The Bradford Exchange is a producer and marketer of collectible goods. Now part of the Bradford Group, it was founded in 1973 as The Bradford Gallery of Collector's Plates by J. Roderick MacArthur. The company created its first live price quotation market in 1983, but increasingly turned to creating new lines of collectibles (rather than just facilitating exchanges between collectors). The company sells its products through its website, direct mail and media advertising.
As of December 2006, the Bradford Group of companies, headquartered in Niles, Illinois, near Chicago, now includes many groups of collectibles, including Ardleigh Elliott, Ashton-Drake Galleries, Bradford Editions, Bradford Exchange, Hamilton Authenticated, Hamilton Collection and Hawthorne Village.
Under the Ashton-Drake Galleries name they have sold dolls like Gene Marshall and Blythe as well as Reborn dolls.
Famous quotes containing the words bradford and/or exchange:
“I feel all dead inside. I’m backed up in a dark corner and I don’t know who’s hitting me!”
—Jay Dratler, U.S. screenwriter, Bernard Schoenfeld, and Henry Hathaway. Bradford Galt (Mark Stevens)
“I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)