Deb Mackie
I remember sitting in my office at the Mint the day Diana died, just waiting for the sh!t to hit the fan. And it did. I worked on several of the Princess Diana pieces when I was employed in the advertising dept there. Although her brother's Diana Fund lost their "permissions" suit against them, The Mint also claimed that a portion of the proceeds were to go to a certain charity she favored. Several years later, no money had been sent to the charity, and they got in more trouble for that. At one point the Mint's lawyers tried to say that the "designer" (me) put that in the original ads without their knowledge! Yeah, I just made that one up.

Fortunately, I'd saved all the copies of everything I'd been directed to do in my file, so that didn't fly. It was the beginning of the end right there. It's still sad looking at that video--back in the late 80s, the place was decadent and GRAND, the glory days of my career. By 2000, it was like being on the deck of the Titanic. We were all just wondering who would be the next to get laid off.

Dave Anderson
The real Franklin Mint story: The Diana and other conflicts may have cost the Mint a lot of money to defend (they did not lose that one, by the way) but it takes more than a couple of lawsuits to bring down what was once a huge corporation. In the early 2000's my company was liquidating for the Franklin Mint, meaning we were buying their unsold surplus and reselling it wholesale to dealers across the country. Their "limited editions" were often 10-50,000 pieces of each item: dolls, coins, leather-bound books, paintings, diecast cars, knives, swords, and all the other collectibles they were famous for, and much of it went unsold, languishing in three huge warehouses in Delaware and Pennsylvania, some of it 10-20 years old. Why? The fact is that when ebay became really popular around the turn of the century, all the people who had been hoarding their Franklin Mint "rare collectibles" for years for their retirement or a valuable endowment to their children, began seeing the same items offered for sale at less - sometimes much less - than they paid for them many years ago. Until ebay there was no real secondary market for collectibles; all you could do is perhaps offer them in a hobby magazine or newspaper ad, and the sad fact of the matter is that since there were actually many thousands of the same item out there, they turned out to be worth very little. Once they hit ebay in numbers you would see, for example, a porcelain collector doll that the Mint sold for $295 go for $50 or $60, mint in box. We watched as the fine collectibles market literally collapsed and took the Franklin Mint with it; their sales declined rapidly as the "real" worth of their products was exposed on ebay and the internet as a whole. We helped to empty their warehouses one by one but there were many things we would not buy at any price; and some they eventually destroyed (we watched them run a bulldozer over 25,000 collector plates, because no one would pay anything for them). And the irony is that their merchandise was indeed very high quality, much of it bordering on true art. I still have many pieces of theirs on display in my home (bronze and porcelain sculptures, knives, and swords) because of their beauty, but I have no illusions about selling them someday for many times their original offering price.