Case 37 — Jellycat · William and Thomas Gatacre · 2023

Demand has doubled and your factories can follow it. Do you keep retiring your bestsellers, or scale the ones that are working while the wave is under you?

Your soft-toy company has always retired designs: each year a list of bunnies and Amuseables stops being made and is never reissued. That was a habit from the nursery-gift years, and it cost you a little revenue on proven sellers. Now the customer has changed. Adults are buying Amuseables for each other, TikTok is pointing at the brand, turnover has gone from about £146 million to £200 million in a year, and the bestsellers are selling out. Your Chinese contract factories can add capacity within months. Stockists you have never heard of are asking for accounts, and the ones you have are asking for ten times the stock. A retired design is currently trading on eBay at three times what you sold it for. The easiest decision available to you is to make more of everything and sell it to everyone.

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