This Mid-Autumn, one brand is betting on plushies over mooncakes

As Singapore marks Mid-Autumn Festival, mooncakes remain a familiar canvas for festive marketing. Cat & the Fiddle is pairing its mao shan wang durian mooncakes with whole cheesecakes, while Old Seng Choong is leaning into heritage and reunion with an assortment of artisanal mooncakes.

Imaginary Ones, however, is taking a different route. Rather than putting a new spin on the mooncake itself, the Singapore-born IP entertainment company is putting its own speciality, plush collectibles, at the centre of its Mid-Autumn campaign.

Its new "Mooncake minis: 月饼宝宝" collection turns traditional and snowskin mooncakes into plush characters, extending Imaginary Ones' heritage series from the Dragon Boat Festival into another major cultural occasion.

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The move follows the company's "Dumpling Darlings: 宝宝粽子" campaign earlier this year, which used blind box plushies to encourage younger consumers to visit Singapore's heritage rice dumpling retailers. The latest collection applies a similar strategy to Mid-Autumn, using a format already familiar to collectible and younger audiences as an entry point into a traditional festival.

At the heart of the collection is a traditional mooncake plushie split into two magnetic halves. Consumers can pull the halves apart to reveal whether the mooncake contains a salted egg yolk, before snapping the pieces back together or sharing one half with someone else.

Four other designs take inspiration from snowskin mooncake flavours including ube, pistachio, charcoal durian and peach.

The collection also extends the experience beyond the plush itself. Its blind box packaging can be transformed into a lantern, giving consumers a second use for the box while recreating a familiar Mid-Autumn activity.

The packaging features four moon-shaped openings that can be popped out, with a battery-operated tea light placed inside to turn the box into a small lantern. Consumers can also use disposable chopsticks or twigs as handles.

For founding partner and CMO Gregory Poon, the approach is about using something younger audiences already understand to create a connection with traditions they may not otherwise engage with.

“I wanted to create something cute that younger audiences would naturally be drawn to, but at the same time use that interest to reconnect them with traditions and experiences that many of us grew up with,” said Poon. 

That thinking is consistent with the Heritage Series' broader proposition of "Not just collecting, but connecting". Rather than creating a conventional mooncake product, Imaginary Ones has taken the elements it is already known for, including IP, character design and collectibles, and applied them to a cultural occasion.

The strategy also brings a physical retail element into the campaign.

Imaginary Ones is partnering with Singapore mooncake brand Tai Chong Kok 大中国, with "Mooncake minis" available across five of its outlets. The partnership is intended to bring younger consumers into traditional mooncake stores, where the collectible sits alongside the edible product and the heritage business behind it. The participating outlets are located in Chinatown, Kampong Ubi, Thomson Plaza, Northpoint City and Waterway Point.

The partnership echoes the approach taken in Imaginary Ones' Dragon Boat Festival campaign, where its dumpling plushies were distributed through heritage rice dumpling businesses including Kim Choo Kueh Chang, Hoo Kee Bak Chang and Eastern Rice Dumpling.

There, the collectible served as a reason for younger consumers to step into heritage stores and discover the food and businesses behind the festival. With "Mooncake minis", Imaginary Ones is applying the same model to Mid-Autumn through a different cultural touchpoint.

Rather than trying to compete with established mooncake brands on flavours, gifting or premium packaging, Imaginary Ones has leaned into what it already knows: IP, character design and collectibles.

Poon said the intention was not to replace traditional celebrations with something new, but to use contemporary formats to lead younger audiences back towards them.

We're not trying to replace traditions with something new. We want to use something new to lead people back to tradition.

Rather than make another mooncake, Imaginary Ones has made the collectible the hook, with Mid-Autumn tradition as the experience that follows.

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