Entertainment
Your Reversible Plushie Doesn’t Have To Be An Octopus
For Fourth of July this year, some friends and I got together at our buddy’s house in north Jersey. Being able to see everyone again definitely made it worth it, but the drive from D.C. took forever. Six hours! With a journey of that length, I had to make some pit stops along the way. At every rest area I stopped at, I saw the same phenomenon: A giant wall-to-wall display of the TeeTurtle reversible plush octopus. This got me thinking, if this particular popular plushie is such a resilient trend—5 months after I first wrote about it, it remains a #1 bestseller on Amazon—why haven’t more companies capitalized on it by turning their own IP into a reversible stuffed animal?
Turns out, I was not the only one to wonder this. Scroll past the octopus on the list of Amazon’s bestselling toys, and you will come across a familiar figure, a reversible Baby Yoda.
The brand name (zhengxi) and the Chinglish product description with its Asian lenticular brackets let you know that it was not Disney who came up with this idea. Yet some factory in China is obviously reaping the rewards.
As I detailed in my initial article, the selling point for the reversible plushies seems to be the dualistic approach to human emotion. Depending on your mood, you can make your toy seem either happy or sad. The market for this has grown with the forced proximity to family members for long stretch of time; understanding each other’s state of mind is a key element in staying sane when locked down together.
If this makes sense to you, and you are among the few who have not bought the octopus due to its ubiquity on TikTok, then you might enjoy this little guy from the “Star Wars” franchise. Because no matter whether he is smiling or frowning, everybody knows that the star of “The Mandalorian” will stay cute forever.