Michael Irwin is responsible for former president Bill Clinton’s saxophone.
No, not that saxophone. A customized telephone manufactured from a saxophone.
Current president George Bush has no reason to be jealous. Irwin and his Indianapolis, IN-based company, CustomPhones.com (http://www.customphones.com), whipped up a red, white and blue telephone for the commander in chief right after 9/11.
And for Fever Pitch, Irwin created a baseball mitt telephone to indicate exactly how obsessive a Bosox fan the hero was.
But the product line for limited edition, if not one of a kind, telephones ranges from sneakers (shades of Get Smart) to cartoon characters (Snoopy, anyone?) to retrofitting antique telephone with contemporary technology. For those who like their conversations warm and fuzzy, Irwin offers a line of such telephone enabled stuffed animals as monkeys, bunnies, and penguins, among others.
Irwin sells approximately 100,000 telephone units a year at an average price of $100. Forty percent of the business is novelty phones; the rest is made of service and high-tech business and residential equipment. He also runs companies specializing in custom lamps, clocks and radios, but they have neither the visibility nor the returns of Custom Phones as yet.
Customers include what he calls rich boy-toy people, celebrities, or just people with a favorite object they want turned into a telephone as a conversation piece. Everything – and anything – from sports equipment to models of various body parts have been turned into working telephones.
All products are made by hand and in the United States, and not on the cheap overseas, Irwin points out with pride.
Although he maintains a storefront in Indianapolis, the bulk of his customers come from the east and west coasts of the United States as well as Europe. While orders can be placed over the phone or through the Web site, the catalog is available only online.
New customers find out about Custom Phones by Web searches or mentions in such publications as Domino, which recently featured one of Irwin’s tamer creations.
Irwin, a former art student turned electrical engineer turned entrepreneur, describes his work as taking something and making it more extreme. He’s not stopping with phones, lamps, clocks and radios, but is looking at other ordinary items of home décor to “Irwinize”. Working LCD screens have been placed, Teletubbie-wise, in the tummies of stuffed animals. Ceiling fans now sport palm leaves or evoke NASCAR. He is eyeing the possibilities inherent in small home fountains.
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