Twelfth Post!

[hoisinsauce]

POST NAMER TBC-- work harder, meme!

Welcome back, anyway! Chat fandom, media, creative things, weirdness from around the net, funny stuff, anything! Meme awaits!

(start a comment thread by replying to this post)

 

Comments

Re: Funny Stuff

[(Anonymous)]

> Jellycat toys have also been a growing trend among "kidults" - adults with a strong interest in toys and childish ephemera, such as Lego and Sonny Angels dolls.

Dead.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyr854k912o

Re: Funny Stuff

[(Anonymous)]

Unlike real adults, who have a strong interest in doing their taxes and making sandwiches for their husbands!

Re: Funny Stuff

[(Anonymous)]

That's such a weird situation; do they just hate shops in the north or something? From the ones listed, it seems like that's their issue.

Re: Funny Stuff

[(Anonymous)]

Did they hire my work's old marketing guy? This "brand elevation strategy" seems like the kind of emptyheaded thing he'd come up with. He got fired recently after turning 30 million marketing budget into 1 million revenue.

(Have no previous interest in jellycats; will now avoid them for treating their stockists like that, though tbf I was very unlikely to ever want to buy one anyway)

Re: Funny Stuff

[(Anonymous)]

Read the letters they sent out to the stockists. Psychopathic. Especially the ones like "you're not official stockist yet, but if you try really hard *maybe* you'll make it". Full of negging and trying to get them to beg. Creeeeeeeepy.

Re: Funny Stuff

[(Anonymous)]

I have a Jellycat plush that someone gifted me, and it's just that - a plush. He's cute and notably quite soft, but I've had a lot of plushies and he's not all that special.

Tried to look him up on their website and he's apparently retired, because their whole business model is about releasing and then retiring designs to create artificial scarcity. They really want to be Beanie Babies, but you can see how that turned out for TY (and honestly, the old Beanie Baby designs were way better than the Jellycat ones).

Re: Funny Stuff

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, looks like they want to turn them into a luxury good and farm "whales". Idk if it can be done because it's true that some people will buy anything, but I think it's more likely they're just damaging the brand rn for no reason, and others are right to say they'd be better off making an exclusive luxury *line* on top of their regular line, rather than just trying to make all the plushies exclusive (lol). I quite like plushies, but I'm not spending more than a tenner on a plushy, so I'm clearly not their intended market; they want the person who'll spend 10k because some kpop guy had the plushy in a frame in a video. I don't think bullying your longtime retailers is how you get there; I think they're ruining their brand and coming across as ridiculous, but I don't sell plushies, so maybe they're basing this approach off some cutting edge research. :P But I doubt it. Comes across like how an unsuccessful person imagines successful people behave.

Re: Funny Stuff

[(Anonymous)]

(the letter:

https://www.instagram.com/p/DLZ_Zb5oqYQ/?hl=en&img_index=1

)

Also... I'm wondering if they don't really get how UK luxury toy market differs from makeup market. You don't really have indie beauty stores, but indie toy stores are themselves a status thing, and in rich areas, you get more of those little shops. Chucking an olde fashioned toy store in favour of *Selfridges* looks tacky, not luxury. If you're rich in the UK, you need a toy for a child, and you want to flex, you buy wooden toys from a local, independent shop. So I've been assuming they're going for a niche, but maybe they don't understand the market. (Tho I'm also surprised if there's that much overlap between "plushy obsessives" and "people who often go to selfridges", but I assume they have stats. I think of selfridges primarily as a shop for teens with no money who want to look rich; richer relatives used to shop there but mostly for the food court, which is gone).

Re: Funny Stuff

[(Anonymous)]

Something that mayyyy not be obvious to jellycat is that the people who *run* indie shops are often rich and doing it as a hobby. They often have rich family and friends and suppliers. People talk. Is the gacha-loot-crate-spend-6-million-on-candycrush market big enough to absorb the loss of all the posh customers? Idk, but wouldn't count on it.

Re: Funny Stuff

[(Anonymous)]

Chance for noodoll to swoop in. I had a noodoll sprout for a while (I did eventually gift it to a kid).

Re: Funny Stuff

[(Anonymous)]

https://www.dailydot.com/news/jellycat-pull-products-from-small-independent-stores/

"Before Labubus, Jellycats were the next big “thing” for collectors"

Lol that says it all

Re: Funny Stuff

[(Anonymous)]

Consider: post-apocalyptic wasteland where Jellycats are used as a form of currency.

Re: Funny Stuff

[(Anonymous)]

My qs: in this post-apocalypse economy:

* Do jellycats have some previously unknown utility?

* If not, how did they out-survive coins? Or, if that's now how they came to be the currency, what were the other considerations driving their adoption?

Just trying to prepare mentally for my new life of destitution, given I've already decided never to buy any of those plushies, and risk being caught on the back foot when this particular dystopia gets going.

Re: Funny Stuff

[(Anonymous)]

SD

"now how" should be "not how"...

Re: Funny Stuff

[(Anonymous)]

* The same forces that caused the apocalypse also imbued Jellycats with supernatural powers. By uttering their Official Jellycat™ names backwards three times in front of a mirror (or any other reflective object), you can temporarily transform them into the real objects that they represent. Entire settlements are surviving off Jellycat™ Amuseables Egglantine Egg on Toast.

* In a last-ditch effort to save civilization as we know it, the surviving governments of the world ordered all metal to be collected and melted down into giant mechas that would, allegedly, protect humanity from destruction. Millions of people sacrificed their coins to this cause, but they were betrayed! The giant mechas were in fact created, but they turned out to be spaceships for the rich and the elite to abandon Earth for the final frontier.

Re: Funny Stuff

[(Anonymous)]

DD

They could've fit a few more people on, but the remaining weight-allowance was saved for rare labubu.

Re: Funny Stuff

[(Anonymous)]

Speak of the devil - someone I know just came back from the UK and got me a Jellycat.

Re: Funny Stuff

[(Anonymous)]

Update: Friend who just came back from the UK spent the day trading rare Jellycats for Labubus. Invisible hand at work.