Setting the moo-d: Why cuddly Highland cows are taking over our interiors

They’re fluffy, they’re orange, and they’re coming to take over your home. If you’ve taken a stroll through the interiors aisles recently, you’ll have seen them – the swarm of cuddly Highland cows that have seized control of the high street, their cloven hooves holding shoppers in a vice-like grip.

Their shaggy fringes and dramatic horns are currently adorning every possible piece of homeware you can imagine, and then some. They appear on cushions, on soap dispensers, on loo seats and crockery. They are refashioned as draught excluders, faux-fur rugs and wicker storage baskets shaped like disembodied cow heads (just £25 at Dunelm!).

It’s enough to have you wondering how the Big (Orange) Cattle industrial complex managed to acquire so much sway over the nation’s retailers – or questioning whether we’ve all unwittingly been dragged into a psy-op to get us to better appreciate the great British countryside.

Ahead of the herd when it comes to this trend is Next, which seems to have doubled down particularly hard on all things bovine this autumn. The sensible clothes store has its own cow character, Hamish the Highland, who presides over his own section of their website, which featured 322 items at the time of writing. It’s even selling trinkets in “mystery boxes”, so shoppers aren’t sure which “Moo-vie night” themed knickknack they’re buying. Will it be Hamish as a pizza, or a bucket of popcorn? It’s a tactic borrowed from the Labubu playbook, adding an element of intrigue to each purchase.

On a recent reconnaissance trip to my local branch, I was genuinely staggered by the sheer variety of Hamishes perched on the shelves. There were ceramic Hamish ornaments. Cuddly Hamishes wrapped inexplicably in bath towels. Hamishes holding mugs, with stringy rope legs, hanging from a clock bearing the message “time for a cuppa”. Tucked behind a chair, as if picked up then discarded by a cow-pilled shopper, was some wire wall art fashioned in the shape of Hamish’s head.

And, I learned, he is truly a cow for all seasons. He appeared in pumpkin form in a spooky tableau featuring the greeting “Happy Hall-moo-ween”, and also seemed to be bedding in for Christmas already. The shelves were heaving with little Hamishes in Santa hats, bearing gifts, and he also popped up in ceramic form in a festive carolling scene, mooing alongside his nameless mates (this one was titled “Deck the herds”). He may well be coming to a stocking near you this December – your in-laws are probably stocking up already.

Clearly, Hamish must be a sales hit, otherwise there’s no way the brand would be pouring so much effort into this stream of spin-offs. When I start canvassing for opinions on the Highland high street takeover, I’m inundated with tales of people’s relatives who are fully paid-up devotees of the cow cult; there are siblings whose homes are teeming with them, and mums who can be brought to tears of joy by a fluffy orange gift.

But there are cynics too. One friend simply declares them to be “fugly”. Another reckons that they are “giving Four in a Bed”, evoking the type of decor that tends to be showcased on the Channel 4 show where bed and breakfast hosts go head to head. A third says she feels bad for the early adopters who got on the Highland cow-wagon years ago, “only for their special interest to become peak garden centre Boomer Christmas sh**e”. There are questions about whether this will simply all end up in landfill – along with countless other fast homeware fads – once the interiors world has moved on to another obsession.

So where did this cowmaggedon come from? Is it just the agricultural equivalent of “live, laugh, love”? Living, breathing Highland cows have become something of a viral sensation on social media over the past year or so, in part thanks to their distinctive look – and the fact that anything remotely cute and cuddly tends to do numbers on Instagram.

Earlier this year, three people had to be rescued in Hampshire after coming into difficulties while searching for a TikTok-famous herd; a few months later, the Highland Cattle Society warned tourists against using the animals as “selfie props”.

Hannah Bartlett, a retail trend researcher and founder of The Christmas Insider, reckons that although “it might feel like Highland cows have suddenly appeared everywhere, their traction has been building for a while”. She remembers “seeing them cropping up all over the Spring Fair, the trade retail show for homeware, fashion and gifts, at Birmingham’s NEC back in February 2025.

Highland cows, Bartlett adds, are just “the latest in a long line of quirky members of the animal kingdom to capture our hearts” – llamas, flamingos, capybaras and cute amphibious axolotls are some of their predecessors, she notes. But for her, these befringed cattle are “instantly endearing and seem to answer a deeper need we have right now – a desire to escape the digital fatigue and fast pace of 21st-century life and hark back to simpler times, slow living and nature”.

And from a more practical point of view? “Their distinctive look also translates brilliantly across everything from ceramics and linens to artwork and soft toys, which perhaps explains how they’ve become quite so popular and prolific,” Bartlett says. That signature rusty orange hue, too, fits in neatly with the autumnal “aesthetic” that has become a social media mainstay for this time of year (pumpkin patches, burnished foliage, and so on).

Chloe Templeman, executive creative director at the design and branding agency Pearlfisher, grew up in Scotland, so “seeing the humble Highland ‘coo’ suddenly plastered across every homeware aisle feels a bit surreal”, she says. But the trend “makes perfect sense from a branding angle” as they “basically look like giant teddy bears”, and “for anyone outside of Scotland who just pictures a standard black and white dairy cow, they’re a fun, weird novelty that really stands out”.

Retailers, she adds, “have definitely jumped on the bandwagon, maybe to the point where it’s getting a little oversaturated now, but at the end of the day, people just love connecting with something that’s beautiful, cuddly and grounding”. When you put it like that, it’s not hard to see the appeal (although encountering Next’s one-metre-tall Hamish Nutcracker Christmas Ornament in real life would not be a particularly grounding experience for me).

But, just as you would with living, breathing cattle, it’s perhaps best to approach this trend with caution. One pal warns how her sister has loved these creatures for years, but reached a point where she would only receive cow-themed gifts. “What started as a love has turned into a burden,” she says. Once you express a vague fondness for Highlands, there’s no going back – your friends and family will buy everything cow-related that they spot for you hereafter, and you might not be able to moo-ve for merch.