Sensing a Tsum Tsum Craze Afoot, Disney Rushes to Supply Fans

LOS ANGELES — Has Disney stumbled across the new Beanie Baby?

Last month, a smattering of Disney Stores started selling a pellet-filled toy the size of a Twinkie. Priced at $4.95 apiece, the little oblong blobs, called Tsum Tsum, look like various Disney characters and are intended to be purchased in groups and stacked like firewood. (Tsum, pronounced tsoom, translates as “stack” in Japanese, according to Disney.)

Disney, unsure how Americans would respond, ordered a modest amount as a test, stocking them on Disney.com and in 60 of the 207 domestic Disney Stores. They sold like wildfire. Some stores are now sold out, with Stitch and Dumbo characters going especially fast, according to a Disney spokeswoman.

“I spend a lot of money on Disney merchandise, but you don’t often see this level of cuteness,” said Scarlett Litton, 28, an Orlando, Fla., Internet sales manager and mother of two. “I have like 30 stacked all over my desk at work.”

Disney is now rushing to restock and expand the line to all of its stores. Airlifting more Tsum Tsum from Asian factories has been discussed. (Merchandise normally arrives by boat, which is slower but cheaper.) Disney is also working to develop complementary products — apparel and tech accessories — aimed at teenagers.

“The uniqueness of the product, coupled with the collectability, has created demand that has far exceeded our expectations,” Paul Gainer, a Disney Consumer Products executive vice president, said in an email.

Tsum Tsum were first introduced by Disney Japan last year as an appendage to a Tetris-style video game for mobile devices; players compete to connect as many Disney characters as they can as a clock ticks down. Both the game and the toys were runaway hits. More than 1.8 million of the stuffed animals have been sold in Japan; the game has ranked as the No. 1 downloaded app for extended periods.

With that kind of success, could Disney really have been caught off guard in North America? Conspiracy theorists will note that Disney is a master at using controlled scarcity to create DVD demand for old movies like “Pinocchio” and “Bambi.”

But even Disney does not always see the future. It greatly underestimated demand for “Frozen” merchandise, for instance. Moreover, the Tsum Tsum game caught fire in Japan on Line, an instant messaging service that has a far smaller user base in North America. The Japanese are also not always trendsetters when it comes to Disney products. The introduction of Duffy, a teddy bear, at Tokyo Disneyland brought dazzling results, but Duffy has received a ho-hum response in the United States.

Whether Tsum Tsum will grow into a full-blown, Beanie Baby-style collecting craze is still anyone’s guess. But some toy analysts are already making comparisons.

“My view is that Tsum Tsum will turn out to be the hit for this fourth quarter,” Lutz Muller, an independent consumer products consultant, said in an email. “A second Beanie Baby? Probably yes. And about time, too.”