TOP SAMPLE
‘YEAR 2000 FURBY’!
We are absolutely thrilled to have such an interesting piece of Furby history in our collection!
What is a TOP SAMPLE?
A TOP SAMPLE is a final production sample of a specific Furby design. They were typically produced as the final example, and sometimes used as salesman samples, though their exact use isn’t particularly documented.
Sometimes, multiple examples can exist of a “#1” Furby, this may be one of them, but we really don’t know!
What we DO know is, is that this Furby never saw the inside of a store, it was previously property of a Tiger Electronics employee.
How did we find it?
This Furby was found at a YARD SALE! For just a few bucks, a user on the internet bought it, alongside the #2 Furby of the exact same design, and then posted about them both.
Soon enough, we heard about it, and sent them a message to learn more about it. They had bought them both with the intention of opening and “customizing” them, which would involve dyeing or altering them drastically, which of course we didn’t want happening to this specific unit!
After some conversation, we bridged the subject of potentially buying/trading for the very first one, to which they thankfully were absolutely willing to do!
In the end, we traded a few items from our collection, and in the mail we received #1 in all his glory.
RESTORING #1…
After receiving # 1 in the mail, we realized its box was in relatively rough shape.
Several corners on the top of the box were torn completely, which wasn’t the greatest news to us, as we love NIB and pristine condition Furby, but after looking over the damage, thankfully nothing had been torn away entirely, and so we knew we could get the tears patched with some careful consideration.
Adam has an artistic eye for this sort of thing, and so I entrusted him to take care of the damage and patch it.
You may be wondering what could be used to patch something so important?
… The answer is surprisingly a children’s glue stick! The very gentle adhesive works very well on paper items, and is actually used quite frequently to repair vintage toy packaging tears, which we learned after speaking to a prominent toy collector.
We bought one for this specific purpose, and it has served us well.
