TWO PEOPLE,
one small shop.

How it started

IT STARTED WITH a beaver.

In 2023 you could not open a feed in Hungary without meeting Bóbr kurwa. If you missed it: a Polish beaver meme, named after the swear word the men in the videos shout when they spot one. It was on t-shirts, mugs, phone cases, plush toys. One of us makes graphics for a living, so we noticed the merch before we noticed the meme. Then we went looking for where it came from.

It came from home videos. Not one video, a genre. Between 2012 and 2017, several men filmed themselves finding a wild beaver. One chases it, cackling. One grabs it, laughing, and gets bitten.

THE ANIMAL IS FRIGHTENED. THE MAN IS DELIGHTED. That is the whole joke.

Then it became a product. Search the name on any print-on-demand site and you get pages of results. There is even an academic paper about it. Its title: Stereotypical Poles and Their Funny Beaver.

We want to be precise about what bothered us, because it was not the swearing and it was not the laughing. It was that nobody in the entire chain asked about the beaver. Not the men with the phones, not the accounts that spread it, not the shops that printed it. The animal was raw material. A wild animal was frightened for content, the content was sold, and the animal never came up.

The smile

WE SELL the smile too.

We should say the obvious thing. Every design in this shop exists because a quokka’s face reads as a grin, and we are not going to pretend the shop would exist without that. The difference is not that we refuse the smile. It is that we tell you what it is. The smile is the shape of the jaw. It does not mean the animal is happy, and it definitely does not mean it wants you closer. You can put that face on a mug and still know that.

Because the same thing is on its way for the quokka. An animal whose face became a meme. People flying to an island for the photo, getting close, reaching out, holding out food. Rottnest has already had to put up signs about it, all over the island: look, don’t touch. Touching or feeding a quokka is an on-the-spot fine.

When an island has to sign-post the obvious, the crowd has already arrived. And this animal is listed as Vulnerable and lives, for the most part, on that one island. There is less room for it to go wrong.

Why

SO WE STARTED THIS.

Not to protect quokkas from fans, we are both fans, but to show that fandom does not have to go toxic. You can be a loud, silly, quokka-on-everything fan without the animal paying for it. That is the whole idea. It is not a foundation and it is not a lecture. It is a shop with one rule and a few habits.

So you will find sunglasses here, and surfboards, and beanies, and coffee, and whatever we think of next. You will not find a hand on it, food held out to it, or an arm around it for a photo. You can check that against every product in the shop.

The habits: the four rules for meeting one in person are on this site and inside the free field guide. Three percent of every order subtotal goes back to the habitat, and we will publish where it went, every quarter. And we never call it the happiest animal in the world as if that were a fact. We call it the animal the internet decided was the happiest, because that is what actually happened.

If you got here because a quokka made you smile, good. That is how everyone starts. If you ever meet one for real, stay a few steps back. The rest of the fandom fits on a mug.

— Balázs & Dorina