Bobble
Heads !

Ex-SAS Soldier is King of the Bobbleheads? 

Creating Dolls is an International Money Maker for an ex-SAS Soldier

Malcolm Alexander's life has taken many unusual twists and turns since he left the NSW South Coast town of Moruya, but none so strange as being crowned the unofficial King of the Bobbleheads.

"I'd been running a promotions company for a couple of years when someone rang and asked if I could make bobbleheads," Alexander says.

"I said, 'Of course, I can', but at the time I'd really no idea what they were talking about."

It didn't take him long to discover that bobbleheads were small dolls with big smiles and over-sized nodding heads. They date back to 16th-century China and beyond, but enjoyed fad popularity in the US in the 1950s and '60s.

Alexander was asked by the San Francisco Giants baseball team, for 35,000 bobbleheads of Willie Mays, one of the team's past heroes, for a match-day giveaway. Alexander, a former counter-terrorism expert who had moved to the US in 1989 to marry, took on the task.

The rest is hysteria.

In five years, the annual turnover of Alexander Global Promotions has grown from next to nothing to more than $US20 million. A production line of about 4000 people has been created in China to make the meticulously detailed, hand-painted ceramic figures.

Alexander's total bobblehead population now stands at about 18 million. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of the 5000 characters are past and present American sports stars: baseballers, boxers, basketballers, footballers, golfers, tennis and ice hockey players, and NASCAR motor racing drivers.

Alexander, who is based in Seattle, has also diversified into club mascots, cartoon characters, movie superheroes, pop stars and political characters.

"We've been doing George W. Bush since the last [presidential] election," he says. "There's George in a suit, George on the farm, and so on. We've just introduced a John Kerry."

How do sales compare? "They're running pretty much neck and neck," Alexander says diplomatically. He's turned down Osama bin Laden - "It wouldn't be right" - but fancies doing "Little Johnny [Howard]". If there is sufficient demand.

With a strategic marketing push that prompted one American business writer to compare him to the ancient Chinese emperor Qin, whose loyal army was preserved in clay, Alexander has led the bobblehead invaders into dozens of other countries. 

They include Canada, Britain, Japan, Israel, Turkey and, recently, Australia, where Alexander has supplied models of Australian football players and members of rock bands such as the Rolling Stones and Kiss.

Sometimes, Alexander stops and wonders quite how, at the age of 45, he arrived at this point in his career. Certainly, nothing had quite prepared him for it. After leaving school, he attended Duntroon military college before joining the SAS.

He left the army to join his future wife, Debbie, whom he had met in Europe. He arrived in Chicago, her home town, without a job, but after contacting the Australian consulate was put in touch with a local steel company that had been bought by a Queensland-based company.

"I was given a start in international sales, I think on the basis that I was Australian and that I'd travelled a lot," explains Alexander, who remains a regular visitor to NSW.

When he, his wife and young family - Trevor, 10, and Hayley, 8 - moved from Chicago to Seattle in search of a better lifestyle, he had to start all over again, with his own company.

"There was enough fear and nervousness in the pit of my stomach to make sure I got out, started knocking on doors, drumming up business." Now much of it comes knocking for him.

Alexander has already started scaling back the bobblehead component of his overall business, from 90 per cent to about 60 per cent. Not that he fears for the future of the figures, which are the result of many hours of design and require the permission of the subject.

"There is a fad element to them," he says. "But what happens is that certain figures go in and out of fashion."

He says that because of their weight and durability, and because the majority cannot be bought in shops, they are not plastic toys, but big-boys' collectables.

For proof, just check out the online auction site eBay.

Excerpted from www.smh.com.au