Is it kitsch, tacky, or a classic? In her book Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, nature writer Terry Tempest Williams declared that the plastic pink flamingo was “our unnatural link to the natural world.”

When designer and sculptor Donald Featherstone graduated from the school of the Worcester Art Museum in 1957, he took a position at Union Products, a maker of plastic lawn ornaments in Leominster, Massachusetts. These products appealed to homeowners of the postwar working class looking to add some flair to their property. One of Featherstone’s first assignments was to sculpt a three-dimensional flamingo. Since using a live flamingo model was not an option, he worked from photographs in National Geographic. The result was a sculpted clay pair of Phoenicopterus Ruber Plasticus, as he later jokingly referred to his creations. They were three feet tall and intended to be sold as a pair—one stood upright and alert, the other stooped as if grazing. The pair of birds sold in the Sears catalog for $2.76 with simple instructions: “Place in garden, lawn, to beautify landscape.”

Americans have long connected the flamingo to South Florida, where flamingos once lived in great numbers. This was especially true in Miami Beach, a vacation destination for the wealthy for decades; one of the first luxury hotels built there was The Flamingo. During the 1980s, America’s love of the bird only grew with the popularity of television shows like Miami Vice. Plastic pink flamingos were given as birthday, housewarming, and moving presents. They replaced the plastic reindeer in the Christmas lawn tableaux during other seasons.

So how is this plastic bird made? When Featherstone’s flamingos were initially produced, the two halves of each bird were injection molded, then glued together. Things changed in the 1970s when Union Products began manufacturing the birds with blow molding technology, which is still used to this day. After the pieces come out of the mold, the bills are painted yellow and black using petroleum-based paints and the legs are added from cut lengths of rolled steel made from iron and other ores. 

Featherstone designed over 650 lawn ornaments, but none became as famous as the pink plastic flamingo. Every year Featherstone added a flamingo to his lawn to commemorate the date of his bird’s birth, with 57 examples on display when he died in 2015. In 1987 he modified his molds by inscribing his autograph on the bird’s rump, beneath the tail feathers, to distinguish his design from copies. In 1996 Featherstone was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in Art for his flamingo. 

Union Products stopped production of the plastic pink flamingo in 2016, but a few years later, the Cado Company bought the rights to the Featherstone plastic pink flamingo. It continues to be manufactured; with over 20 million pairs sold as of 2018, sales are still going strong with no signs of slowing down. And not to worry, the tradition of “flocking” a friend or neighbor by filling their lawn with pink plastic flamingos also continues.