Florido Sindy – Sindy de Florido

Well OSM has undertaken some marathons over the years, but the Florido pages have taken a whole year of research and writing, and rewriting, and reconsideration and rewriting and then some more rewriting.

Some of you will know that adding the Florido Sindys to the museum has been a long-held ambition. But as with the Dutch Sindys, where we were ably helped by Patricia Ruiter, we were conscious Florido would need help from a Spanish collector. In 2024, I was chatting to María Pilar Montero García about our love of Florido and she offered to help us. Maria is a lifelong collector of Florido Sindy. This is what she would like to add to the blog:

Sindy was my childhood doll and I loved her face and articulation. I played with her so much that her inner elastic snapped and she fell apart. And then Sindy was discontinued in Spain! I started slowly collecting as a child as a reaction to this experience, and some of the dolls shown here are from that time. My family was supportive, and my sister Pepa has helped us find some of the bits we were missing for these pages. It’s been an absolute honour to work with Annie for these pages. The museum is a labour of love and she works tirelessly for it on top of being incredibly smart. There is a lot of effort and thinking behind these pages, from the layout to searching for information and presenting it. When did Florido cease activity? Were these two Sindys made from the same mould? How many variants are there for this outfit? Is this packaging original? The evidence needs to be weighted and judgements made. It is very satisfying when the pieces of the puzzle start coming together, even if the puzzle can never be complete.

OSM is often blessed with help from kindred spirits who share our ideals and values, and Maria is no exception. Early on she decided that Google translate was not yet sophisticated enough to handle the translation to Spanish to her satisfaction and for her this was not good enough. If we were going to do this, the Spanish version had to be right, and so she translated everything. Personally, with my limited language skills reading the translations of what the catalogue text and Florido advertisements actually said was a real pleasure. The cheese competition where children were urged to eat more cheese to get their chosen toy is a real favourite!

From my perspective, we have never handled bi-lingual pages before and I needed to work out if I even had the skills to handle such a task. I did a lot of reading on best practice for the task and I think we have managed it, but do let us know what you think?

To begin with, it was easy. Just write what was in the catalogues, but then you start wondering about the detail? Now Maria is very partial to spreadsheets, and so we had spreadsheets for everything! Backing card colours, specific designs of outfits, shoes, and even the Sindys and their hair colour. It was brain bleeding, but we could always find a reason to have another spreadsheet! But other decisions were quite simple, we would use Maria’s dolls collected from childhood so as to show as many Florido examples as possible, and I would cover the Florido boxes and boxed outfits.

We need to acknowledge the other kindred spirits who have helped us. We must thank Sandra Millington who knew we were looking at Florido and sent OSM her enigmatic Exinmex Sindy to look at, and what a lovely Sindy! We didn’t know what she was. Coincidentally, Maria had also bought an Exinmex Sindy from the auctioneers Richard Wintertons and so we contacted them to ask about Maria’s Sindy as we knew absolutely nothing about these dolls. Ben Winterton was very helpful, he didn’t know of Exinmex Sindys either, but he very kindly shared what he knew. Thank you, Sandra and Ben.

A big question for us was why Spain had their own Sindy and so that got us onto the Exin connection, and what was that all about? Maria started reading every book which covered Exin and I went looking for British connections. We got quite a long way but then decided to join the EXIN Coleccionables Facebook group because we still felt there was more to uncover. The administrator Iñigo Rincón kindly allowed us to post our question, and we are grateful to Madel Man Montes who replied and pointed us firmly in the direction of Josep Maria Arnau Pibet and Madelman. Thank you both for your kind help.

I couldn’t read the Spanish books, but I started looking online at websites which could be translated into English (Maria was absolutely right, some translations made no sense at all) and began trawling through the Spanish Registro Mercantil Central (the official registry for business). Then I found a blog hosted by José Torralba on the Madelman factories. So we wrote to him, turned out he was the co-editor of https://www.enciclopediamadelman.com/ and he knew Jon Diez de Ulzurrun who wrote the “Informe Madelman” books which Maria was reading. The two Madelman collectors decided to help us, and Jon who is a mine of information and loves documentation shared anything which even just referred to Florido. We found some wonderful additional pictures which we had never seen of Florido Sindy, and he has generously allowed us to use them. Thank you so much Jon and José for sharing your knowledge.

Lastly the Florido pages wouldn’t be as complete, nor in Spanish, without Maria’s awesome and considerable effort. Thank you, Maria, it wasn’t always easy, but we did have a lot of fun on this journey.

Having written everything down, we hope our pages do justice to Florido Sindy. If you are able to add to our pages, or have any observations or comments, do get in touch.

There are 14 new pages 7 in English and 7 in Spanish and the Sindy Galleries have also been updated.

Happy New Year from Our Sindy Museum!