Britain confronts rash of robberies of Jellycats, a posh plush toy

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LONDON – When they came for the soft toys, Fiona Wallis was ready to play hardball.

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Wallis, the owner of Snapdragon, a toy shop in southwest London, wasn’t completely surprised on a recent Thursday when two thieves entered and immediately grabbed armloads of Jellycat figures, posh little British plush toys that have exploded in value as viral collectibles online.

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Jellycat heists have plagued shopkeepers around the United Kingdom for months. Security cameras have caught shoplifters stuffing bunnies down trousers, bears under blouses and hedgehogs into baby strollers.

In Cheddar, near Bristol, two thieves backed their car through a glass door before filling the trunk with an estimated $27,000 worth of Jellycat rabbits and other pricey figures.

“It has gotten beyond insane,” said a London store owner who was burgled twice and asked not to be identified to avoid calling attention to her failing security systems. “Someone is going to get hurt.”

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“We could lose 400 pounds a day, twice in one day, it’s so bad with the Jellycats,” said Sarah Bland, a staffer at the Chiswick branch of Waterstone’s book and gift shops, where they’ve moved the products out of sight and only produce them on request.

Some retailers have put their Jellycats in locked glass cabinets, pulling them out like jewelry. Others have added cameras. Some have just given up.

“A lot of our branches are phasing them out entirely,” Bland said.

Knowing the risk, but determined to keep selling a popular and profitable line at Snapdragon, Wallis had already moved her inventory of Jellycat caterpillars and coconuts right next to her cash register. It didn’t help. The pair, a man and woman in their mid-30s, marched right up to the till as she looked on agog.

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“What are the Jellycats? This is them?” the man asked.

“Yep,” answered the woman, whom Wallis recognized as having entered the shop to case the place an hour earlier. The two began shoving her entire inventory of Jellycats, more than a dozen fuzzy critters with sweet smiles and black eyes – priced from 20 to 40 pounds, or about US$27 to $54 – into two plastic grocery bags.

Shock turned to rage. Wallis came around the counter and gave chase as the pair bolted out the door and headed down the street toward the Underground station a block away.

She was just fast enough to get a hand on the woman’s hoodie.

“You’ve got my toys!” Wallis recalled screaming as the two grappled.

Jellycats haven’t always been such mayhem magnets. Created in London in 1999, they were quietly made and sold as cuddly gifts, sitting innocently on shelves from small-town gift shops to the high-end Harrods.

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The company eventually supplemented its traditional lines of stuffed toys – your lions, tigers and puffins – with whimsical lines of stuffed teapots, ice cream cones, pickles, fried eggs and toilet-paper rolls, most with the same embroidered Mona Lisa smile. Selfridges, the venerable London department store, sells a bespoke Jellycat fish-and-chips set.

The company expanded, opening a U.S. headquarters in Minneapolis in 2001, and Jellycats grew as an online craze – some store owners say it blew up during the pandemic – with thousands of videos on TikTok and Instagram of collectors showing off their menageries or boasting of some hard-to-find new acquisition.

Operating like a fashion company, Jellycat brings out new models every year, while retiring some old lines, driving up values even more. The items usually retail for between US$27 and $300, but can resell for much more.

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Princess Charlotte, third in line to the British throne, boosted the brand by being delighted with a Fuddlewuddle puppy in an official baby photo in 2015. Kylie Jenner sent the collector-sphere into paroxysms when she was shown on video pulling a Jellycat pea pod out of her black Birkin bag in 2020.

Online clearinghouses like Facebook Marketplace, Amazon and Vinted are awash with Jellycat products, some at astronomical prices. A “Special edition retired Bashful Didi Bunny” still with its original price tag was going for 1,845 pounds (about US$2,500) on eBay on Friday. It had 14 watchers.

And, no surprise, there is a black market for Jellycats.

Many of the items flooding online resale markets are fenced goods stolen from stores, critics say. They are a growing part of a shoplifting wave that has buffeted British retail for years, with thefts becoming more frequent and brazen as food and energy costs have soared.

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“What this wave of Jellycat theft shows is that crime is moving from essential items to items that are popular for resale, the trendy and fashionable,” said Andrew Goodacre, CEO of the British Independent Retailers Association. “In some cases, organized crime are driving this kind of theft because they are aware that disposing of these items is so much easier these days with the online markets.”

The Metropolitan Police and the Jellycat company declined to comment.

Some retail thieves, Goodacre said, were field agents of bigger gangs, plush-toy fences who give the snatch-and-grabbers quick cash for hot Jellycats and then sell them online for much more. He called on police and the online retailers to do more to scrub the digital markets of stolen goods.

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“Some of these premises are being hit once or twice a week,” Goodacre said.

One shopkeeper took justice into own hands, becoming a folk hero among Jellycat robbery victims. Charlie Groves noticed an US$80 Jellycat hedgehog missing from its shelf in his garden centre gift shop in the English coastal city of Bridport. He scoured his security footage from a camera trained on his Jellycat racks, and saw a woman sliding the critter into her baby carriage. In all, about 300 pounds (about US$400) in other Jellycats went missing.

Groves went on to identify which car she got into with his parking lot cam, including a personalized license plate that gave a clue to her name. When he scrolled through Vinted, the online reselling platform, a few days later, he spotted his hedgehog. He was able to track the seller to his Facebook account, where he saw the woman captured on the store’s security footage listed as the seller’s wife. In July, he was notified by police that the woman had been criminally charged and ordered to pay him 300 pounds in compensation.

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“It’s a shame that it took so much to get it sorted out, but it did get resolved,” Groves said Friday.

Police advise against freelance investigations, and also against shop owners chasing possibly armed suspects down the street. But that didn’t stop Wallis.

When Wallis gave the woman’s hoodie a yank, she dropped many of the Jellycats. The man turned back to help his partner, giving Wallis a shove and dropping some of the purloined plushies from his own bag. He also lost a shoe in the melee.

The pair sprinted off anyway, ultimately getting away with about US$282 worth of Jellycats, Wallis estimated, but she was glad to have stripped them of even more than that, especially when she learned they had hit a neighbouring toy store for Jellycats just days before.

She doesn’t regret her risky reaction. “It was instinct,” she said, once again behind the till, hovering over the crime-bait critters. “I just thought, ‘This my shop and you’re not getting away with this.’”

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