These Cute Penguin Plushies Aimed at Kids Wouldn't Mind if They Got Super Into Crypto, Too
Pudgy Penguins is only the latest push to try and slowly introduce crypto and other web3-related ideas to the next generation. It feels weird!
We have a membership at a local zoo, and upon entering, we ask each kid which animal they want to see first. Without hesitation, my youngest looks me in the eye: penguins. During each visit, my kids can pick out one toy—one. We encourage them to look around and take in all the shops before making a decision. My youngest, the more impulsive of the two, does not need this. She buys a new, cute penguin plushie.
Given all that, who do you think a toy like this is made for?
Here’s a little help. It’s on Walmart’s website. It costs $14.97. It’s called a “Huggable Pudgy.” The company who makes them suggests to “start your day with your forever friend.” It also promises to help “immerse yourself in a captivating digital journey.”
It’s a plushie for Pudgy Penguins, an extension of a popular NFT collection started in 2021, featuring goofy-looking penguins in a variety of colorful outfits, and says it’s a “web3-born brand that fosters creativity, freedom, and community.” Non-fungible tokens are a way of providing proof of ownership over a digital creation, such as a piece of art, and it’s shockingly common for NFT collections to brand themselves with artwork one might mistake for being from a children’s show. (The reason chiefly being that cartoonish characters are easy to create variety around.) It’s also becoming more common for such artwork to appear in parts of the real world, and that includes toys.
What’s less common, at least in my experience, is seeing them so targeted at children, but Pudgy Penguins are available in Target, Walmart, Hot Topics, Five Below, and Macy’s. They even come with a “Forever Friend Adoption Certificate” with this text:
“You are now the proud owner of a very special Pudgy Penguin, who will stay by your side through thick and thin. Thank you for adopting this Pudgy as your Forever Friend. By signing this certificate, you promise to give it a lifetime of love, friendship, and fun.”
Just below that text is QR code that connects to Pudgy World, an online space its creators call “a hyper cozy game set in the whimsical world of Pudgy Penguins.”
If my kid asked for one, they might never know the difference, but I would!
And it would feel icky!
“My team and I acquired Pudgy Penguins for $2.5M [in 2021], with the vision of creating the world’s next great character brand, while also reinventing how IPs are built,” said Pudgy Penguins CEO Luca Netz, who was also one of the first employees at the now Amazon-owned door camera company Ring, in an interview. “The key question for me and my team then was, ‘How do we take these NFTs and bring them to life and build a community that is about impacting people in a positive way?’”
Netz, as he already pointed out, didn’t create Pudgy Penguins, but the rise of NFTs tied into his “avid collector” habits. Pudgy Toys became a direct extension of this.
He told me the target demographic for Pudgy Toys are “15-to-26-year-olds,” which lines up well with the people you’ll see sharing enthusiasm for Pudgy Toys on Twitter.
“It’s always more fun to have tea with friends and today @pudgyray and I brought our Pudgies along!” wrote one person on Twitter, who not shockingly self-describes as a crypto enthusiast. “Remote work + pudgy friends + tea PERFECT DAYS DO EXIST! Btw if you want a pudgy plushie go get one at Toys R Us mid valley!”
Wait, Toys R Us still exists? Anyway.
Some of this “oh, it’s not really for kids” talk is a little hard to square with the description on Walmart’s website, which says you should “have fun experiencing the digital and physical worlds alongside your Pudgy Penguins Huggable Plush for boys & girls” and describes it as “an excellent penguin gift for kids or adult collectors alike.”
And yet, in Pudgy Penguin’s defense, lots of adults buy toys and figures with simplistic child-like aesthetics, or else things like Funko Pop wouldn’t be so popular.
But two things can be true, no?
Adults, through a combination of crypto and aesthetic but mostly crypto, are into these. But it can also lay the groundwork with a younger generation, drawn in by aesthetics, and hope their investment in the characters lasts while the company builds out its metaverse components like Pudgy World, which is due to feature games.
You can see this tension played out in the reviews on the various toys on Walmart:
“Cute but dangerous. It's basically a stuffed animal designed to encourage children to waste money gambling on nfts and crypto,” wrote one person. “Beware. Well built though.”
Writing “well built though” is extremely funny.
“Cute stuffed animals woth a scannable QR code to allow the non crypto person actually see how it kinda works using blockchain technology,” wrote another buyer. “don't be nervous about the term blockchain.my 6 year old got the penguin and I kept the card woth the QR code lol .pretty cool way to learn how the future internet will be.also bought sun figureen ones.I can see this being a hot Xmas present and selling out fast.”
When pressed on the idea these toys are, by design, also a convenient trojan horse for trying to get kids into crypto, Netz said “web3 education or getting involved with the Pudgy Penguins NFT community is optional and an added bonus for those who are interested, instead of a requirement.”
“Our approach goes a long way to getting a much wider audience interested in the brand,” said Netz, “instead of restricting ourselves to folks with web3 experience.”
Which doesn’t explicitly rule out the trojan horse idea? You get to have it both ways.
“Young people are naturally tech-savvy and curious about the latest innovations,” he added. “They're not just passive consumers; they're creators, influencers, and early adopters who are shaping the future of how we interact with technology.”
Our interview was conducted over email, so I’ll excuse some of the press release-y talk in some of Netz’s answers. But my children are seven (soon to be eight) and four (she’d correct me to more accurately say four-and-a-half), so they’re just wrapping their heads around the concept of money, let alone digital wallets. But even if NFTs, crypto, and everything else isn’t going away, there’s reason to be skeptical that the coming generations will, by default, think it’s super interesting. Some data suggests otherwise.
“There has not been much research on the marketing of crypto or access to crypto among youth and families,” said Hamline University professor of psychology Serena King, when I asked her about the topic in a story about Neopets going crypto last year. “We know little about how [to] access them and the marketing of these tools to you and the public and the actual behavior of youth or families with the tools. This is an area in desperate need of increased research.”
I found this passage from a New York Times piece on Pudgy Penguins revealing:
The worst you could say about community NFTs is that they’re encouraging people to overpay for what amount to digital bragging rights, and that suckers will inevitably end up holding the bag when the bubble pops. But I doubt many fans would be dissuaded by the argument.
I told Ms. Zhong, the crypto entrepreneur, that I was still confused by the appeal of Pudgy Penguins, which didn’t seem to do much besides attract attention.
“That’s half the point,” she responded. “No one knows what’s going on, but it’s a lot of fun.”
The “fun” feels a little less fun when they’re trying to rope my kids in, though.
Next up, Pudgy Penguins will be at San Diego’s Comic-Con convention in San Diego.
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Also:
It feels like the crypto stuff imploded a few years back, then quietly came back and remained exactly that—quiet. I have no idea what that says about the market.
Does anyone who reads Crossplay have a teenager? Are the teens talking about crypto at all? That feels like the age where curiosity might start bubbling in.
I once bought and sold a small amount of dogecoin on a lark, and made like $200 in a matter of hours. It felt extremely powerful, and then I never did it again.
These remind me of webkinz. They were stuffed animals that led to a (bad) browser game platform full of micro transactions in the 2000s. My sister and I were into them around your kids age, much to my parent’s dislike. I remember them being placed strategically at the grocery store to attract child height eyes.
So... what does the QR code actually do? All the rugpull projects (which is to say all the projects) mentioned in Folding Ideas' Line Goes Up had *extremely* half-baked, barebones, or nonexistent digital components where, at best, you'd look at your NFT jpg on a web browser. This one made it to the point where they manufactured a physical product, so it's got that going for it, but I have a hard time believing there's anything meaningful to do in their online experience.