Pillow Pets
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| Type | stuffed toy |
|---|---|
| Inventor | Jennifer Telfer |
| Company | CJ Products |
| Country | United States |
| Availability | 2003–present |
| Materials | chenille |
| Slogan | It's a Pillow. It's a Pet... It's a Pillow Pet. |
| Official website | |
Pillow Pets are a brand of stuffed toys with Velcro straps that allow them to be changed from a decorated pillow into a stuffed animal. The toys are made from chenille. Invented by Jennifer Telfer in 2003, Pillow Pets first gained success when Telfer personally sold the toys near the Christmas season of that year. They would later become more successful through television advertising, where the company's famous slogan, "It's a pillow, it's a pet, it's a Pillow Pet!" was in every ad. Pillow Pets have been used for charitable fund raising.
In 2003, Jennifer Telfer was living in San Diego with her husband, Clint, and two sons. In an interview with CNBC, Telfer states that she came up with the idea of functional stuffed toys when her oldest son, then seven, flattened out one of his stuffed animals from sleeping with it often. She decided on a combination of a pillow and a stuffed animal as the concept for Pillow Pets. Telfer and her husband proposed a meeting with a plush manufacturer at a tradeshow in Las Vegas, and decided to wholesale the toys themselves through their company, CJ Products (CJ is a combination of their first initials). Following the meeting, the Telfers were prepared to sell the first toys.
The first Pillow Pet was "Snuggly Puppy". In the Christmas season, Jennifer Telfer first sold Pillow Pets at mall kiosks, but failed to sell them all: "Every single parent would walk up, and their kids would love them. [The parents would] say, 'No, it's just another stuffed animal.' Because they didn't know that it opened up to a pillow." A few weeks later, Telfer discovered that the Pillow Pets were most profitable during the period after Christmas when they were almost sold out at home shows. She later ordered a container of 7,000 Pillow Pets, now in six different animal varieties, and sold all of them in three months. By the end of 2010, CJ Products earned $300,000 in gross sales.
In 2009, CJ Products started using television advertising to promote the Pillow Pets. Commercials aired on children's cable channels such as Nickelodeon, and family-oriented networks such as Travel Channel. Partly because of the ads, gross sales of $7,000,000 were recorded at the end of 2009. Telfer recalled: "I didn't realize that we were gonna be at this level, or people would love my idea as much as I loved it."
In 2012, Dream Lite Pillow Pets were introduced, along with Glow Pets in 2013.
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