This won’t be the company’s only event this year: Squishmallows will be at San Diego Comic-Con next month with a new game and rare toys for sale. Bret Ingraham, director of PR at Jazwares, the parent company of Squishmallows, confirmed that more than 10,000 Squish were given away to fans at VidCon - a total that could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars on the resale market. While some creators had hundreds of fans waiting to see them - MrBeast’s panel, “YouTube’s Algorithm, Explained,” was packed and turned away more than 200 people - no one matched the hype at the claw. “I know creators like Logan Paul and Tana Mongeau have created chaos in the past at VidCon, but I can’t think of any brand-run exhibit that had that kind of impact,” Weekman said. This is a creators’ event after all!īuzzFeed News reporter Kelsey Weekman, who attended VidCon, said she was blown away by the popularity of the Squishmallows booth. While most of the crowd seemed like organic traffic and genuine fans of the plush product, a few people were paid to participate. Some even took home a Hectico the Cobra Snake, which holds an estimated value of $125 on the Squishmarket. (Yes, the same StockX where your high-school friends buy their Yeezys.) Longtime Squish fans like Kalei Glozier, a 25-year-old who came from Michigan and has a collection of more than 500 Squish, were impressed by the selection at the booth. Lucky collectors hit the Squish jackpot by finding rare items like Jack the Cat, which is sold on StockX for $700. Collectors, content creators, kids with their parents, and adults with friends they’d met in the Squish community all shared the same amount of excitement when it was their turn at the claw. Brown’s school, the University of Alabama, Huntsville, has its own local Squishmallow Instagram page, where fans can meet online and in-person and connect with each other.At one of more than 100 attractions across four days at VidCon, fans waited for more than four hours to participate in a “human claw machine,” where they had 20 seconds to grab all the Squishmallows they could - including some rare and unreleased toys.
Some position their Squishmallows in frame during their Zoom classes as a conversation starter or to show off their collections. Brown said Squishmallows have become particularly popular among students during the pandemic.
“There’s a lot of scalpers now that go out and buy an entire store’s stock.” “It’s created a lot of issues finding them in stores,” said Rebecca Brown, 21, a college student in Huntsville, Ala., who has 325 Squishmallows. He said that the company is increasing production to keep up with demand. “The success of Squishmallows comes from the exclusivity, which helps drive collectibility, said Jonathan Kelly, co-president of Kellytoy. According to Insider, Squishmallows are being resold for hundreds of dollars on sites like Mercari. Some that have become hard to find are fetching big prices at resale, though. (In February 2020, The Toy Book, a trade publication, reported that the company had sold 50 million Squishmallows.) According to the company, sales of Squishmallows have tripled in the past six months. Jazwares said in early March that it has sold more than 73 million toys. “Even though the craze was coming before the pandemic, it certainly hit a fever pitch in the past year, and this craving for comfort is a big part of it,” said Kelly Deen, senior vice president of marketing at Jazwares, the parent company of Kellytoy, which created Squishmallows. Collectors say the stuffed animals have given them comfort in a painful year, and that hunting for them has fostered a much-needed sense of community during an extended period of isolation. Squishmallows, a line of soft, huggable toys created in 2017, have exploded in popularity during the pandemic, thanks to social media and in particular TikTok (or “SquishTok,” as fans call it). Over the last few months, bulbous and brightly colored plush toys have sparked a Beanie Babies-style craze among children, teenagers and adults alike.
0 kommentar(er)
