Awwwww

Perfect hipster business valentine story:

The story of the Uglydolls, as David Horvath tells it, goes like this. A couple of years ago, he was living in Los Angeles, and his girlfriend, Sun-Min Kim, had moved back to Korea to be with her family. Horvath, an illustrator, wrote her long, pining letters, and at the end he would draw one of a number of cartoon characters he had made up – a blocky, orange guy named Wage, with startled round eyes and an apron. At Christmas, Kim surprised him by sending back a plush-toy version of Wage, about a foot high, that she had sewn herself. Horvath was so excited that he showed it off to Eric Nakamura, the owner of a store in Los Angeles called Giant Robot, which sold art books and magazines as well as toys and T-shirts made by artists. ”He thought I was pitching him a product,” Horvath recalls. ”He said, ‘Yeah, man, that’s great, I’ll take 20.”

The Dolls then got more and more successful, mostly among urban people in their 20s and 30s. It even appeared in the Whitney Museum.

They are now trying to sell them to actual children:

It’s clear that he and Kim see their invention connecting with children. Each character comes with a tag explaining the character’s back story and how they all ”know” one another and what each one is like. … To Tracy Edwards, the Barneys vice president who oversees the chain’s home and kids businesses, the Uglydoll characterizations are important: ”The stories, in the end, sell the dolls.”

But there is a story that might sell them to adults, like this writer:

Meanwhile, the Uglydolls have given Kim and Horvath more reasons to visit each other, and now they plan to marry. This in itself is the kind of ending you’d expect from a children’s story – of the sort that grown-ups can’t resist.