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21 hours ago
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The Jellycat section of Scotsdales in Great Shelford is 216 cubic feet of sensory overload. The brightly coloured, charmingly quirky toys fill floor-to-ceiling shelves in this Cambridgeshire garden centre, plastic eyes staring, stitched smiles beaming. There are plushly soft teddies and bunnies and cows and giraffes, but also boiled eggs in sunglasses and tennis balls with arms. Side by side they sit, a strange, soft communion, begging to be picked up and cuddled.
A closer look, though, reveals something less alluring. Every Jellycat has a grey security tag dangling from it, a pin piercing its downy fur. A scan of the ceiling shows security cameras trained on the shelves. When a member of staff walks past, I notice them glance apprehensively at me – and, I realise, at my tote bag over my shoulder. A laminated sign next to the shelves confirms I am, indeed, under surveillance: “CCTV cameras are operating in this area.”
Soft-toy company Jellycat, which celebrated its 25th anniversary with a party at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston last year, was launched by Thomas and William Gatacre in London in 1999 before expanding into Minneapolis in 2001. It has since gone global, now selling in shops across more than 80 countries. The Amuseables series, a range of stuffed everyday objects that launched in 2018, is especially popular at the moment and proof that Jellycat can make anything into a soft toy and turn a profit. Cuddly toilet roll, anyone?
It’s like the Beanie Baby craze of the 90s but with a more premium product. Beanie Babies, incidentally, sit untagged on a separate shelf in Scotsdales.
In recent years, Jellies (as aficionados call them) have gained huge momentum online: Jellycat’s official TikTok account, for example, has 10.2m likes. There are Facebook pages dedicated to buying and selling rare examples; Reddit threads that discuss in detail the latest releases; and influencers sharing videos of themselves “unboxing” the toys. The company’s recent collaboration with Harrods went viral on TikTok, with exclusive tea-set Jellies Cheryl Cherry Cake (£44.95), Vicky Teapot (£32.95), and Seb Teacup (£19.95) becoming hugely sought after. According to Jellycat Ltd’s most recent filing with Companies House, revenues rose 37% to £200m in the 12 months to 21 December 2023, with pre-tax profits up 24% to £67m. Impressive given the highly competitive toy market.
But for all the sweetness and whimsy, the Jellycat phenomenon has a darker, stranger underbelly. There is a flourishing secondary market for Jellies – a result, in part, of the way the company releases limited-edition toys and “retires” favourites. Resellers on sites such as eBay and Vinted sell rare Jellies for huge markups. A quick look on eBay, for example, throws up numerous people selling the three-piece Harrods tea set for about £200, more than twice the original price. On Vinted, the set is listed for £220.
Perhaps inevitably, the ease with which these toys can be resold has made them attractive to shoplifters, with some suggesting organised gangs may even be stealing to order. Retailers such as Scotsdales are having to go to extreme measures to keep their Jellies safe: not just CCTV and security tags, but facial recognition software to flag up possible shoplifters, and automatic number plate recognition in the car park.
This crime wave has outraged many fans. Sallyanne Redman, 56, bought her first Jellycat more than two decades ago and claims to have the UK’s largest collection of Bashful Puppy Jellycats – soft, silky-furred dogs with floppy ears and dangly arms and legs. She is so besotted with her Jellies that last year she had the ashes of her late husband, who used to buy them for her, set in a resin heart and sewn into a black and white Bashful Puppy called Shep, her husband’s nickname. “He’s in my bed,” Redman tells me, her voice thick with emotion as she describes just what this particular Jellycat means to her.
Since the death of her husband in 2023, Redman has been on adventures with Shep and, along the way, collected a new Jellycat from each place she’s visited. “I would research in advance where there were Jellycat stockists and then I could go there and get myself one or two. And then I’d photograph them, like on the beach,” she says. The soft toys tell the story – physically and emotionally – of her grief. “I live on my own now and it’s something I can talk to. It’s almost like there’s this little representation of my husband.” She calls the shoplifters “abhorrent”.
Tiffanie Leeks, 20, who is autistic, also talks to her Jellycats when she is finding things difficult. “I confide things such as my intrusive thoughts,” she says, adding that knowing that Jellycats are stocked in local shops motivates her to leave the house when she’s struggling. Shoplifting “makes me feel angry and sad”, she says. “Because of my autism I hate unfairness and it just isn’t fair.”
It’s not just crime that angers Jellycat fans, but what they see as speculation. Jade Duce, 22, who started collecting Jellies five years ago, is frustrated at being “priced out” of the market by resellers. “The Pine Cone retailed for £16 and I’ve seen it listed for as much as £175,” she says. “No one was bothered about the Pine Cone until the internet told everyone it was the must-have Jellycat.”
