21 of the Most Popular Gifts of the Century

Shopkins Toys, created by an Australian company, are characters inspired by items found in grocery stores and malls. The toy received the Toy Industry Association’s 2015 Girl Toy of the Year. Moose Toys has been aggressive in protecting its brand. In 2015, Chinese police raided factories in Yiwu, China, and confiscated 150,000 counterfeit Shopkins toys.

Hatchimals was the best-selling toy in 2016. The line of mini-figure toys features robotic furry, bird-like creatures that “hatch” themselves from an egg. Children cuddle with the egg for about half an hour before the creature inside emerges. When Hatchimals were released in October 2016, there was a firestorm of demand for them. To meet the surge in requests, the Toronto company that created Hatchimals flew the toys in from its Chinese factories.

Cozmo, a three-pound rolling robot with a single arm, expanded the possibilities of artificial intelligence. It can read and respond to the real world, exhibits curiosity, and absorbs human-like responses from encounters and experiences. Users can play various games with it, including keepaway. Anki, the company that created it, went bankrupt in 2019 and the robot is now made by Digital Dream Labs.

Don’t Step In It is a line of toys that heralded the emerging gross-out toy category. In the unicorn edition of the game, players shape rainbow-colored clay into piles of poop, place them on the floor mat, don blindfolds, and try to avoid the piles. Not exactly pin the tail on the donkey.

The Baby Shark toy built on the appeal of the song of the same name, whose video on YouTube became the first to reach 10 billion views. Baby Shark toys are plush toys aimed at children 2 and 3 years old that play singalong music. Singing promotes listening, memory, and pronunciation skills, which are crucial to early literacy and creativity.