Can you guess what the plush toys in the image above represent? Haven’t got a clue? Urine and excrement. That’s right, plush piss and poop are the latest rave among the Swedish kids … and probably adults too.

When I first heard about plush piss and even plushier poop, frankly, I did not know what exactly to think of them. Sure, it might be fun as a practical joke, but I can’t really imagine attaching them as a key ring to my keys, let alone learning that my kids picked plush excrement as their totem for good-night’s sleep. I can’t.

Even though one cannot be exactly sure what the people behind these “toys” really had in mind when planning this product (toilet training or bachelor parties, hard to tell), it all started as a student project. Kiss och Bajs, as they are called in Swedish were designed by Emma Megitt, a student at HDK (a sister academy of Valand where I’m studying right now) for her Master’s in Design project. She started the couple’s Web site and requests for the plushy bodily produce started pouring in.

Now the original Pee and Poo are so big that they even have their own merchandise ranging from tattoos and T-shirts to sold-out socks and, naturally, underwear.

Anyway, the small Kiss and Bajs (key rings) run at 8€ a piece, while both also come in the larger version (each approximately the size of a pineapple) will set you back for 32€. Quite affordable for something so ephemeral and priceless at the same time. Go and grab one, they’re on sale on the Internet too, and let me know how you feel about them.

One more thing. Kiss and Bajs definitely have a glitzy site catering to the whole world, but I beg you pardon, in Finnish they’d be called Pissa and Kakka, and not Kissa and Kakka. In Finnish kissa stands for cat, not piss.

Mladen

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 11:57 am and is filed under Culture, Sweden. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.