What is Build-a-Bear doing?

Build-a-Bear has been making adorable Pokemon plush for years now. For a long time, they have generally followed a standard formula of one Pokemon release or re-release per month. It was slow going, but predictable, and a good way to let customers catch their breaths between each one, especially if they’re forced to purchase online bundles just to get them.

Now, suddenly, they’re practically throwing the re-releases at us. In October came Umbreon, with a new release happening around the same time. We’ve had Mimikyu and Mudkip. For Black Friday, they re-released Glaceon, Mew, and Alolan Vulpix without even announcing it. At the same time, they re-released Flareon and did announce it. Now, merely a couple of weeks later, it’s Espeon.

It’s exciting, overwhelming, and concerning all at once. These online bundles are not cheap. How am I going to get them all? I missed Glaceon because of the lack of announcement, but I managed to get Umbreon and squeaked by with Flareon. I don’t know if I can afford Espeon before he might be gone. Glaceon vanished in a few hours on sale. The full-price ones usually stick around longer, but there's no guarantee of it. Umbreon sold out last Christmas at full price.

I’d like to believe this new strategy is just to get as much business as possible for the holidays. But is it? Or could there be a worrisome reason, like that they’re about to lose the Pokemon license and want to get as much out of it as possible before that happens?

As far as I know, they’re doing really well with the license and losing it seems unlikely. But there are strange stipulations that go with it, such as that they can’t restuff any Pokemon plush or put a sound in if it wasn’t originally purchased with one. If it’s that hard to make Pokemon plush, maybe losing the license isn’t such a far-fetched idea.

Hopefully this thought is nonsense and there's nothing to worry about. But regardless, it does present a problem. Unless one is made of money, collecting this flood of new re-releases is going to be almost impossible without going into debt. Espeon and Vaporeon, judging from their prices from individual sellers, are the very most popular of the out of print releases. Espeon has literally sold for hundreds of dollars. Now Espeon is back, so Vaporeon and likely Jolteon can't be far behind. From Build-a-Bear's track record lately, we may see both of them before the month is out. I will be very surprised if we don't see at least one of them very soon.