Disproportionate Teddy Bear

About

Disporportionate Teddy Bear refers to the Joyfay Giant Teddy Bear, a 6-foot-tall stuffed bear sold on the retail website Amazon.com notable for its bad reviews regarding the length of its legs, which is not immediately apparent from the product's Amazon description.

Origin

The Disproportionate Teddy Bear is produced by the by Joyfay, a company owned by four scientists looking to supplement their income in their respective PhD programs. The bears legs were made longer to save on shipping costs and qualify for Amazon Prime shipping.

The first review of the bear was posted by Amazon^[1] user ENVYMMMA_Riely on February 22nd, 2012, who wrote:

"It was a great gift for my wife on Valentines Day! Comes in a smaller box then you would think. It does expand after you open it. It did have a small hole in it knee that I had to fix. I was a little sad about that. But over all it is a great big bear all of 6'5" if not more! It is not overly wide and has long legs."

Spread

On Nobember 9th, 2017, Twitter ^[2] user @cooltonedcutie posteda. series of reviews of the bear, which complained about the length of the legs. They captioned the post "i can't handle this." The post (shown below) received more than 100,000 retweets and 243,000 likes in less than four days.

The following day, Gizmodo^[3] published an interview with creators of the bear, who defended their choice to make the bear's legs long. In addition to saving on shipping costs, the bears fir the proportions of adults, which the creators presume will make it sell better with older customers. Nikola Matic, co-founder of Joyfay, explained:

"Dig deep down and think, 'Why is it that anybody buys teddy bears?' There are some answers and they’re quite profound. One of the reasons why people buy teddy bears is because the proportions of the arms and torso and legs are that of a baby. And it’s kind of innate to children to like those kind of proportions. And it’s kind of cute to us. It’s like an axiom: Everybody finds babies to be cute. So normal teddy bears, they maintain these kind of proportions… But in the real world, if you had babies that were that big, they could not walk and they couldn’t hold their head."

Several media outlets also covered the popularity of the Teddy Bear, including Teen Vogue^[4] and Boing Boing.^[5]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References