pear / plushie research

One of the first new deliverables that need to be considered due to the timescale is the plushies. These are small soft toys that will be used to represent the characters in Pear. The Budget is quite an issue for 4 bespoke plushies as many companies will only accept bulk orders or charge around £50 for a single design.

I have looked at various different suppliers to try and find the best deal:

FurryTails create high quality plush toys and have over 20 years experience, though only accept orders of 2,500 pieces. This is way over my budget and I only need 4 plush toys in total.

Cuddlies are a site that make children's drawings into real life plush toys. The quality is great and each plush is hand-made. Each plush starts at £50 and with 4 to make, that leaves me over budget.

Plushie.co.uk are another manufacturer that create high quality plushies but a minimum order is 1,200 pieces.

Many of the other larger manufacturers I looked into had similar requests and didn't do one-off plushies that fit my budget. I decided to look into etsy and find small businesses that would fit my project better. 

I found BrenOllie ran by Tina Winterborne. She creates small plushies and also does custom orders. I contacted her about a quote and she said she could do the plushies for £10 each with £5 postage. This was a great price that fit into my budget and left over half left for printing.