The teddy bear is more than 120 years old. Soft toys are one of the oldest, most crowded, and most price-driven categories in consumer goods, full of cheap lookalikes and characters licensed from film franchises. Asked to name a category where brand power goes to die, plush would be a reasonable answer.
Yet in April 2026, TIME named Jellycat one of its 100 most influential companies.
The London company grew revenue 43 percent in 2025 to £450 million, while pre-tax profit rose 98 percent to £240 million, a margin above 50 percent. Earlier U.S. figures showed the same divergence: in the first half of 2024, Jellycat sales rose 41 percent year over year while the stuffed-animal category grew just 2 percent.
At that point, a brand growing twenty times faster than its category was not merely winning a share fight. It was changing the terms of the category.
That is the lesson for any leader who believes their market is mature. Jellycat did more than out-compete other toy makers. It changed what it was selling, to whom, and on what terms.
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The Category Did Not Change. The Buyer Did.
The easy explanation is the “kidult.” According to Circana, buyers aged 15 and older now account for nearly 20 percent of global toy sales, and spending from that group has more than doubled since 2020.
But that wave was available to every toy maker. Jellycat rode it to a luxury-grade margin because it rebuilt the four things that decide how a brand is valued: what it makes, how it relates to customers, how it shows up in the world, and the story it tells. Then it made all four say the same thing.
1. Put The Brand In The Product, Not On It
In a commodity category, the logo is often all that separates one product from the next. Jellycat moved the brand into the object.
From a bunny to a croissant, a dragon or an aubergine, the forms change wildly. But the simple, playful expressions and tactile softness remain recognizable. Within the Amuseables range, two small eyes and a stitched smile recur across foods and everyday objects. Add materials the company calls “noticeably softer, subtler and long-lasting,” and the bond forms in the hand before a word of marketing is read.
That recognition is valuable enough to defend in court. Jellycat has sued Next and Hamleys over alleged lookalike products, telling the High Court that more than 11 million pieces from its Amuseables range have been sold in the UK. The allegations have not been established by a court.
The lesson: find the product feature that can do the work of a logo. Recognition built into the object can be harder to copy than recognition bought through media.
2. Change Who You Sell To, Then Price For Them
A child’s toy comes from a pocket-money or gifting budget. An adult’s comfort object comes from a discretionary one. Jellycat priced for that shift. Its 2024 catalog ranged from an £18 bunny decoration to a £275 oversized Christmas tree.
The adult buyer also changes the lifetime of the relationship. It no longer ends when a child grows up.
Jellycat deepens that relationship market by market. Paris gets a patisserie, London gets fish and chips at Selfridges, and Shanghai gets a theatrical café. In China, young professionals have embraced the brand as a source of comfort and companionship.
The lesson: a mature category is often a mature definition of the customer. Ask who else buys what you make, and for what reason you have never priced.
3. Borrow Your Rhythm From A Category With Pricing Power
Mature categories run on inherited habits: permanent ranges, steady replenishment, predictable promotions. Jellycat borrowed its habits from fashion and luxury instead.
New collections arrive throughout the year. Designs retire, and some become hard to find. Rare pieces can resell for multiples of their original prices. This is the sneaker-drop model, imported into a category that rarely operated on those terms.
Its retail borrows from hospitality. At the Jellycat Diner at FAO Schwarz in New York, staff “cook” plush burgers. In Shanghai, a pastel-themed café became a social-media event. These are not ordinary stores. They are theater, and every visitor’s phone becomes a media channel.
The lesson: your category’s conventions are not laws. Study how categories with pricing power manage scarcity, cadence, and experience, and borrow the rhythms your customers would welcome.
Brand should strengthen competitive position, pricing power, and enterprise value. The Blake Project helps make that happen.
4. Sell A Character, Not A Product
Jellycat gives its characters names and biographies. The Amuseables Croissant, according to its product page, works front of house at the Jellycat Patisserie, is “quietly smitten” with the head chef, and spends weekends at Gare du Nord timing the Eurostar.
Even the company’s origin is told as a storybook. Its own “Our Story” page credits the brand to the ninth generation of an imaginary Jellycat family.
Customers do not just bond with products. They bond with characters. They are not asked to admire Jellycat but to love something Jellycat made, which is a far stronger tie. The brand writes the first line; the community writes the rest.
The lesson: in a crowded category, customers rarely care about the company’s story. Give the object a story worth retelling.
5. Make Every Move Say The Same Thing
Each of these moves could be copied on its own. Rivals can add a face, run limited editions, or open a pop-up.
What is harder to copy is the agreement between them. The face makes the character recognizable. The character makes the scarcity meaningful. The scarcity makes the theater worth filming. Every layer says one thing: comfort, made tangible, and yours to love.
Most brands in mature categories innovate in one place while the rest of the business keeps saying what it always said. A premium product sits in discount packaging. Each move is sensible. Together they cancel out.
The lesson: growth in a mature category rarely comes from one bold move. It comes from moves that reinforce each other, so a competitor would have to copy the whole system to catch up.
Five Questions For Brands In “Finished” Categories
- What does our category assume about who buys, why, and what they will pay?
- Which product feature could carry our brand without a logo?
- Which customer are we underpricing because the category taught us to see them a certain way?
- Which rhythms from categories with pricing power could we borrow?
- Do our product, relationship, presence, and story all say the same thing?
Jellycat did not wait for its category to grow. It redefined what a soft toy could be, and who it could be for.
The question for every brand leader: is your category really mature, or have you simply accepted its definition of what you sell?
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Ali Zouitene, independent brand strategist and market analyst based in Paris.
At The Blake Project, we help leaders turn brand into a disciplined driver of financial performance — strengthening pricing power, competitive position, and enterprise value. Email us to start a conversation about enduring profitable growth. For The EBITDA.
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