‘I have to have one of those’: plushie super-fans explain the appeal

It started with a boiled egg. Last year, Chloe Day, 25, kept seeing it all over social media. She was intrigued. It wasn’t the kind of egg you’d have for breakfast. There was a smiley face on the bright yellow yolk and little legs descending from the egg white. At 14cm tall, it was adorable – the egg part soft and fluffy and the legs made out of brown corduroy.

What Day was seeing, on social media and in shops, was an “amuseable” boiled egg by Jellycat, a brand that specialises in cute soft toys with smiley faces. “I remember it so clearly,” she says. “It kept cropping up. I thought: I have to have one of those.” Eventually, she bought one.

Since getting her first Jellycat in June last year, Day’s collection has grown substantially – she now has 252. This summer, she and her boyfriend bought their first home and one of the spare rooms will be dedicated to Jellycats, with floor-to-ceiling shelves to house her ever-expanding collection.

Day is part of a growing community of Jellycat enthusiasts. While the privately owned brand has been going since 1999, its popularity has soared in recent years. Founded in London by brothers Thomas and William Gatacre, this year marks 25 years since Jellycat first launched – and its range keeps expanding. Its offering of soft toys (also known as plushies), includes classic cuddly animals like bears and bunnies, but it also has the amuseables line (launched in 2018), which includes random objects – a baguette and a tennis ball, a cactus and a boiled egg – all with a smiley faces and legs (or, occasionally, arms). Some of the toys appeal to children. Others seem geared towards an adult audience, like the amuseable coffee-to-go, a fuzzy takeaway cup in neutral tones of cream and beige, with dangly legs and a smiley face. You can even get Jellycat bags, which are “wearable” versions of the toys, and come in a variety of designs, including a croissant, a takeaway coffee and a sausage dog. Jellycat’s toys range in size and price, too – the smaller ones start at £11, but the “gigantic” toys can cost between £750 and £1,200.

The company doesn’t share sales figures or offer interviews, saying they prefer to let the “Jellycat fans do the talking.” But in a rare interview in 2021 with MBS group, William Gatacre said the brand is all about “trying to be uplifting”, and that when they launched, they wanted to refresh the toy market, saying: “It felt tired, bare and a little bit taxidermy.” The company name was a suggestion from Thomas Gatacre’s seven-year-old son, who apparently loved jelly and cats.

As well as the Jellycat online store, the toys are stocked in shops all over the UK, including department stores like John Lewis and Selfridges as well as upmarket lifestyle stores such as the White Company. According to Selfridges, Jellycat is now the department store’s fastest-selling toy brand and its sales of Jellycat products are up 189% from last year. It’s not just in the UK – Jellycats are sold in stores across 80 countries. The company is global. In 2001, it expanded and formed a US arm, Jellycat Inc. It now has offices in London, Minneapolis, Shanghai and Seoul.

In 2018, the Gatacre brothers hit the Sunday Times Rich List, when the company was valued at £155m. Since then, it has gone from strength to strength. According to 2022 statements for Jellycat Limited (the brand’s UK arm), the company’s annual revenue increased by 72% to £146m.

The rise of Jellycat’s fans in recent years is partly down to social media, where people showcase their collections and connect with other enthusiasts. On TikTok there are 113,000 posts with the Jellycat hashtag. There are more than 729,000 on Instagram. Search for the hashtag and you’ll be bombarded with videos of people unboxing their latest purchase, or sharing their collection and dedicated Jellycat display shelves stacked with colourful toys.

The brand has a slick social media strategy, too, regularly posting Jellycat memes and news about “Jelly drops” on Instagram and TikTok, where it has 841,000 followers and 466,000 followers, respectively. Day says she has always loved collecting things – as a child, it was vintage Barbie dolls and Charlie Bears – but she says Jellycats are “The only one that’s really stuck.” That’s down to the variety of toys, the new product launches (four times a year) and being able to hunt down rare items. Some designs have been “retired”, making them more valuable. “There’s always something new to choose, and iIt’s exciting when you manage to get one that you’ve been after for a long time,” she says.

While Jellycat has been making cuddly toys for decades, it’s the newer toys she loves. “I wouldn’t say that some of the old Jellycats have the same appeal, unless you’re a diehard collector. I like the newer models, like the baked bean, the olive and the marshmallow. There’s nothing else like that.” Each of these has the signature smiley face and legs – the baked bean is a single orange bean, the olives are a pair, joined by a dark green stalk, and the marshmallow comes in a set of two, one pastel pink, one white. Day likes the aesthetic of the newer toys, like the amuseables, which bring inanimate objects to life, often in bright colours, compared to the more traditional older toys, such as bears and bunnies, in more neutral tones. She creates different displays of her Jellycats in her home, which often have a theme, like outer space.

Andrew Elliott, 25, has also enjoyed collecting toys throughout his life. But the draw he feels towards Jellycats is on another level. “Jellycats are the only thing that’s ever come into my life where I’ll see one in a shop window and think: I have to get that,” says Elliott, who lives in London. “I find it difficult to walk into a shop where I can see them and walk out without any.” He has been collecting Jellycats for about four years and has 43 of them displayed on shelves above his bed. His girlfriend bought him his first – a donkey, which is still his favourite. “I have a particular emotional attachment to that one,” he says.

