| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1964 |
| Founder(s) | Joseph Segel |
| Headquarters | Exton, Pennsylvania |
| Website | www.franklinmint.com |
The Franklin Mint is a private corporation founded by Joseph Segel in 1964. The private mint operated from Wawa, Pennsylvania but that operation has now closed. The company is now owned by a private equity firm and has limited operations in Exton, Pennsylvania, marketing coins, jewelry, diecasts, dolls, sculpture and other collectibles.
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For five decades The Franklin Mint produced and marketed "collectibles". Their product line began with manufacturing and marketing privately-minted gold and silver commemorative rounds and medallions, but branched out into other collectibles. The Franklin Mint was one of the earliest and largest minters of slot machine tokens.
It minted in its own production facility numerous sets of coins-of-the-realm, theme-based medals and ingots, selling them on the subscription plan, with buyers getting a monthly shipment and invoice. Franklin Mint struck issues in many precious and semi-precious metals. American history and art masterpiece themes were predominant, with space, important persons and other topics also quite popular. Sets were often limited by the number of subscribers, by a cut-off date or a fixed mintage, resulting in "limited editions".
From 1973 to 2000, the Franklin Mint had a division called the Franklin Library, which produced hundreds of editions of classic works of literature, in what were purported to be fine bindings. Franklin Mint purchased the Sloves Book Bindery in NYC to help jumpstart its book division in the 1970s. The most recent book offerings were produced by RR Donnelly for the Franklin Library.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Franklin Mint released a series of recordings on heavyweight virgin vinyl under the title of "The 100 Greatest Classical Recordings Of All Time." These were pressed on unique red vinyl in bound cases, as a subscription service, typically with two 12" LPs per transmission, using recordings of major-label classical musicians including the NBC Symphony under Arturo Toscanini, the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy and the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein.
In 1983, the Franklin Mint entered the die-cast car market with the 1935 Mercedes Benz 500K Roadster. In the following years, Franklin Mint produced several designs including the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, one of Franklin Mint's better-selling models. Collector knives, figurines, plates, Monopoly sets, chess sets and board games including the three dimensional chess game featured frequently in the TV series Star Trek, plaques, and other collectibles have been issued by the Franklin Mint.
The Franklin Mint was heavily reliant upon direct mail and media print ads for sales. Advertisements for Franklin Mint collectibles—including the Civil War Commemorative Chess Set among thousands of other items—were once ubiquitous in popular magazines.
In 1980, Warner Communications (now part of Time Warner) purchased The Franklin Mint for about $225 million. The combination was short lived: Warner sold The Franklin Mint in 1985 to American Protection Industries Inc. (API) for $167.5 million. However, Warner retained Eastern Mountain Sports, a retailer that The Franklin Mint had acquired in the 1970s, as well as The Franklin Mint Center, which it leased back to API.[1] API was renamed Roll International in 1993.
During the early 2000s, Roll International divested and wound down much of the Franklin Mint business. On August 31, 2006, Roll International Corp sold the remaining assets of The Franklin Mint to a group including a private equity investor and The Morgan Mint. That investor exited its investment in 2009 with new investors coming in to recapitalize the company. The new ownership is restoring The Franklin Mint by re-introducing previous products and expanding their lineup of collectibles.
Following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund was granted intellectual property rights over her image.[2] In 1998, after refusing the Franklin Mint an official license to produce Diana merchandise, the fund sued the company, accusing it of illegally selling Diana dolls, plates and jewellery.[3] In California, where the initial case was tried, a suit to preserve the right of publicity may be filed on behalf of a dead person, but only if that person is a Californian. The Memorial Fund therefore filed the lawsuit on behalf of the estate, and upon losing the case were counter sued by Franklin Mint in 2003. In November 2004, the case was settled out of court with the Diana Memorial Fund agreeing to pay £13.5 million (US $21.5 million) to charitable causes on which both sides agreed. In addition to this, the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund had spent a total of close to £4 million (US $6.5 million) in costs and fees relating to this litigation, and as a result froze grants allocated to a number of charities.[4]