While most of the crowd seemed like organic traffic and genuine fans of the plush product, a few people were paid to participate. Some even took home a Hectico the Cobra Snake, which holds an estimated value of $125 on the Squishmarket. (Yes, the same StockX where your high-school friends buy their Yeezys.) Longtime Squish fans like Kalei Glozier, a 25-year-old who came from Michigan and has a collection of more than 500 Squish, were impressed by the selection at the booth. Lucky collectors hit the Squish jackpot by finding rare items like Jack the Cat, which is sold on StockX for $700.

Collectors, content creators, kids with their parents, and adults with friends they’d met in the Squish community all shared the same amount of excitement when it was their turn at the claw. At one of more than 100 attractions across four days at VidCon, fans waited for more than four hours to participate in a “human claw machine,” where they had 20 seconds to grab all the Squishmallows they could - including some rare and unreleased toys.