You’d think that promoting a plushie in a foreign country where plushies are ubiquitous would be all fun and games, and you’d be half right. It is fun, but it isn’t a game. Plushie work is work.

Suppose you’ve followed along with Plushie Confidential volumes 1–3. In that case, you’ve heard about the genesis of Bitty (the puppet), how Itty Bitty (the plushie) appeared following in his fuzzy footprints, and why Japan’s Bitcoin Tokyo conference completely changed our approach to this project. Not much has changed since the last edition of Plushie Confidential, except for the progress we’ve made building a team to help us promote him in Japan, which can be challenging to pull off when your internal team is just two people and whoever from Block, our mothership company, we can coerce into helping us.

So what now?
1 ASSEMBLING A TEAM

During our first trip to Japan as a team, and as noted above, Bitty and Itty Bitty made pretty big splashes in the land of the rising sun. This did not go unnoticed by conference organizers and the small group of people, from kimono models who helped us create content to university students who helped us translate Japanese to English, who recognized that we might have been on to something.

Fortunately, the project made a positive enough impact that everyone who helped us the first time was willing to help us more comprehensively push the plushie into the Japanese market. One of our foremost strokes of luck so far is Bitcoin Tokyo’s organizer, Koji. In addition to helping us with retail and e-commerce (see following paragraph), he has a pretty extensive social media following in Japan including 40K followers on Twitter, 18K on YouTube, and a bitcoin-focused newsletter.
2 RETAIL & E-COMMERCE, AND SPONSORSHIPS

One of our biggest goals with Itty Bitty was to take him off of e-commerce stores (which we still want to use, but would like to not rely on so much) and into physical stores, ideally retail stores, where people could touch, hold, and picture themselves owning one. We already have plushies at Tokyo Bitcoin Base, a bitcoin co-working and events space, in addition to dozens of stickers and art and merchandise projects related to Itty Bitty. We also have another potential retailer, which we won't name here for the sake of our ongoing negotiation.
3 CAMPUSES

We have some half-baked ideas for how to get Itty Bitty onto campuses with strong engineering cultures. It’s a work in progress, but since we have access to several university students who are willing to help us seed Itty Bitty into these schools, for all we know, this could be our best platform for promoting Itty Bitty in Japan. But the execution matters, and that is something that is still very much in the air.
4 MISCELLANIA

On a sweet and related note, we were walking down a street in Tokyo with some Itty Bittys when we noticed that the children of a nearby couple were reaching out for the Itty Bittys we were carrying, so we did the right thing and gave the kids one each. The parents were grateful, but the kids looked like they had just been given actual bitcoin… not that they would have known what that is, but you get the idea. This confirms our suspicion that Itty Bitty is going to be more popular with younger customers who are less set in their ways (K–16, let’s say) than with older, more stubborn bitcoiners who don’t understand, and still don’t understand, why a bitcoin would ever be depicted as grumpy. The shorter answer is that it’s cuter. The longer answer is that it’s cuter, more memorable, distinct, and very, very Sesame Street/Muppets. Ask your kids. They get it.
5 AI NIGHTMARES

Finally, let’s talk about trying to animate Itty Bitty in Veo3, which is supposed to be the gold standard for image-to-video generation. A tool like Veo3 is such a godsend for anyone trying to market a single e-commerce product and should, when it’s working right, make tasks that could take hours, lots of people, lighting and sound teams, post-production crews, and so on, possible weeks to pull off. Unfortunately, while Veo3 excels at some things (rendering people doing things, cityscapes, animals, basically anything set in reality), it has not yet reached the point that it can render a plushie toy to become anything except a mutated, flailing, malformed John Carpenter movie monster with too many limbs and an unnatural set of motions that make it look as it is trying to break free from the horrible shape that Veo3 transformed it into. If you want to sleep tonight, we recommend skipping over the upcoming gif.

Behold, if you dare:

Next time on Plushie Confidential: Products, Progress, and Hopefully Fewer AI Abominations