These days, the marketplace is awash in covetable, cute toys with avid followings, most notably Jellycats, Squishmallows and Labubus.Unsplash
Erin Chau goes hunting a few times a week.
Her quarry? Jellycats, plush toys of British origin that first launched in 1999 but have taken the Internet by storm since 2020, retailing around $100 each.
“Sometimes the stores will have one or two of the rare ones that have just come in, but those sell so fast,” says Chau, a Toronto-based content creator. “It’s luck of the draw, but that’s the fun of it. You never know what you’re going to find.”
Chau has a circuit of Jellycat stockists she likes to hit: The Indigos on Bloor and in the Eaton Centre, Kol Kids on Queen West, Bergo in the Distillery District.
Right now, she has a few specific Jellycats on her wishlist, including the highly-coveted Rolie Polie Giraffe, as well as a Cheesecake and a Strawberry Milkshake that are both exclusive to FAO Schwartz in New York.
If (or when) Chau does acquire them, those Jellycats will be joining her collection of 144 others – a particularly impressive number considering she only started collecting in earnest last October, when they dropped a holiday collection that included a bunny in a snowsuit and a hot chocolate she couldn’t resist.
“I ended up buying the whole collection,” she says. “And then I just went down the rabbit hole and started to get obsessed with them.”
Chau is not alone in her passion for collecting plushies. These days, the marketplace is awash in covetable, cute toys with avid followings, most notably Squishmallows, Jellycats and Labubus. And as anyone who remembers the Beanie Baby fever of the 1990s will attest, this isn’t our first brush with toys that spark a frenzy.
“Every decade, we’ve seen these toy or collectible-based hype cycles,” says Markus Giesler, a consumer sociologist and professor of marketing at York’s Schulich School of Business. “People get really excited, there’s a great deal of buzz, which in turn amplifies the demand.”
What is different now, rather than in the era of the Cabbage Patch Doll or the Furby, is social media, a key vector in giving these crazes the community that Giesler says is essential to their longevity.
“You need like-minded people with whom you can actually talk about this,” he says, pointing to something consumer researchers call a “consciousness of kind,” a feeling of belonging to a group.
He explains that people may be drawn to collecting for different reasons – some people might love the satisfaction of detective-like acquisition, some might feel emotionally drawn to these cute objects, others just like to be part of a moment – but the end result is the same.
“The beautiful thing is you have an object that galvanizes all these interests and motivations – financial, emotional, economic, community – and finds something that they see as meaningful,” Giesler says. “And that’s what makes it so powerful.”
Chau experiences the phenomenon first-hand: When a friend travels, for example, she’ll ask them to bring her one of the location-exclusive “rare” Jellycats. Her hobby is also something she shares with her father, a lifelong collector of Blue Jays memorabilia himself.
But the real buzz comes online. Chau frequently posts about Jellycats on social media, and often gets DMs from fellow collectors she’s connected with on various apps.
“People will be like, ‘I just saw the rare onyx dragon at Indigo Eaton Centre,’ and I’m like, ‘I have to go!,’” she says, noting that she’ll often be thanked by other collectors when she posts about what she’s seen on her own hunts. “My job is very isolating sometimes because I’m making social media videos, so it’s just fun to be able to talk to people about something that I love. Also, I don’t really have friends IRL [in real life] who love Jellycats the way I do.”
You may think that social media, with its ability to make something ubiquitous overnight, could mean that our current batch of plushies have shorter trend lifespans than their analog predecessors.
Labubus, for instance, were everywhere two years ago but feel like they’ve faded from the kind of explosive mainstream relevance they had when celebrities including K-Pop star Lisa and footballer David Beckham were seen with them.
Giesler argues that social media can actually have an opposite effect, extending their lifespan.
“Social media adds fuel to the fire, and as cycles get faster, they become more extreme. But there’s also the possibility for revivals,” he says. “It has the ability to resuscitate and reconfigure brand communities. It helps inject new meaning, new images, new creativity. Social media is generative like that.”
He also adds that toy companies are also now incredibly good at navigating these hype cycles, even employing consumer sociologists and anthropologists to help them extract maximum commercial value.
“Toy makers are meticulously strategic,” he says. “They ask themselves, what can we do to make that community and emotional experience last as long as possible?”
Elisa Gozzi, Toronto-based toy expert and content creator, does think the appetite for Labubus specifically is softer, but she points to a whole new batch of soft toys on the rise: Squishables, particularly notable for having a Plague Doctor model, and Canada-based Sad Nuggie, which just opened at store at the Eaton Centre, are two brands on her radar.
As a collector herself, Gozzi says that nostalgia often drives adult toy fans like her. “I’ve never really liked the idea of growing up too much,” she says. “I’m 34, but I don’t feel like I’m that age. I think it’s something that keeps you closer to that past.”
Gozzi does know some plushie collectors who will buy two of a kind: One to keep for themselves, one to re-sell if it’s particularly rare or desirable.
“I have another friend who buys a toy, and he’s very happy about it. And then he takes a picture of the toy, and he re-sells it,” she says. “Sometimes it’s really just the feeling of, ‘Yes, I got this thing!’”
That said, she cautions against anybody hoping that their plushie collection will make their fortune. (A sobering reality check: Most Beanie Babies today are worth $5, and that’s a generous estimate.) There are some plushies – usually limited-editions or collaborations – that can have inflated resale value, but there’s no guarantee they’ll hold onto it in the long term.
“I’ve never thought about them [as an investment.] I buy what I like, and then when I’m tired of something I re-sell it,” Gozzi says. “It’s tricky. It’s like the art market. I wouldn’t recommend that you buy for an investment because you don’t really know how the market could go.”
For her part, Chau hopes to one day pass along her Jellycat collection to any future children. In the meantime, she’ll keep collecting.
“I have rules for myself. They have to be either pink, because that’s my favourite colour, or they have to be rare or have significance to something in my life,” she says. “Like, I bought a baseball because I’m a huge Jays fan. I want to be able to look at my collection and explain why it’s special to me as opposed to just having a million.”
As for which Jellycat will be lucky number 145 in her collection? She’s got the holiday release date later this September circled on her calendar.