Sophie la Girafe

Sophie la girafe is a teething toy in the shape of a young giraffe, about 18 centimetres tall. She is cast hollow in natural rubber, white with a scatter of brown spots applied by stencil, seventy-six by the maker's count, and has small horns, rounded ears, dark eyes and a red-tipped smile. A whistle hidden in her body squeaks when she is squeezed. Her four legs and long neck, each of a different thickness, are made for small hands, and for chewing.

She was first made on 25 May 1961 by Delacoste, a Paris firm that had moulded rubber toys since the nineteenth century, and was named after the saint of the day. Rubber toys of the time were mostly farm and household animals; a giraffe was exotic, and her long limbs made her easy for a baby to grasp. Her success, the maker says, came by word of mouth from parents whose teething infants stopped crying.

The toy maker Vulli of Rumilly, in the French Alps, bought Delacoste in the early 1980s and in 1991 moved Sophie's production to Rumilly. In France she became something like a national institution: in 2010 more were sold there than there were babies born. She reached the United States in the early 2000s, appeared in the hands of celebrities' children and, in 2009, was named product of the year by American specialist toy retailers.

Vulli now sells her in more than eighty countries and has built a whole range around her, from rings and rattles to bath toys. In 2026 French reporters revealed that the toy, long sold as made in France, had for years been made largely in China. The object has hardly altered since 1961: the same rubber, the same squeak, the same spots, on each of the seventy million the maker says it has sold.