Every weekend, since November 11, a line has quietly claimed The Grove in Los Angeles, snaking from the central plaza, past storefronts, and all the way onto The Grove Drive. It appears early in the morning, often beginning before opening, and lingers — dissipating only when closing time arrives. At the head of it, however, is not a celebrity or an irresistible sale, but a plethora of Jellycat plush toys.
Strikingly, most of those queuing in pursuit of the cozy, winter-themed stuffed animals are not eager children who have somehow coaxed their parents or guardians to endure the wait. Rather, the overwhelming majority are adults.
Nestled among several other free-standing shops in The Grove’s central plaza is the Jellycat Ski Club pop-up. It is where this line begins, and where people interested in purchasing the soft toys can often find themselves spending hours waiting.
The icy-blue building is hard to miss amid the Mediterranean climate of Southern California. Adjacent to the building, a giant stuffed bear, dubbed Bartholomew, rides a snowmobile through a pile of wintry mix. Customers and passersby eagerly approach him and take turns climbing onto the back of the ski-doo for a photo-op against a backdrop displaying the business’s emblematic logo – Jellycat Jack the cat.
The Ski Club pop-up officially opened its doors to customers on November 11 and is set to continue until December 31. Since its opening, it has offered the option to secure tickets for time-slot reservations that allow customers the opportunity to bypass the line. Every Thursday at 8 am, new reservations are added and sell out within minutes, often leaving fans frustrated. Without a reservation, people looking to visit have to brave the long-winding walk-in line.
Jellycat may have some of us rethinking whether we ever truly grew out of our stuffed animal obsession as children. But in reality, it’s more likely that the brand has cracked the code on how to expand their marketability and make their product irresistible to an older audience — with comfort, competition and quirkiness.
Cori Scherer Bertucio is a 55-year-old collector of Jellycat toys. Within just six months of beginning her new hobby, she has accumulated enough Jellycats to fill up an entire wall of floor-to-ceiling shelves in one of the rooms of her Brentwood, California home.
“It’s like Christmas every day at my house because I buy Jellycats every day. And it might actually become an addiction,” Bertucio says.
Nowadays, Bertucio spends a lot of time purchasing and reselling on the online marketplace Whatnot. She mainly chooses which Jellycats to buy based on their resale value, and makes sure that if she isn’t sure that they will end up reselling, they will at least make a good addition to her personal collection. In a way, they act as almost an investment.
“It can be from $35 to $350 and even more. For really hard-to-find bunnies that are really collectible, it can go to $450,” Bertucio explains.
The Jellycat Ski Club pop-up seems to recognize the extent to which collectors will go to make sure they get their hands on the rarer toys. The Los Angeles location brought with them a limited edition, exclusive line of five characters that are only available at The Grove. Bertucio said that when she visited the pop-up, the exclusives were the only ones she purchased.
“Actually, the Franilla bunny is their exclusive bunny, and I bought a few more of those off of another app and sold those. They’re all sold,” she says.
This element of scarcity is a driving factor of the craze for Jellycats. Michelle Jackson runs a Jellycat collectors account called jellycatjackson with her daughter on Instagram. The mother-daughter duo has amassed over 7,000 followers with content ranging from photos of their collection to short videos of their visits to Jellycat shops. Similar to Bertucio, they were driven by the scramble to build an impressive collection.
“All of a sudden, they became harder to get. And then that’s when my brain clicked, and we kinda went crazy,” Jackson says, “I told my husband, ‘At least it’s not drugs!’”
Steven Westberg is an Associate Professor at the University of Southern California with an expertise in consumer psychology and marketing. He explains that being drawn to scarcity is ingrained in our DNA, linked to our primitive instinct to acquire and hoard items that we suspect to be in short supply.
However, status is also an important factor in decision-making for consumers. In simply owning something that others don’t have, but that may be in high demand, our perceived social status can be increased.
“A very similar item, like a stuffed animal that isn’t super popular, it’s going to lack a few elements that all contribute to that socialness. But it can still have all the same sort of intrinsic characteristics,” Westberg says.
The pop-up business model only complements this perceived scarcity by consumers. Despite its immense popularity, Jellycat has yet to open a standalone flagship store. The business has only six official locations across the world, all located within other businesses or department stores. The descriptions of the various events and experiences on the official Jellycat website utilize words like “exclusive” and “one-of-a-kind”.
“In-N-Out Burger had their secret menu. So for a while there, the secret menu was really impactful because it’s a driver to learn about something that seems to be kind of secret. Not everybody knows about it,” Westberg explains in reference to Jellycat’s inclination towards pop-ups and limiting storefronts. “People are more inclined to share that with others. If everybody knows about it, there’s no point in sharing it with others. So, purposely limiting distribution, and the idea of where the pop-ups are going to be, you got to be in the know.”
But for many collectors of the London-based toy, there’s an element beyond scarcity — one of positivity and joy.
“I was depressed. I had moved to LA, I was living in a condo, and I didn’t want to leave my bed,” Bertucio shares, “And then I got a Jellycat, and I’m like, ‘Oh my god,’ and it made me feel better. And then I just kept collecting them, and now, I mean, I feel so much better.”
Jellycats are famous for their unique, quirky designs. Their ‘Amuseables’ line particularly embodies this, with what the official website describes as making “everyday life even more fun.” The Amuseables feature various random, inanimate objects — like a peanut with a reindeer costume or a pickle — brought to life with two button eyes, a smile and sometimes even a set of arms or legs.
“They just get cuter and cuter,” Jackson says, “They make you feel happy. It’s cute!”
For some, the phenomenon of Jellycats has provided more than a chance to repeatedly experience the short-lived high that engaging in consumerism can provide. It goes beyond that, creating a sense of escape for those who find that they need it now more than ever.
“It brings you out of what’s going on in the world. And you go into this Jellycat world, and it’s just all fun and games,” Bertucio says. “It’s just all good and happy. That’s why I love it so much, because I make people happy.”