Nap notes

Picking a plush size you will actually use

Four numbers, what they feel like in a room, and the one mistake almost everybody makes buying their first plushie online.

Size is a question about furniture, not about cuteness

Measure the spot, not the plush

The size that goes wrong is always the one chosen from a photo. A plush on a white background has no scale, so the brain fills in whatever it wants. Before you pick, look at where the thing will actually live — the end of a bed, a desk corner, the back seat of a car — and measure that. A 34-inch long cat plush is wonderful along the head of a double bed and absurd on an office desk.

Under 8 inches: the pocket ones

Palm-sized plush toys are a different product from the big ones even when they are the same animal. They get carried, lost, washed and replaced. Buy them when the point is portability or when you are building a little collection on a shelf, and buy more than one, because a single small plush tends to vanish.

11 to 20 inches: the hugging ones

This is the size we sell most of and the size we recommend to anybody who has not held one of ours before. Both arms fit around it, it stays light with PP cotton fill, and it does not dominate a bed. If you cannot decide, the answer is almost always 11.8 or 15.7 inches.

24 inches and up: the pillow ones

Long plush pillows stop being toys somewhere past two feet. They go under a knee, along a lower back or across a sofa. The fill matters more at this length: a long plush stuffed too soft sags in the middle, which is why we keep the density even from end to end rather than padding the head.

The mistake

People buy one size smaller than they wanted because of the price gap, then buy the bigger one three weeks later. If the two sizes are close in cost and the plush is for sleeping with, take the bigger one the first time.

Where this leads

Everything above comes out of sewing the same animals over and over and hearing back about them. If it helped, the shelves are the next stop; if it did not, write to us and we will add the answer here.