Often, though, the line between collector and reseller is blurred. Hannah Tynan, 31, who has 101 Jellycats – and 10 Jellycat tattoos – has turned reseller herself at times, once even selling a Fuddles Calf Jellycat bought in a charity shop for £20 for an impressive £380. “I hadn’t planned on selling it,” she says. “But it suddenly bumped in popularity.” Another reseller said she had cashed in on the Pine Cone craze, selling one she’d bought a couple of years earlier on Vinted for £18 for £120 on eBay within a week of noticing its popularity soaring.
Retailers, meanwhile, are struggling to cope with the Jelly thefts. One shopkeeper, who runs a garden centre in the south of England, says he watched on CCTV as a woman concealed Jellycats in a pram carrying her child. He says he later managed to identify the woman by searching resale websites and found the stolen goods being sold on a Vinted profile belonging to her husband, although the woman and her husband deny any illegal activity. Another garden centre in Horsham, Sussex, has had to put its Jellycats behind glass to prevent thieving.
In December, the British Independent Retailers Association warned of the growing “industrial scale” of shop theft and estimates at least three in five items shoplifted from its members ended up being sold online. Caroline Owen, who has been managing director of Scotsdales for 40 years, tells me about 60 Jellycats were stolen from just one of its three branches over the Christmas trading period. “What we don’t know is whether the shoplifting is own-use, so stealing for yourself, or stealing to sell,” she says. “I think there is both going on.” She tells me of colleagues at other garden centres who have traced and caught shoplifters. “I think some people have realised their shoplifters are not coming from their area. They’re actually travelling in.”
Despite that, she is reluctant to blame organised gangs, saying she would expect groups stealing to order to sweep multiple items off the shelves, rather than the more sporadic shoplifting Scotsdales has seen. “When we look at the shoplifting data over a period of time, it’s ones or twos [that are stolen],” she says. “They’re easily pocketable; they’re easy to put in a bag or a buggy.”
Cambridgeshire constabulary also says there are no organised crime gangs shoplifting Jellycats to order in the area.
Ultimately, Owen doesn’t want to stop stocking Jellycats. “It’s our biggest-selling toy brand,” she says. “Ninety-five per cent of people are honest and we have to play to that market.”
Fiona Bannister, 48, an admin on the Jellycat Buy and Sell UK Facebook group, does her bit to fight crime by keeping an eye on the Jellycats sold through the group. “As group admins, we keep a check on sales posts and take action if anything seems out of place,” she says. Admins look out for sellers that have lots of the same item; blurred photos taken in cars, which suggests pictures were taken in a hurry upon leaving the shop; and toys with tags on. “It would be very difficult for stolen items to be sold in the groups without it quickly being flagged up.” Instead, she believes they often end up on Vinted – which, she says, “doesn’t seem to be interested”.
A quick scroll through Vinted reveals hundreds of Jellycat listings. When I approach three sellers and ask them to share proof of purchase for their new-with-tags products, two are able to provide receipts, while the third listing – from a seller with no reviews – suddenly becomes unavailable, although it is not clear if the listing has been deleted or the item has been sold.
Asked about the potential sale of stolen goods, Vinted said: “We take this matter seriously, and our teams are constantly mobilised to detect and counter new malicious behaviour as well as reviewing and improving processes where we see a need. We also work closely with the police when they ask us for information on potential cases of this type.” As for eBay, a spokesperson said: “The sale of stolen property is strictly prohibited on eBay, and we work with a range of law enforcement bodies to keep our platform safe.” They added that the company works with dozens of retailers to investigate cases of theft. “If we identify that an item is stolen through these investigations, we immediately remove it and take the appropriate action against the seller.”
Although Bannister hasn’t heard much about organised gangs stealing Jellies, she has “no doubt” it goes on. “It’s absolute madness how quickly Jellycats have increased in popularity and, as a result, are giving thieves and scammers the opportunity to take advantage of Jellycat fans.”
Stolen Jellycats aren’t the only issue that admins on Facebook groups have to contend with: there has also been an increase in the number of fakes. US-based Aria Babow, 28, who has more than 2,750 Jellycats and has managed Jellycat Facebook groups for more than four years, has built a website dedicated to Jellycat identification: people email her photos of their toys and she assesses whether they’re the real deal. “The problem is that the fakes are getting better,” she says, adding that spotting them isn’t an exact science. “Over the years, Jellycat has changed their tags, the logo on certain ranges, and tag placement. This has made it a lot harder for newer collectors to know if the ones they are getting are authentic or not.”
How does Jellycat feel about the rise of shoplifting and fakes? It declined to comment, beyond: “Here at Jellycat, only our characters and fans do the talking for us.”
The fans are indeed only too happy to spread the Jellycat gospel. And the characters – the toilet rolls, the bunnies, the teacups, the puppies, the cherry cakes – are so beguiling that their manufacturer doesn’t have to do too much beyond simply being a good, creative toy maker. But behind the fluff, the dangly limbs, and the sweet, stitched-on smiles lies something far less cute – something that is seeing loyal customers, sometimes vulnerable customers, taken advantage of. And that isn’t quite as cuddly.
