Little Ireland: Emigrants snap up quirky magnets created by Irish grandmother
Patricia Pierce’s clay creations offer a little piece of our modern culture to nostalgic emigrants, writes .
HER husband Frank used to say: ‘Is there anything else coming out of the oven besides those?’
They weren’t even edible, laughs Patricia Pierce.
At the time, over five years ago, she was creating handmade clay pieces of art at her kitchen table and then ‘baking’ them — including miniature batch loaves of bread, bags of chips, and chicken fillet rolls.
These scaled-down pieces were then transformed into fridge magnets, to send to emigrants as a reminder of what they were missing from home.
“I was already selling them — you start off with friends and family. I had a nephew in Dubai and friends who had children abroad and we were just saying wasn’t it very hard to find anything to send them that isn’t a leprechaun or a sheep or the paddywhackery usual stuff, just a little keepsake of home.
“I asked my nephew what he was missing and he said his chicken fillet roll, so I made one and then his friends wanted one and it sort of snowballed from that,” Patricia tells .
“These are the things they wouldn’t be able to get abroad — they wouldn’t even know what they were talking about, like coddle and bread, crisps on bread, batch loaf, chipper chips on bread, all the things they really miss.”
At the time, the Dublin-based grandmother of one, who will be 59 next month, realised she had a budding business in her hands, now called Quirky Irish Icons, which she hoped she could run online — but she had never opened a computer and was still using her old-fashioned Nokia phone.
“I needed to be connected with the expats abroad on Facebook and that sort of thing, but I had absolutely no training at all. I didn’t know anything about business.
“Now I’m Twittering and Instagramming and I’m LinkedIn and Facebooking and I have the website — and any orders I get, I have the phone there and it clicks ping; it’s fantastic.”
Patricia’s education in business and computer training came through the support of staff at her local enterprise board, who recognised that her individual art pieces were indeed quirky and full of their creator’s Dublin humour.
I thought I had a business already but I hadn’t a clue — I had no business plan. They mentor and give the advice that regardless of whether you have the best invention ever in the world, you still need the basics of running a business.
So I did the Start Your Own Business course which took the guts of a year to do — it was brilliant. I wanted an online business — me, who hadn’t even got a computer. How was I going to set up a website when I couldn’t even use a computer? So they sent me training on that as well and I just lapped it all up.
With 17 clay creations now on sale and more ideas in the pipeline, as well as making the magnets, Patricia also frames some of the pieces under themes such as ‘Born And Bread In Ireland’, which she says has butter in the middle, surrounded by different types of bread and what we Irish do with it.
“They say that the bread is just not the same abroad and the butter is white slop,” she remarks.
Other framed pieces include Dublin City’s Poolbeg Chimneys and Moore St with a stall and street names.
In fact, when she met Taoiseach Leo Varadkar at an event for new start-ups, she gave him a frame consisting of Moore St and the Dublin 1 street sign, and the Poolbeg Chimneys, because she has seen him out running in that area.
Having the business has opened up Collingswood-based Patricia’s world too: “I’ve met loads of people and I’ve made loads of mistakes and loads of things have went wrong for me, but I’ve learnt from them all and I’m at a stage now where it’s really only starting to take off. And I feel far more confident now too.”
While she did the prototype of each piece herself by hand at first, as the orders started coming in, she got a mould made of the prototypes and also a manufacturer, through the local enterprise office. Now she makes up batches of 500 at a time.
A mother of two and a former youth development officer, what advice would she give to others about starting their own business in their mid-50s and later?
“Go for it. It’s like a new lease of life. It’s something you’re doing for yourself. At the beginning it was almost like ‘mam is on one of her rants’ or whatever, and it’s after turning into a business and they’re all real proud of me now.”
For Frank, to whom she has been married for 37 years, when he thinks back to what came out of the oven five years ago, the proof is in the pudding no doubt, that dreams can come true.
www.quirkyirishicons.ie
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