Our story

Started at our kitchen table, not a boardroom.

Sootheroo is a husband-and-wife thing. We're a family of four in Melbourne, and somewhere between the toddler years and the small mountain of stuffed animals that came with them, we noticed something odd: nearly every one of those soft, cuddled-threadbare companions was modelled on an animal from somewhere else entirely — a bear from a European forest, a rabbit from an English hedgerow. Lovely creatures, all of them. Just not ours.

So we went looking closer to home. Every Sootheroo character is native to Australia — from the sun-crested cockatoo to the shy, long-eared bilby — and each one is built with the same weighted, floppy, ultra-soft construction that made boutique plush shelves famous the world over, then tested to a standard we'd genuinely hand to our own kids. Because that's exactly who it's for.

We think of a Sootheroo as living three lives at once. By day, it's a small, sturdy character that sits proudly on a nursery shelf, styled in with the rest of the room. By night, it's the one thing a toddler won't fall asleep without. And for the families who send one overseas, or tuck one into a suitcase home, it becomes something else again — a genuine, huggable Australian animal souvenir, the sort of heirloom stuffed animal a child might still have on a shelf as an adult, long after the cuddling years are over. We didn't set out to make a newborn keepsake gift, a sensory plush toy, and a piece of nursery decor all at once — but that's more or less what turned up on our kitchen table.