Inside the Cult of Squishmallow
I infiltrated a Squishmallow Discord in 2021. What I found was equal parts adorable and depressing.
Search “Squishmallow” on TikTok, and you’ll find beds colonized by bulbous, limbless creatures, presiding over the duvet like a pastel politburo. Their collectors speak of them with evangelical zeal, generally reserved for televangelists, sneakerheads, or curators, sorting their acquisitions by taxonomy; their size, shape, color, collection, and personality type. The devotion feels silly, then endearing, then disturbing.
These toys—puffed-up, hyper-simplified avatars of animals and foodstuffs, each stamped with two black dots for eyes and a schematic smile—should be innocuous. And yet they command a fervor that seems disproportionate to their simplicity, accumulating in bedrooms until they constitute less a collection than a small, soft army. What, exactly, is the Squishmallow seducing in us? Or maybe the better question: what in us was already primed to be seduced?
They look like toys for primary schoolers, and yet youth culture has claimed them, perhaps because each Squishmallow comes with a biography that reads like a millennial’s therapy notes.
Take Seth, a fuzzy brown fox: “He is nervous to try a new sport or play a new instrument, and although he may not be the best at everything he tries, he doesn’t let that stop him from having a good time!” Or Stacy, a pale blue squid who “is a shy squid, who prefers to be home with her friends or even by herself. Big groups of Squishmallows make her a little nervous, so she loves to learn and explore through books.” These aren’t childish fantasies—they’re fully articulated, diagnosed anxieties with coping mechanisms attached.
My friend Molly McGrath got their first Squishmallow—a brown bear—as a Christmas gift from their brother. They “totally became obsessed” and now own over forty. McGrath traces the appeal to earlier crazes: “They’re cute and collectible like Beanie Babies and comfy like those body pillows a few years ago.” But Squishmallows have an edge that the others lack. “They’re so much better,” McGrath explained. “Each has their own quirk and personality. Like this one”—they held up a rainbow pegasus—“they rollerskate like me!”
This is the pinnacle of Squishmallow marketing: the illusion that a mass-produced plush toy understands you. The biographies create a sense of kinship that goes beyond childhood make-believe. During the pandemic, when many of us confronted isolation in ways we hadn’t anticipated, it’s easy to see how these soft, yielding objects could fill a void. “It’s nice having them in bed with me to cuddle with,” McGrath said. “I’m cooped up in my apartment and just super lonely. I miss my friends, and having them with me makes me feel less alone.” Then, quieter: “Am I crazy for that?”
The numbers suggest McGrath is not alone, nor crazy. Since launching in 2017, Kellytoy has released over four hundred characters across forty countries. This past February, the company announced it had sold over fifty million units. Much of that success can be traced to TikTok, where Gen Z collectors document their hauls and embark on “Squishmallow Hunts” through Walgreens, CVS, Target, Costco—a modern treasure hunt for mass-produced comfort.
The formula is familiar. Remember Beanie Babies in the nineties, Webkinz in the early aughts? Squishmallows range from five inches to twenty-four, priced from six to twenty dollars—accessible enough that nearly anyone can buy in. But Kellytoy has adopted the streetwear playbook, releasing collections in limited drops to manufacture scarcity around objects clearly designed to be mass-produced and abundant. The result is a resale market that would make even Supreme blush.
Naturally, the hunt has moved online onto Depop, eBay, Poshmark, and even on Discord (more on that later). Wendy the Frog—an avid basketball player and chemist, according to her bio—sells for upwards of three hundred dollars. An eight-inch Valentine’s Day exclusive of Stacy the Squid, she of the social anxiety, sold for over two thousand. These aren’t prices determined by craftsmanship or rarity in any meaningful sense. They’re the byproduct of artificial scarcity meeting genuine loneliness, and a kind of Depression-era stockpiling mania.
Joi Li, a Depop seller, discovered Squishmallows on TikTok and quickly amassed over sixty. She started reselling them as a way to fund college, but it became something else. “It’s a great way to downsize my collection, maybe justify my addiction lol,” she told me. “But also, you can trade with other collectors. It’s cute. We’re just like a little family.”
The family metaphor kept coming up. To better understand it, I found my way to r/Squishmallow and then to a Discord server with over 500 members dedicated to hunting, trading, reselling, and—surprisingly—competing—a gold mine. I spoke with Luke, a high school student in Indiana who’s been collecting for a year and a half. He described the hunt as “addictive,” “an everyday activity, just something to do.” The toys offered an escape: “They’re just really cute and cuddly, and buying them takes my mind off of school and the idea of corona completely.”
But Luke also described a darker current running through the community. “I feel really jealous, or overall saddened if I don’t find a specific Squishmallow I want, and it’s literally because other people share posts and just, you know, show off.” This isn’t unique to Squishmallow collectors—it’s the same anxiety Supreme and other streetwear brands have weaponized for years. The limited-drop model doesn’t just create desire; it generates a fear of missing out so acute that it can override actual desire. Luke admitted he’d recently caved and bought an entire Easter collection: “I realized I only bought them because of the scarcity and how other people wanted them, not for my own enjoyment.”
What began as curiosity about a generation’s attachment to stuffed animals revealed something more unsettling: a portrait of what it means to be young now, facing loneliness and a longing for connection with few tools to manage either. The Squishmallow craze coincided with the pandemic’s upheaval, arriving precisely when many teenagers found themselves isolated and unequipped to cope. Whether through tactile comfort, a retreat into childlike simplicity, or the compulsive satisfaction of completing a collection, these strange hybrids—part marshmallow, part cute animal, part emotional support object—have embedded themselves in the consciousness of a generation that was already primed for seduction.