Obvious Plant
Real objects. Fake premise. Planted in real stores.
Obvious Plant makes products that are built to look completely real and are, on inspection, completely absurd -- then leaves them on the shelves of real stores for strangers to find, buy, or just stop and stare at.
Nothing here is trying to fool anyone for long. The joke is in the gap: how convincingly ordinary it looks from three feet away, and how little sense it makes up close. The version on this site is the retail half of that joke -- the same ideas, made available to take home even if you never find one in the wild.
A few of the objects
Poorly Named Cats
A blind-box set of cat figurines, each one saddled with a deliberately terrible name. Seven to collect, no way to choose which one you get.
Anxiety Wolf
A plush wolf with a small sack on its back, designed so you can write down a worry and hand it over for him to carry.
Therapy Sword
A 13-inch foam sword, sold as a stand-in for the cost of actual therapy — swing it at your problems instead.
Jazz Crabs Shirt
A t-shirt printed with crabs playing jazz. That's the whole idea.
Cheep's Food Catalog
A parody grocery catalog for a fictional store called Cheep's, filled with the worst products imaginable — Obvious Plant's first printed publication.
How a plant gets made
Have an idea
It usually starts with a joke: a fake product, a fake sign, a fake rule for a real park. Sometimes the idea comes first and a store gets found to fit it; sometimes a real place suggests the joke on the spot.
Build it to fit
The object is designed and packaged to belong exactly where it's going -- same shelf, same materials, same seriousness as everything around it. The joke only works if it looks like it isn't one.
Leave it for someone to find
It goes back on a real shelf, in a real store, for a real stranger to notice. No sign points to it. Finding it -- and figuring out it's a plant -- is the whole experience.