One Does Not Simply Clean 804 Bananya Plushies
By: Adam Sheehan, Director of Events
You may have seen that Crunchyroll has been taking a Bananya plushie pool around to different conventions since Crunchyroll Expo on Labor Day weekend.
This little circle of fluffy happiness has brought a smile to thousands of people from the west coast to the east coast these past months. A byproduct of having all these people in the pool is that it recently came time to give all the plushies a good deep cleaning. You may ask, “how does one clean a whole pool’s worth of plushie banana-cats?” We asked this very same question.
After calling over 20 dry cleaning locations to find one who would dry clean these (2 said yes), we discovered that dry cleaning 804 plushies (how many we have in the pool) was quite expensive — more expensive than actually buying a whole fresh batch, actually. This was something we did consider, but because they are such a popular product (get yours today while supplies last!), we would not have been able able to order another full amount in time for our next convention. In the end: Plan A was too expensive, plan B was not an option, so plan C it was! The difficult thing was that we didn’t have a plan C yet. ‘Yet’ being the key word here.
After thinking about this issue, we came up with an idea for plan C: take all the plushies to a laundromat and wash them ourselves. As strange as it sounded, it seemed like it would work. So we set about putting our plan into action, with some additional considerations in advance of the big cleanse:
- Location, Location: Find a sizeable local laundromat near our warehouse in Texas, where the plushies live
- Research: Next was to try and figure out what kind of washers and dryers they had, to determine load capacities. The combination of Google photos on Google Maps plus some online spec-digging helped us calculate how many hours it would take to wash and dry all the plushies
- More Quarters, Please: We had to get enough quarters to handle all the washing and drying ($100 in quarters is heavy!)
- Logistics: Jump on a plane on a Friday from San Francisco to Dallas, to get the plushies
- More Logistics: Get to the warehouse and call a Lyft XL to pick up all the plushies (which just barely fit in the vehicle) and get them over to my house (I luckily also live in Texas) to store until the weekend cleaning fun.
Finally, it was go-time.
Early Sunday morning all the Bananya plushies crammed in every spot of my car to head over to the laundromat. They just barely all fit in there.
Each of the plushies got their time in the wash.
After a few loads of doing this, it became very mesmerizing to watch them go around and around.
During this time the narrator for the English dub decided to jump and join the fun with adding his voice to what all was happening.
After some more fun in the washer, drying them all, and packing them up we clocked in at about 4–5 hours of work and few strange looks from people at the laundromat. What a day, but now we’re ready for our next convention!
Speaking of conventions: our freshly-laundered Bananya plushie pool will be at Anime NYC this weekend. Swing by and say hello — we hope to see you there!
