Composite: Guardian Design; Jellycat\With the booming resale market for Jellycat rarities, retailers across the UK are reporting a surge in ‘stealing to sell’ shoplifting, with some going to extreme lengths to protect their ‘Jellies’.\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 Scotsdale
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