A unicorn that poops rainbows, in plush

In April 2016 a client of ours forwarded a brief that opened with a link to a commercial. The ad had gone round the world the previous autumn, and its star was a white unicorn with enormous blue eyes and a rainbow mane, and its premise, delivered with a straight face, was that this unicorn poops rainbow soft-serve. An agency had pitched the brand a plush that did the same — the unicorn, ten to twelve inches tall, with a swirl of rainbow soft-serve on a cord that pulls out from exactly where you would expect and tucks back in afterwards — and the brand had said yes.

The brief was specific. Long lashes, big eyes, chipmunk cheeks. Furry, like the character. A vibrant, troll-style mane and tail. Nice quality, child-safety tested, 2,500 or 5,000 to start, with a national retailer in view if it sold. And one line that set the pace for everything after it: the agency was already sampling with another supplier, and did not want to lose the deal to the time that had passed.

We worked the whole thing as an OEM programme. Our client owned the customer relationship and we owned the product: the layout, the pattern, the materials, the samples and the production.

A layout in a day, then samples for free

The first reply went back the same day. Our first mockup put the unicorn on the little stool from the ad; the customer wanted the plush alone, so the layout was redrawn over the weekend and sent on the Monday. The agency was, in the distributor’s words, very happy with it, and asked for one change: the ice cream would lose its cone. Embroidered eyes, for safety, were understood and agreed.

Then the awkward part. The competitor was producing samples at no charge, so the distributor could not charge its customer either. We took that on: the samples were free, and where they were not, we shared the cost rather than pass it down the line.

The poop was right first time. The face took three rounds.

The first sample took three and a half weeks, most of it spent on the mane. Different long-pile materials were tried for the troll hair the brief asked for, and the sample went out with a cut-plush mane in six colours instead, alongside swatches of the long-pile options. When the brand saw the photos they preferred the cut plush and the long-pile question was closed. The customer’s first comment on the first sample was that the soft-serve, we had nailed.

The face was another matter, and it is the honest centre of this story. The customer’s first round of comments ran to seven points: make the muzzle smaller so it stops being the focal point, make the eyes and lashes one-and-a-half to two times bigger and give them depth, make the inside of the ears white, take the head shape from our drawing rather than the round sample, thicken the horn. Then, with the sample in hand, two more: the bigger eyes must not become bug eyes, and the horn must stop flopping.

Every version was built to the US child-safety requirements the brief set, which is why the first sample had sewn eyes at all. The second sample switched to plastic safety eyes for the life the customer wanted, backed with fabric behind the eye so they would hold in a pull test. The customer’s verdict on the photos was blunt. The blue was the wrong blue, the eyes bulged, and moving the pupils around in an image editor did not fix it. We sourced a different eye; the customer approved it from a photograph within two days. The horn was tapered to a dull point and stiffened. The third sample, with the new eyes and the revised horn, closed out the face. The programme went on to produce and ship for the brand’s retail range.

Why this one matters

A character plush lives or dies on the face, and the face is decided by a few components — the eye, the lash, the shape of the muzzle — that can only be judged in the hand. Getting from a customer writing “crazy eyes” to a customer approving the eye from a photograph is a matter of sourcing the right part and turning a round quickly, not of drawing better. The part people assume is difficult, a rainbow poop on a cord that disappears back where it came from, was right the first time. That is usually how it goes, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.