Sallyanne Redman keeps the UK's largest collection of Bashful Puppy Jellycats, and she talks to them. She sewed a small amount of her late husband's ashes into one of them, according to The Guardian's 2025 reporting, so that he is never really gone from the room. "I live on my own now and it's something I can talk to," she told the paper. "It's almost like there's this little representation of my husband." Redman is 56, a retired administrator, and her story is one of the clearest signals of something happening in British (and Australian, and American) consumer life that the spreadsheets are only now catching up to.
The collectors
Redman is not alone. In Ipswich, Jessica, a 22-year-old sales assistant, has a Jellycat collection worth more than £1,000, according to BBC reporting. "On payday I treat myself to one or two, and a few more through the month," she told the BBC. "When I've had a bad day and I know a Jellycat is on its way, I look forward to seeing it in real life and adding it to my overflowing shelf." Amanda Hope, a 36-year-old software specialist from Surrey, told the BBC she has spent more than £3,000 on the brand. Tiffanie Leeks, a 20-year-old collector who has spoken publicly about her autism, says she has used her Jellycats to work through difficult thoughts. "Because of my autism I hate unfairness and it just isn't fair," she told The Guardian. These are not parents buying for children. They are working adults, on recognisable salaries, allocating meaningful portions of their disposable income to soft toys priced from £11 to well over £700.
The comfort economy
The psychological frame is older than the category. In 1953, the paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott introduced the term "transitional object" to describe the blankets, soft toys and odd scraps of fabric that infants use to manage separation from a primary caregiver [1]. The object, Winnicott wrote, occupies "an intermediate area of experience, between the thumb and the teddy bear." It is not the mother, and it is not quite the child. It is, in his words, the first site of culture.
The Jellies are functioning, at scale, as transitional objects for adults living through what the U.S. Surgeon General, in May 2023, formally declared an epidemic of loneliness [2]. About half of U.S. adults report measurable levels of loneliness, the Surgeon General's advisory found. Social isolation increases the risk of premature death by 26%. "Given the significant health consequences of loneliness and isolation, we have an opportunity, and an obligation, to make the same investments in addressing social connection that we have made in addressing tobacco use, obesity, and the addiction crisis," wrote Dr Vivek Murthy. Bia Bezamat, a cultural expert at Kantar, puts the consumer translation more plainly: "When we talk about comfort, we're thinking about how the world right now is a really scary place. There is a lot of uncertainty and volatility, and people are trying to find the tools, spaces, and brands that give them that sense of comfort" [3].
The kidult economy
The market is now large enough to plan around. According to Circana, one in five toys and games globally is now bought by over-18s for themselves [4]. Between June 2021 and June 2022, NPD (now Circana) found, kidults bought 24% of all toys in the U.S. and represented roughly two-thirds of dollar growth in the category [5]. The share of toy sales for the over-12s has nearly doubled since 2017. In Europe, the kidult segment is worth about €4.5 billion, almost a third of all toy revenue on the continent [6].
Jellycat is the case study. Founded in London in 1999 by brothers Thomas and William Gatacre, the brand reported revenues of £200 million in the year to December 2023, with pre-tax profits up 24% to £67 million [7]. By December 2024, revenues had jumped 66% to £333 million, and pre-tax profits had risen 76% to £117 million [8]. Co-founder Tom Gatacre took a dividend of approximately £110 million. The plush industry as a whole grew 102% between 2019 and 2024 [9], and Jellycat's U.S. sales rose 41% in the first half of 2024, while general stuffed-animal sales rose only 2% [3]. The brand now sells in more than 80 countries, and its official TikTok account has 10.2 million likes [7]. In 2026, Jellycat became a new entry on TIME's TIME100 Most Influential Companies list [9].
The retail turn
What is striking about the Jellycat economy, observers say, is how little of the retail experience resembles a toy purchase. In July 2024, Selfridges welcomed the Jellycat Fish & Chips van to the fourth-floor toy department, a globally exclusive collection of culinary characters staged as British seaside kitsch [10]. The brand's 25th anniversary party was held at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. The Amuseables series, soft everyday objects, launched in 2018 and now anchors much of the resale trade on eBay and Vinted: a Harrods Vicky Teapot at £32.95 resells for roughly £200, and a Cheryl Cherry Cake tea set for £44.95 trades for close to £220 [7]. Drops are quiet, stock is uneven, and discontinued favourites become artefacts. In other words, the brand has built scarcity where the category has historically offered abundance.
That scarcity has costs. Jellycat has stopped supplying around 100 independent UK stores, concentrating distribution among a smaller group of larger retailers [8]. The Guardian has documented organised shoplifting, scams and a growing secondary market in which soft toys are traded like limited-edition trainers [7]. Alison McCabe, who owns Rumours gift shop in Whitby, is blunt about the customer base. "Many of the Jellycat shoppers are adults, not children. They're people who want some comfort in their life" [8].
A new shape of adulthood
Caveats matter. U.S. plush sales actually fell 8% in 2025, to $2.4 billion, according to Circana, even as Jellycat continued to grow [11]. The story is not that plush is booming everywhere; it is that the kidult and collectible segment is booming while traditional plush contracts, and Jellycat is riding the first wave, not the second. The "kidult" framing, as defined by Circana itself, includes everyone over 12, which is a generous net.
But the broader pattern is harder to dismiss. A generation that came of age through a pandemic, a cost-of-living crisis and a documented loneliness epidemic is spending hundreds of millions of pounds on objects that, in Winnicott's terms, occupy the space between the self and the world. "Toy companies began to say, 'We're not in the kids business. We're in the play business. And anyone can play,'" the toy industry consultant Richard Gottlieb told TIME in 2022 [5]. The Jellycat CEO, Arnaud Meysselle, takes a similar line: "We never set out to be a kids' brand or an adults' brand. We just want to make things that bring joy" [9].
That is the corporate line. The line from the collectors is more specific. It is that a small stuffed dog, or a teapot, or a slice of cake, can be made to hold a husband's ashes, or a bad day at work, or a quiet hour at the end of a long shift. The market is large because the need is older, and more ordinary, than any of us would like to admit.