Bluey, Disney and Marvel — The Licensed Ty Favourites

Plenty of Ty collections don't start with an animal. They start with a character the child already loves, and works backwards from there.

Bluey is the obvious one in Australia. The Ty Bluey and Bingo regular Beanie Babies at $11.99 are about as safe as a gift gets — instantly recognisable to any Australian child, and they land perfectly well with kids far too young to care about collecting anything. They're also the toy most likely to be requested by name.

Bluey Ty products are also a wonderful gift to send.

Disney brings Stitch and Dumbo into the range, and Stitch in particular has a following well beyond small children. We sell a steady number to adults who own no other Ty product and have no intention of starting a collection, they just want Stitch. Dumbo comes as both a clip and a regular, which makes a matched pair easy if you want a small gift alongside a larger one.

Marvel covers Spiderman, Captain America, Groot and Iron Man. The clips at $6.99 are the sensible pick for school bags, the regular soft Beanie Babies at $14.99 sit better on a shelf, and the 14 inch Iron Man Squish-A-Boo at $27.99 is the one for a child who wants something to carry around.

Licensed characters behave differently to the rest of the Ty range in one way worth knowing about. They generally don't carry a birthday on the tag, and their availability follows film and television cycles rather than Ty's own seasonal calendar. That means a character can be everywhere for six months and then simply stop, and popular ones don't always come back. If a specific licensed character matters to someone, buy it when you see it rather than waiting for a better moment.

Licensed characters don't sit especially well alongside a neat shelf of pastel Beanie Bellies, and trying to force them together usually looks worse than giving them their own space. A Marvel shelf and a Boos shelf, kept separate, reads much better than one of each in a row.

Mostly though, the licensed range works as a way in. A child who gets a Bluey or a Spiderman clip often ends up curious about the rest of it, and once birthdays and character names enter the conversation you've got a collector rather than a kid with a soft toy.

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