Bad Taste Bears

Late one night in 1994, Peter Underhill, an illustrator and Graphic Designer from Coventry, was designing a range of cutesy bears to be printed onto little girl's pyjamas. To clear his head after becoming "All cuted out" he drew his first ever Bad Taste Bear, "Hey kiddies! Here's the chainsaw bear!" He enjoyed drawing it so much that he started putting a list together and drawing and painting bears in "interesting" situations as a release for his twisted imagination. In 1999, the sketches were discovered by Piranha Studios, a leading character giftware company who turned them into collectable figurines. They began with just six figurines on sale in the Gadget Shop - at this stage the bears were being hand-cast and painted by home workers in Newcastle upon Tyne. Within the first year the range increased to twelve, and due to increasing demand in the following months, production was moved to a factory and a collectors club was launched to provide a point of contact for the growing hoards of Bad Taste Bear fanatics! Hundreds of collectables and tens of thousands of collectors later and here we are, together, involved in something that we never thought would be such a phenomenon. In 2008 OddCo bought Piranha Studios and are proud to have taken the Bad Taste Bears into their first decade. We will soon be reaching the 12th Year of Bad Taste Bears thanks to the continuing support of all of our Loyal Bad Taste Bear Collectors, the ingenuity of Peter Underhill and the collaborative work of Oddco Ltd.