Recently, Gift has announced that they will be releasing the Touhou fumo lineup through AmiAmi, a site dedicated to various hobby and character goods. For those who don’t know what fumos are, they are a series of high quality soft plushies created by the Japanese company Gift and designed by ANGELTYPE, a former Touhou doujin circle.

Due to the exposure fumos have been getting on social media, many individuals have sought to purchase these plushies for themselves. However, due to the original seller being on a Japanese site, many users have struggled to figure out how to purchase these plushies through direct means.

This changed for the better when Gift announced their first ever fumo sale featuring international shipping. Until now, fumos were only accessible through Gift’s online shop, which has been periodically restocked. This meant that users had to rely on proxies and forwarding services to purchase fumos which required additional information and knowledge to use. However, since AmiAmi supports international shipping, users can directly purchase fumos without the need of proxies or forwarders.

This came at a price, however. Upon the fumo sale opening at 6pm JST, AmiAmi’s site was taken by storm. Due to the significant amount of traffic, users were locked out of the site and struggled to purchase their own fumos. Tenshi was the first fumo to sell out, which only took around 20 minutes. The last of the fumos to disappear, Hatate, was completely sold out after the 50 minute mark. With this, the AmiAmi fumo pre-sale,which was meant to last until September 7th, ended after only 50 minutes.

attempts to purchase these fumos on Twitter.

User A celebrating their AmiAmi fumo: “I really feel for the people that didn’t get in on the Amiami fumo sale. I got in and purchased mine within 3 minutes of the sale.

User B explaining the AmiAmi fumo crisis: “It’s official, AmiAmi was NOT expecting this amount of reaction. Their site cannot handle the fumos! The great fumo war has begun!”

User CappuCirno expressing their view about the sheer popularity of fumo sales: “Fumo stock was INCREDIBLY low. I know Touhou is still niche in the West, but the fumo meme craze has really ramped up over the last year…. They said pre-orders would be open for a WEEK and they were all gone within an hour!”

Yesterday marks a momentous event for the fumo community! Through my times buying fumos from gift I've never seen so many people in the discord vc before!
To say this most recent sale didn't go too well would be an understatement. I just really hope that the next sales are better

— A haunted Marisa plushie (@Marisa_Plushie) August 27, 2021

While the amount of fumos purchased has increased exponentially with time, the lack of accessibility means that many fans miss out on sales. Touhou fans managing to crash AmiAmi should be a clear indicator of how popular fumos have become over the years.

While Gift may have had their sales issues in the past, I believe that supporting international shipping was a great first step in making fumos more accessible to international fans. However, I believe they will need to realise the sheer amount of popularity fumos have internationally, and help accommodate this through increased stock and smoother site purchasing.

With this very rough but successful start to international fumo shipping, it would be great to see AmiAmi and Gift use this opportunity to better prepare their site for huge incoming traffic, whilst increasing the amount of fumo stock to better accommodate for new fumo buyers.