Can You Sell Crochet Squishmallow-Style Plush on Etsy? The 'It's Handmade, So It's Fine' Myth

Search Etsy for "squishmallow" and you'll scroll past thousands of listings that were never made by Jazwares: crocheted round plush, "Squishmallow-inspired" amigurumi, custom clothes sized for the real thing, matching keychains, and a whole cottage industry of makers who spell it "squish mallow" or "squishy marshmallow plush" to slip past the search filters. Nearly all of them lean on the same reassurance, repeated in craft groups until it sounds like law: it's handmade, I crocheted it myself, so it's fine.

It is one of the most expensive misunderstandings on the platform, because it confuses how you made something with whether you're allowed to sell it. Handmade describes your labor. It says nothing about whose design you copied. And Squishmallows are owned by a company that has gone to federal court to defend the shape of a plush toy — not just its name.

The short answer

You cannot sell a plush that copies the Squishmallows look — the specific rounded, egg-shaped silhouette, the flat embroidered face, the particular characters and their names — no matter whether you crochet it, sew it, or 3D-print a mold for it, and no matter what you title the listing. The name "Squishmallows" is a registered trademark, the individual characters are protected, and the overall look is being actively litigated as protectable trade dress. "I made it by hand" describes your craft; it is not a defense to reproducing someone else's protected design. What you can do is make and sell genuinely original plush in your own style, and you can resell a single authentic Squishmallow you actually bought, unaltered, under first sale.

The line to hold in your head: handmade is a description of your effort, not a license to copy. You can sell plush you designed. You cannot sell a hand-copy of plush someone else designed.

Why "handmade" feels like a defense (and why it isn't)

The instinct is understandable. Etsy is built around handmade goods, and there's a deep-rooted belief that if you personally crafted an item from raw yarn, you own it outright. You do own the physical object and the labor. What you don't own is the design if that design belongs to someone else.

Copyright and trademark don't care about your medium. A painter can't reproduce a copyrighted character just because they used their own brushes; a crocheter can't reproduce a protected plush design just because they used their own hook. The law looks at the finished thing and asks a simple question: would an ordinary buyer recognize this as the branded product, or as coming from that brand? If the answer is yes, the fact that you made it by hand is irrelevant — arguably worse, because a convincing handmade copy is still a copy competing with the real product.

This is exactly the trap sellers fall into with the biggest plush brand on Earth.

What Jazwares actually owns

Squishmallows are made by Kelly Toys, a subsidiary of Jazwares, which is owned by Berkshire Hathaway. That ownership matters because it tells you what kind of enforcement you're dealing with: a well-funded rights holder with a legal budget and a documented willingness to use it.

Jazwares holds rights across three separate layers, and a single listing can trip all three:

The word mark "Squishmallows" (and "Squishmallow") is a registered trademark. Putting it in your title, your tags, or your description is a direct trademark use — even as "inspired by," even misspelled, even in a hashtag. Reported listings that name the brand are the fastest and most common takedowns.

The individual characters — Cam the Cat, Hans the Hedgehog, Wendy the Frog, and the hundreds of named "Squad" members — are protected as original creative works. Copying a specific character's colorway, face, and features reproduces protected expression regardless of the name you give it.

The overall trade dress — the rounded egg-shaped body, the soft marshmallow texture, the simple flat embroidered face — is what Jazwares argues functions as a source-identifier, meaning consumers see that silhouette and think "Squishmallows." This is the layer most handmade sellers never see coming, because they assume dropping the brand name makes them safe. It doesn't, if the shape still reads as the brand.

The enforcement is real, and it went after the shape

If you think a company won't fight over the outline of a plush toy, look at what Jazwares actually did.

