Woolworths' Ooshie craze dents Coles sales as parents chase Disney collectibles

When Woolworths' latest batch of Disney Ooshies ran out a week ahead of schedule in late August, the rubber figurines had already done something unusual: they had dented the sales of Australia's second-largest supermarket chain. Coles released its full-year results on Tuesday showing that despite gaining market share over the previous twelve months, the company experienced a sharp sales decline spanning nearly four weeks—a period that coincided almost exactly with Woolworths' collectibles promotion.

The Ooshies themselves are small, pen-top figurines featuring characters from Disney, Marvel, and Star Wars franchises. Customers who spent thirty dollars at Woolworths received one sealed pack, creating an element of chance that transformed the promotion into something closer to a game than a straightforward marketing gimmick. Children tore open the packaging to discover which character they'd received, then traded duplicates with friends and classmates in an attempt to complete the full set of forty. The mystery and incompleteness drove the hunger—the same mechanism that has powered collectible crazes for generations.

Coles chief executive Leah Weckert described the sales impact as temporary, lasting roughly four weeks and affecting physical stores more severely than online channels. But the numbers told a story worth noting: nearly two-thirds of parents surveyed by YouGov said they had changed their shopping patterns specifically to chase the Ooshies, with many shifting their regular grocery trips to Woolworths. One in five adult collectors indicated they planned to resell their Ooshies online, transforming what began as a children's game into a genuine secondary market. A Facebook swap group dedicated to trading had accumulated more than forty-five thousand members in recent weeks, while Woolworths organized dedicated swap meets across the country to help customers complete their collections.

The social dimension ran deeper than retail competition. Schoolchildren staged Ooshie battles, flicking the figurines across playgrounds to knock down opponents' collections. Millennials pursued them with particular enthusiasm, while baby boomers saw them as gifts for younger relatives. Yet the craze also exposed friction. Some schools moved to ban the toys outright. Bellevue Park state school in Queensland posted on Facebook that Ooshies had become a source of distraction and conflict, with unfair trading practices emerging. A Sydney after-school care centre cited disputes over ownership and instances where children had become distressed. These bans, oddly, became a point of pride for Alan Ngov, chief commercial officer at Headstart International, the company that designed the figurines. "You know it was a good one when you get banned from the school yard," he wrote on LinkedIn.

Professor Gary Mortimer, a consumer behaviour expert at Queensland University of Technology, offered a more generous interpretation. He compared Ooshie trading to the marble games of previous generations, suggesting the figurines taught children negotiation, fair play, and how to manage disappointment. The swap economy, he argued, developed genuine skills in value exchange and compromise. Yet this optimism collided with environmental concern. As the craze inevitably fades, the question of where forty million tiny plastic figurines will end up has begun to trouble advocacy groups. Kirsten Junor, chief executive of Reverse Garbage, a not-for-profit focused on waste reduction, posted a video calling the promotion wasteful. "It's just future landfill," she said. "Kids don't need them. We don't need them. The planet doesn't need them." Woolworths responded by noting that Ooshies are made from ninety-seven percent recycled thermoplastic rubber and established collection bins in some stores for recycling the figures once the collecting phase ends.

Meanwhile, Coles reported that its net profit rose one percent to 1.09 billion dollars for the year to June, and its supermarket profit margin improved from 5.3 to 5.7 percent. The company's leadership indicated it would continue launching its own collectible campaigns in future years, suggesting the Ooshie moment, however temporary, had proven the power of scarcity and social momentum to reshape shopping behaviour. The question now is whether the environmental cost of that power will eventually demand a reckoning.