"If you are a real collector, you cannot decide what to collect or when," says Suhail Zarooni, 38, as he lords over his collection of over 200 Starbucks mugs at The Collectors, an exhibition at the Wafi Shopping Mall that also includes the world's largest collections of snow globes, licence plates, rosary beads and bookmarks. "Somehow it has already come into your mind. Something clicks. Once I was sitting with my secretary in a coffee shop and he pulled out a box of matches to light a cigarette. Now I collect matchboxes."
As a collector, Zarooni is best described as a generalist and one of means. He is the chairman of the Al Zarooni Group, a sprawling conglomerate of 45 companies with interests from real estate to plastics to "Asian trading", and he treats his collections - or, in his words "my babies" - with a businessman's attention to detail and upkeep. Ten full-time employees maintain his collections and a computer database with details of their origins. "I have one personal secretary for my business and another for my collection," he says.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Zarooni owns more miniature cars (over 2,000) than anyone in the world. He has 3,000 newspapers with historically significant cover stories, including accounts of Hitler's death from 1945 and Queen Elizabeth II's wedding from 1947. He collects antique crockery, Cartier pens, Wedgwood items commemorating major events in British history, Swatch watches, stamps, 24-carat gold-plated bank notes, coins, crushed bank notes, special edition film cells and pieces from the Thai Royal Family Collection. He has gathered Princess Diana dolls with his wife and Harry Potter paraphernalia with his two sons.
A briefing on his collecting prepared by his staff reads: "This passion is homage to the intertwining of history and time which reveal new stories everyday which shape the way we as a race think and evolve." An ordinary Starbucks mug costs between $7.95 and $10.95 (Dh29 and Dh40), and city-specific mugs (available only in their hometowns) cost about $39.80 (Dh146). According to the Starbucks City Mug Wikipedia page (which details 14 varieties of limited-edition Starbucks mugs) the company started selling city-specific mugs in 1994. The release of "States of Beans" mugs in 1997 with coloured motifs from different American states. In 2004, four cities introduced art deco-style mugs. In 2005, UK shops sold mugs with photo montages. And so on. Serious collectors like Zarooni scour antique shops and eBay for harder-to-find treasures, like old mugs documenting the evolution of the coffee shop's now ubiquitous "mermaid in green circle" logo (over time the image has zoomed in on her face). Zarooni's rarest mug, from 1987, came from a seller in Germany and cost him about €500 (Dh2,891). It is slightly taller than a normal Starbucks mug, and the mermaid logo is "naughtier": it reveals her two tails and belly button.
"There are two kinds of collector," Zarooni explains. "One do it as a business and then the other collect for themselves. I'm in the second group." As collections grow, so do aspirations. Though Zarooni has one Guinness world record, he is gunning for another for the Starbucks mugs. And, in three months, he is planning to convert one of his villas in Al Barsha, Dubai, into a museum. "At first it will be open to some government people, my friends and the media, but maybe in the future the public."
One inspiration for letting in the masses was a man from India who found Zarooni at his exhibition and told him that he had travelled all the way to Dubai just to see his mug collection. "He was such a fan," Zarooni notes, adding that he receives dozens of e-mails a month from admirers."
