Courtney Sullivan, a lawyer in Scottsdale, Arizona, was tasked with a mission: Her nieces in Texas wanted NeeDoh squishies, but their dad (her brother) discovered they were sold out everywhere he looked.
Luckily, Sullivan found some in a local store and mailed them over state lines to her nieces.
NeeDohs, colorful rubbery balls and cubes of varying textures, have gone viral on social media — and the demand is outpacing supply. It’s caused a mini-Labubu effect: Kids (and parents and aunts) are desperate to find them in stores, while knock-offs flourish and resellers jack up prices on the real thing.
“Literally, within the first nine weeks of the year, we’d sold through the whole year’s inventory,” Paul Weingard, CEO of Schylling, the maker of NeeDoh, told Business Insider. “No company can plan for that. It’s been fantastic, overwhelming demand that just well outstrips our ability to replenish.”
Schylling, based in North Andover, Massachusetts, specializes in vintage or classic toys — things like wooden paddles with a rubber ball on a string, View-Masters, Big Wheels, and Lava Lamps — along with other, more modern toys. They launched NeeDoh in 2017, when fidget toys, slime, ASMR videos, and squishies were already popular with kids.
Since then, NeeDoh has been growing its sales by about two times a year, says Weingard (who declined to give exact sales numbers). The recent viral surge, which he estimates is about six times last year’s growth, has made NeeDoh the 52-year-old company’s best seller of all time.
Still, having a hit toy is great, but it can be complicated: Pop Mart, the maker of Labubu, saw its stock drop by 30% after it published an earnings report revealing that the furry dolls, which have started to fall out of favor, accounted for most of its sales.
Miguel Montano, a youth pastor in San Antonio, told Business Insider that NeeDohs are indeed a hit, like the hits he’s seen before.
“My older high school students talk about them, but it’s the freshman middle schoolers who are obsessed with them,” he said. “It’s just another fad — Labubu, Funko Pops, whatever is in. There’s an almost mindless gravitation to it.” Montano isn’t above the lure, though — he bought two NeeDohs for himself at a hefty markup from a reseller.
Weingard told Business Insider that sales of NeeDoh had been steadily rising, but really blew up this past holiday season when an advent calendar-style multi-pack went viral on social media, kicking off a craze for the sensory toys. While the “Nice Cube” is their top seller, holiday multi-packs are also driving sales. An Easter-themed pack of 10 squishies is selling for around $200 from resellers on Walmart.com.
I myself have been a victim of overpriced resellers. I paid $18 at a store that sells viral products at a local mall for a nobby gumdrop-shaped NeeDoh that my kid had been wishing for for weeks. The squishy’s regular retail price is only $6. After playing with it a little, I can admit it does have a hard-to-describe satisfying squish factor, and I’ve found myself absent-mindedly playing with it at my desk during the workday.
But the difficulty of finding these in stores is frustrating to both kids and adults. Just this week, I saw a desperate plea in my local parents’ Facebook group asking for any leads for stores that had NeeDohs in stock. Answers flooded in with various sightings. On Reddit, the NeeDoh subreddit has 10,000 weekly visitors, where people discuss where to buy them and post photos of their collections. On TikTok, I’ve been seeing ads in the TikTok Shop for products that look suspiciously like NeeDoh packaging but with a different name.
Sullivan, the aunt in Arizona, was thrilled to be able to supply her teenage nieces with the hard-to-find toys. “I grew up in the thick of the Cabbage Patch Kid craze, so he knew I’d be all over the challenge of the hunt. Unfortunately, my success has caused my husband to become interested in NeeDohs. He already took a Super Ripple for himself and has pre-reserved my next Nice Berg.”
Weingard told Business Insider that Schylling is ramping up production as much as it can. (There was an unfortunately timed stop in production in February, right as the products were blowing up online, when factories in China, which make the NeeDoh, shut down for the Lunar New Year holiday.) He said they hope to fully meet demand by the summer.
“It’s incomparable to anything else we’ve ever done in terms of the popularity and demand,” Weingard said. “It’s certainly challenging in a respect. We never designed NeeDoh to be a viral craze; it wasn’t intentional. We imagined it more in keeping with the other products in our line. We wanted to create a contemporary classic, something that would be in our line for a generation or more.”
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