Bashful Bunny (Imogen)

The Bashful Bunny is the design most people picture when they picture a Jellycat: a long-eared rabbit, weighted to slump agreeably, in fur that is more velvety than fluffy. It arrived in the mid-2000s — around 2006, some years after Jellycat itself launched in London in 1999 — and it is the shape the rest of the Bashful range was drawn from. Jellycat's own copy calls the beige one "the dear little hopper that started it all," so if you want the ancestral version, that is the colourway to look for; cream, grey and pink are siblings rather than the original.

What makes this a collecting subject rather than a single toy is the colour churn. Jellycat retires Bashful colourways quietly and without announcement, so the range is constantly shedding shades while adding new ones, and the retired ones are what collectors hunt. Older stock is also physically distinguishable — sellers routinely flag "old style" and stitched-paw versions as a separate thing from current production.

Our records for the individual colourways here are thin and partly year-only. Where we show a release as a range, that means we know the year and not the day.