His love for Jellycats has continued to grow ever since, along with his collection. “They’ve made a toy of pretty much anything you could imagine. They’re really fun to collect,” says Elliott. “They’re sort of like a modern day Beanie Baby, but not just animals.” Since many of the toys are inanimate household objects, he sometimes swaps the real thing for a Jellycat. “I like to replace stuff in the house with them every now and again. I put Jellycat fruit and veg in the fruit bowl. At work, I used to replace my colleague’s office supplies with Jellycats, things like rulers and pencils.”

At home, they spark joy. “They make me happy when I see them,” he says. “We don’t live in the most fun and friendly times, so I think surrounding your house with smiley faces is a good thing.”

But for some, collecting Jellycats goes beyond their pleasing aesthetic and cute, smiling faces and offers a form of self-care. Nell Richards, 40, who lives in Dorset, started her collection nine months ago. She has severe anxiety after leaving an abusive relationship, and has also been left paralysed down one side after having two strokes aged 33. “I was given a Jellycat as a present to help with my anxiety, and I fell in love with them,” she says. “I didn’t know anything about them before. The first one I got was a Bartholomew Bear. It’s lived on my bed ever since.”

Over the last few months, Richards’s collection has grown and she now has 23. They all share the bed with Bartholomew Bear, though she’s looking at getting a dedicated shelf for them. “They make me feel calm,” she says. “They help with my anxiety. If I’m anxious, I’ll sit on my bed with them. I like stroking the rabbit’s ears – it takes the edge off things.” Because of her disability, Richards has carers who come into the house, and they’ve also witnessed how beneficial her Jellycat collection can be. “I have carers every morning. If I’m feeling anxious, they bring one to me and it helps.” Richards is totally new to collecting toys and she’s been surprised at the impact her Jellycats have had on her. “As a 40-year-old, I never expected to collect something like this.”

Neither Day or Elliott set out to collect Jellycats either, but they also have found comfort in them. “I didn’t expect my collection to balloon like it has,” says Elliott. “But I like the fact I can look at them and remember where each one came from and how I felt when I bought them. I wouldn’t have envisioned collecting Jellycat toys at this point in my life, but I’m glad I have something that makes me so happy.”

While we might not expect adults to find cuddly toys appealing, psychotherapist Susie Masterson says it makes sense. “When we feel anxious, it can help to focus on an area of our lives that brings us joy. As adults, life can be overwhelming. The stress surrounding things like work, family, politics and climate change can lead to feelings of dysregulation and a sense of being unsafe,” she explains. “Jellycat makes the kind of toys that we would have had in our cots. If you think about the world of a baby, it is usually a safe place where we are surrounded by smiling faces – whether in human or toy form.” According to Masterson, the combination of the colours, soft fur and cute facial expressions is likely to make people feel soothed, whatever age they are.

That said, it can be hard to get past the idea that toys are for kids. This is something that Day struggled with at first. “If you tell people you collect cuddly toys, it can feel as if you’re going to be judged, because it feels like a children’s hobby,” she explains. “But then when you go on TikTok and see all these people the same age as you – women and men – it encourages you to not hold yourself back.”

This sense of community on social media is what inspired Day to set up her Jellycat TikTok account. She also wanted to show others that Jellycats aren’t just for kids. Interestingly, she has people of all ages engaging with her content. “TikTok shows you all the different age brackets of people watching. There are people in the 40 to 50 age bracket and even collectors who are 60 to 70. That was a nice surprise. It proves that it’s for adults as well.”

Both Day and Elliott have Jellycat TikTok accounts, while Richards is part of a Jellycat Facebook group. “I’ve been surprised by the number of adults who collect them,” she says. “I thought I was a weirdo for collecting them and then I discovered a whole community online.” Unlike many spaces online, they all say the Jellycats community is hugely positive. People often comment on Day’s videos, asking for advice about which Jellycat to buy and she’s always happy to help and swap tips.

Similarly, Elliott has found the online Jellycat community to be refreshingly positive. “There’s not any toxicity in the community because, at the end of the day, it’s a group of people interested in collecting toys. Nobody’s saying: ‘My collection is better than yours’. As someone who’s a football fan and a gamer, I often find myself in quite toxic communities, but the Jellycat community is a reprieve from that.”

This idea of connecting with others with a shared interest is important, says Masterson. “Collecting things with others is about a sense of belonging. If we can see ourselves in others and vice versa, we feel less isolated. Research demonstrates that people who feel a sense of belonging report higher levels of self-esteem,” she says.

In some ways, perhaps collecting Jellycats isn’t so different from the ways that adults have always collected toys – it’s just that people have swapped model cars and porcelain dolls for soft toys shaped like an avocado with a smiley face. This is something that chimes with Elliott. “I can trace my love of collecting things back to my late grandmother. She collected porcelain dolls and had a whole room dedicated to them. They freaked me out – they were all just staring blankly. My way of improving that is having things with smiley faces,” he says.

Richards recently got the amuseables sandcastle for her 40th birthday this year, while Day hopes to try to complete a few of her collections, including the sports balls set and, of course, the boiled eggs (as well as the classic egg, there’s a scuba diving egg, a graduation egg, bride and groom eggs, and more). Elliott says he can’t see himself stopping collecting any time soon. “My collection will only grow, not shrink,” he says. “They’re just these silly little things that exist purely to make you smile. That’s the strongest part of it.”