Find Chaffy
Chaffies are small, and round, with one and a half ears. They're very trusting, a little bit stupid, and they have a tendency to always get themselves lost. Chaffy HQ was set up to keep track of their whereabouts as all 9,620,527,033 of them travel the globe looking for a place to call home!
FIND CHAFFY began as a social experiment - I sent ten Chaffy soft toys around the world, asking people to take a photo of the Chaffy wherever it was, and then pass it on to someone else. The hope being that somehow, through the kindness of strangers, the Chaffies would make it back home! Of course they never did, people couldn't bear to part with them, but we still collect all the photos of their various travels at the website www.findchaffy.com
The search continued in FIND CHAFFY and FIND CHAFFY NOW, two picture search books I created for Scholastic. They were translated into loads of different languages, thus ensuring our search became global!
Since then, the search for Chaffies has continued in endless new ways. I teamed up with Birdbox and Mind Candy to produce a series of short Find Chaffy animations (which you can watch above). I also had more toys made, from hard resin this time, and hid them around London landmarks - only to release clues for people to find them (which they did incredibly quickly!)
Chaffy has since found new audiences online - some of the Find Chaffy memes were shared so many times on Facebook they were seen by 20 million people in one week!
Chaffies are more than toys, more than a book or a cartoon. Chaffies are a connection between us all.