France’s Iconic Giraffe Toy Faces Made-in-China Backlash

As the world held its breath over the fate of the Middle East this week, France has been gripped by a very different story: a scandal over a chewy rubber giraffe.

Sophie la Girafe, the country’s national toy, has long been a symbol of “made in France” craftsmanship, sold as a gift to newborns across the country. But this week, it was revealed the beloved toy has secretly been manufactured in China for the past decade.

Vulli, the company behind the toy, quietly began moving production to China as far back as 2013, according to an investigation by French outlet Mediapart. By 2019, manufacturing in France had effectively ceased – the factory in Rumilly, a small town in the French Alps, was kept running only to package toys already made in China. “We’d place four or five people in the workshop, the raw materials were expired.

 Everything was fake,” one manager said.

French authorities launched an investigation into the companyincluding on suspicion of deceptive commercial practices – after an inspection in 2025 found the brand was still selling toys with the “made in France” label, according to the French outlet.

Meanwhile, the company quietly switched the tags on its French packaging to read “born in Paris” – a subtler claim that stops short of asserting where the toy is produced. Yet in China, the old story persisted: on Tmall, a leading Chinese e-commerce platform, the brand’s flagship store still listed France as the country of production.

Tmall is owned by Alibaba Group Holding, which also owns the South China Morning Post.

Ironically, Vulli’s problems started when Sophie la Girafe became a global success. Overseas orders soared in the 2010s, but the company’s original production line in France simply could not keep up with demand, a former manager told Mediapart. The shift to Chinese production addressed that problem, but the company was reluctant to give up its “made in France” cachet – the image of French craftsmanship that allowed Vulli to attach a hefty price tag to what is, at its core, a simple rubber toy.

Sophie sells at US$31.99 in the United States, €16.90 in France and 208 yuan in China. Eric Rossi, Vulli’s then-CEO, called the toy “an accessible luxury” in a 2021 interview with public radio station Radio France.

The move proved hugely profitable. Vulli’s gross profits climbed from €18.3 million (US$21.5 million) in 2019 – the year French production ceased – to a peak of €22.5 million in 2022, rising nearly twice as fast as the firm’s revenues, according to corporate filings with the French government. Profits slid back to €17.9 million in 2024, as sales faltered.

Alain Thirion, Vulli’s current CEO, defended the company’s actions in an interview with French broadcaster TF1 on Tuesday, calling the move to China a temporary measure forced by delays at the firm’s new French factory.

But Mediapart’s investigation found the company’s second factory in eastern France had never produced the toy at industrial scale since the company first invested there in 2016, nearly a decade ago.

For many French people who received a Sophie la Girafe as children and have since gifted one to the next generation, the sense of shock and betrayal is palpable.

“I am super disappointed. I gave it to everybody and told them it was the best of the best,” said Nicolas Baumann Fischer, a business owner in Paris. He said he would not buy from the brand again unless the company committed to major management changes.

“People might say ‘yet another business killed by China’, but China did not ask for this. It’s a stupid Frenchman who saw an opportunity to make more money,” he added.

For some analysts, the scandal also highlights France’s difficult path towards re-industrialisation, despite the sweeping ambitions Paris has pursued under President Emmanuel Macron since he first came to power in 2017.

That Vulli invested in a second factory as far back as 2016, only for it to never reach industrial-scale production, points to deeper structural obstacles facing French manufacturers, according to Sacha Courtial, a China researcher at the Paris-based Institut Jacques Delors.

For Courtial, it is to some extent understandable that the company chose the cheaper and more reliable option.

“As long as an object costs five times less to produce in Shenzhen than in Rumilly, French economic patriotism will remain trapped between ‘made in France’ marketing and Chinese manufacturing reality,” he said.