Retailer hopes to find VIP bear a new home with card design competition
Paddington Bear has taken up residence at Henry & Co stores as the royal favourite is celebrating his 65th birthday – with a marmalade sandwich, of course!
“We’re currently celebrating the 65th birthday of Paddington across our stores,” Henry & Co retail operations director Sharon Green told PG Buzz.
As an extra incentive to fanfare Britain’s fave bear, leading Paddington licensee Rainbow Designs is running a best-in-class window display competition, and Henry & Co’s Heswall store is pulling out all the stops with its entry.
In addition to the window displays, Henry & Co has instigated several retail activations., as Sharon explained: “We have blank birthday cards for our customers to design their own personal happy birthday message and post to Paddington in our very own red postbox. The winning design will get to give Paddington a home!”
The kind bear from Peru with a big appetite for marmalade sandwiches was first introduced to the world in the book A Bear Called Paddington by author Michael Bond in 1958.
The tale of the friendly and polite bear who meets the Brown family at London’s Paddington Station started a phenomenon that has sold more the 35million books worldwide and captured everyone’s hearts during Queen Elizabeth II’s platinum jubilee celebrations with the TV skit featuring him offering Her Majesty a bite of his sandwich – but the monarch revealed she always carried one of her own.
Rainbow Designs holds an official licence to produce Paddington Bears – the very first was made in 1972 by Shirley Clarkson as a Christmas present for her children Joanna and Jeremy, now the famous TV presenter and motoring journalist, and her company Gabrielle Designs went on to produce the officially-licensed toys for 25 years.