In early 2024, when Build-A-Bear launched a plush line called "Skoosherz," Jazwares and Kelly Toys sued in federal court, alleging the collection copied the distinctive look and feel of Squishmallows — the shape, the softness, the facial styling, the overall aesthetic. Build-A-Bear pushed back and argued those features belong to a broad plush category that predates Squishmallows, and the two sides traded competing suits. The dispute became one of the most closely watched brand-enforcement cases in the toy industry before the parties settled in 2026.

Sit with what that means. Jazwares was willing to litigate for years against another billion-dollar company, not over the word "Squishmallow" — Build-A-Bear never used it — but over the trade dress, the visual identity of a round plush with a flat face. If they'll do that to Build-A-Bear, the idea that a solo Etsy seller crocheting "Squishmallow-inspired" plush sits safely below their radar is wishful thinking. Rights holders enforce against small sellers precisely because it's cheap and fast: a marketplace report, not a lawsuit, and your listing is gone.

What actually gets your Etsy listing reported

Takedowns rarely start where sellers expect. It's not usually a Jazwares lawyer reading your product title. It's a brand-protection service or a competitor scanning the marketplace for keyword matches — and those scanners read far more than the title.

They read your tags. They read your description. They read your image alt text and filenames. A listing titled innocently as "round crochet plush toy" still gets flagged if the tags say "squishmallow, squishmallow inspired, squishmallow crochet" and the description says "perfect for Squishmallow collectors." Sellers obsess over making the title clean and then bury the brand name a dozen times below the fold where they think no one looks. The scanners look there first — that's where the intent-to-trade-on-the-brand is most obvious, and it's the single most common reason a "handmade, so it's fine" listing comes down.

That's the differentiator worth internalizing: checking your title is not checking your listing. If the brand appears anywhere in the metadata, you're exposed.

The safe lane for plush sellers

None of this means you can't sell plush on Etsy. It means you sell your own plush. The line is cleaner than it feels:

Design your own shapes. A rounded plush is fine — round is not owned. What Jazwares argues it owns is the specific combination that reads as Squishmallows. Vary the proportions, give your plush its own face style, its own personality, and build your own named characters. The further your work sits from the branded silhouette-plus-flat-face combination, the safer you are.

Describe honestly and neutrally. Jazwares' own materials point to language like "round plush toy," "marshmallow plush," and "squishy plush" — generic descriptors that tell buyers what the item is without riding on the brand. Use words that describe your product, not words that borrow someone else's recognition.

Keep the brand out of every field. Not the title, not the tags, not the description, not the alt text. If you're tempted to add "squishmallow" as a tag "just for search," that tag is the evidence.

Resell authentically if you want to trade the real thing. Buying a single genuine Squishmallow and reselling it unaltered is protected by first sale. Buying one to crochet a copy from is not — that's using authenticity as cover for reproduction.

A useful gut check: if your listing's entire appeal is that it looks like or is searchable as a Squishmallow, you're selling their brand equity, not your craft. If it would still sell on the strength of your own design with the brand name stripped out of every field, you're on the right side of the line.

Before you list, actually check

The sellers who lose shops over this almost never intended to infringe — they trusted the "it's handmade" reassurance and never checked whether a name was hiding in their tags. A thirty-second scan of your full listing, not just the title, is the difference between a sale and a strike.

If you want to see how a brand-protection scanner reads your listing, our instant checker runs your title, tags and description against 500+ trademarked brands and flags the ones that draw reports — including the metadata fields most sellers forget. It's the same lens the reporters use, pointed at your own shop before they get there.

For the broader method — how to vet titles, tags and graphics before you ever hit publish — see our guide on how to check trademarks before selling on Etsy. And if you sell handmade copies of other popular collectibles, the same "I made it myself" trap plays out identically with the Pop Mart smash hit — worth reading why crocheting a Labubu yourself doesn't make it legal.

Handmade is a wonderful thing to build a business on. Just build it on your own designs — because "I crocheted it myself" is a description of your work, and the company that took Build-A-Bear to federal court over the shape of a plush toy is not going to accept it as a defense.