Lauren Bradshaw
launched Walnut Animal
Society, a collection of
handmade stuffed animals, out of her Orlando
home last year. Her first
creation, Henry the Fox,
is named after her son.
It all started with an unsuccessful search.
Lauren Bradshaw was looking for a fox stuffed
animal for her young son, Henry, and just couldn’t
find one. So she attempted to devise a pattern for a
fox and put her own sewing skills to use. If she had
a pattern, she reasoned, she could potentially make
multiples and start selling them online.
“It was a lot of trial and error,” she recalls. “But
when I was little, I had a stuffed hippo. And I used
to lay awake at night thinking about how to make it.
I have thought about pattern and construction from
an early age.”
Her experiment led to last year’s launch of Wal-
nut Animal Society, a collection of soft critters
that—in addition to Henry the Fox—now includes
