, Warner Brothers Inc. and MGM Studios — all out of a Northwest Houston warehouse.
While gaining an international reputation as a leathercrafter, she’s maintained relationships with local customers and developed a broad list of out-of-the-ordinary suppliers.
“I don’t know why it happened, how I fell into doing some of this,” she says. “But really it’s just progressed naturally over the years.”
Indeed, Gordon was teaching commercial art part time at Houston Community College when she began crafting potpourri and jewelry boxes covered with fashionable fabrics for friends and relatives, with little plans to form her own company.
But the one-time manager of a local Montessori school yearned to work for herself again — this time using her artistic training. At the urging of a friend she submitted some of her boxes to a Neiman Marcus buyer in Dallas.
“I didn’t know it was supposed to be hard to sell to them — I was that naive,” she says with a laugh. “I went up there and showed them some of my product and walked out with a $5,000 order.”
Those boxes became more elaborate in time, and she began covering specialized wedding and baby books at the request of some customers. Her venture into leather came the same way, through customers who wanted customized leather albums. And she began making leather covered desk accessories, including memo boxes, pencil cups and the like, for a growing list of corporate clientele.
“I had never done that before, so I just started reading books about how to work with leather,” she says. “It sounds stupid but its true. I’m embarrassed to say it, but it’s pretty much the same skills.”
Now Gordon’s offices are brimming with all sorts of raw leather — from the common cowhide to the exotic ostrich skin. She’s made goods out of pig suede, lamb skin, alligator and Karung snake and developed a list of suppliers that rivals any leather goods manufacturer.
“Finding the right product is a key thing,” she says. “It’s important to know your vendors. I specifically tell them who we’re doing things for, and then make sure you get good hides and good service.”
Gordon’s leather wedding books caught the eye of buyers in Disney’s Fairy Tale Wedding department, which immediately bought 500 of the leather-bound picture books for their honeymooning guests.
A product development official at Disney’s California headquarters, who had seen the wedding albums, asked Gordon to submit some character-related products for possible use at Disney’s theme parks. Gordon was so excited at the possibility she stayed up all night and the next day shipped her inlaid renderings of Mickey, Minnie Mouse, Goofy and others.
“It gave me a good chance to exercise my creativity in a different way,” Gordon says.
With precise faithfulness to the original Disney characters, her designs got the nod from Disney’s old-time animators, and Disney awarded her a license to produce products bearing the Disney trademarks, which are closely guarded by the California company. In time, Gordon has earned an art contract to design, produce and sell her own products bearing the Disney characters, an agreement virtually unheard of in the industry.
“Everything we do for Disney has to be approved by Disney for correctness,” Gordon says. “They can be real sticklers for that. But I’ve never had anything sent back by them.”
Disney came calling again three years ago, when the company began opening its own galleries. For the first time, Disney buyers visited Gordon’s Houston shop and brainstormed with the local artist about her ideas for the galleries.
The resulting ideas include some intricate, and expensive, furniture — the plush Mickey chair, a set of Mickey and Minnie formal dining chairs and a table featuring a dramatic scene from Disney’s Fantasia.
“They were impressed with the scope of work we could do as a small shop,” Gordon says. “We can turn around a product quickly and do special orders without much delay because we’re small — that’s unique in the United States.”
Aside from producing for the Disney galleries, 100 of which are scheduled to open throughout the country by the year 2000, Gordon has also landed contracts to produce products for Warner Bros. and MGM. She’s sold boxes with scenes from the “Wizard of Oz” and “Betty Boop,” as well as a Riddler question-mark chair for Warner’s promotion of the movie “Batman Forever.”
In recent weeks, Paddy Gordon Designs has produced two leather-bound chairs replicating the MGM lion for a newly opened MGM Grand Hotel gallery. And she’s landed an agreement to furnish the board room for Disney Australia.
“Now it’s gotten extremely complicated with the copyright questions,” she says. “You have to be careful that the right things go to the right people for approval.”
In September, Gordon was one of four Americans invited to sell limited edition products at the Disneyana Convention for Collectors, an annual gathering where the rich and famous get their Disney memorabilia. Other attendees included Waterford Crystal and Armani clothing, and she’s been invited to return next year.
Gordon recalls it was her husband, a Rice University professor of sociology, who suggested she steer her business to an upscale clientele.
“That was a crucial decision,” she says. “If I made any mistake, it was by not pricing things high enough. It’s very hard when you’re new and shy — it’s hard to put a proper value on what you do.”