ZUS Coffee's plushies return with an emotional twist

ZUS Coffee’s recent cryptic posts featuring its Blue Buddy character have been unveiled as a relaunch of its "ZUS Buddy" plushie. This time, with a range of emotions and expressions.

Based on its social media post yesterday (15 June), the Malaysian coffee chain announced that the "emotional support buddies" will be available for free with a minimum spend of RM25 in a single receipt.

The plushie campaign is set to run for six weeks beginning today 16 June to 27 July while stocks last. According to ZUS Coffee, the new plushies are here to remind everyone: "It's okay to feel emotions, because every feeling matters".

Don't miss: ZUS Coffee’s Blue Buddy takes centre stage in cryptic campaign

Each week will feature a different emotion. The first week will begin with anxiety, followed by disgust, fear, sadness, anger, and joy. Based on the announcement details, eligible customers will receive one of the six "ZUS Buddy" characters randomly, but all of the characters will share the same type of emotion according to the weekly rotation. 

The characters are Blue Buddy, Pinky Boo, Frappe Fen, Choco Chipster, Porta Pal and Bean Boss. With that, customers will have the chance to collect up to 36 different plushies within the 6-week long campaign. The "It's okay to feel emotions" series can also be purchased online as a full set of six boxes on the ZUS Coffee website. The characters have also been featured as tumbler straw stoppers, available on ZUS' online and e-commerce channels. 

In a statement shared with A+M, ZUS Coffee said the limited-edition collectible series shines a spotlight on mental health, utilising the plushies as emotional support for everyday moments. They are meant to remind customers that it's okay to feel whatever they are feeling even when it's messy, uncertain, or overwhelming. 

“In a world where everyone’s expected to ‘just smile,’ we wanted to create something more real. ZUS Buddy is a reflection of what you may be feeling. We want our customers to know: we see you, we hear you, and we’re right here with you. We’re all humans who feel deeply, and that’s perfectly okay,” said Venon Tian, COO of ZUS Coffee.

Looking back, ZUS Coffee's cryptic social media posts have become clearer, as the brand had been highlighting the words "feel" and "fluffy" in its past captions. In one of its latest videos, the coffee chain announced that the "emotion cafe" was back in business, as Blue Buddy has its buddies back from vacation and ready to brew, marking the end of the brand's mysterious series of posts, and the start of its new "It's okay to feel emotions" campaign. 

Since the beginning of June, ZUS Coffee had been teasing the return of its "ZUS Buddy" plushies with a series of social videos and posts. It first began when ZUS Coffee shared an announcement on its social accounts, alerting app users that Kaldi, the goat herder character in its logo, is "experiencing a mental breakdown". The post on 3 June said: "He's tired, like all of us. After years of serving specialty coffee, he needs a short break. In the meantime, someBUDDY's taking over to shake things up", pointing to its blue coffee cup mascot, Blue Buddy.

Not long afterwards, ZUS Coffee dropped another video, depicting the "ZUS Buddy" squad "departing" from Malaysia for an exciting journey. ZUS also teased that the "ZUS Buddy" team was making a comeback, in a video showing the keychain plushies laying around the ZUS office in random places: on the chair, on a shelf, in between some blinds, and even in the corner of an elevator.

The "ZUS Buddy" characters were first unveiled in October 2024 as keychain plushies, which were made available with the purchase of any two 'Frappe Buddy' series drinks.

Earlier in April, Tian said in an interview with Bloomberg, that ZUS Coffee was planning to open nearly 200 new stores in Southeast Asia this year. It will open 107 new stores in Malaysia, 80 in the Philippines and six in Singapore. The coffee shop operator also plans to start its first stores in Thailand and Indonesia this year. 

Currently, the coffee-chain is the largest in Malaysia, overtaking Starbucks and has 743 stores in the country. Starbucks, in comparison, has 320 stores. Meanwhile, ZUS Coffee currently has 120 stores in the Philippines and four in Singapore. The coffee chain also operates in Brunei under a franchise model. Tian reportedly said that ZUS Coffee's success lies in its ability to localise flavours for each market. This includes palm sugar drinks in Malaysia and purple yam coffee in the Philippines.

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