Ensky Charms, Pouches and Desk Keepsakes

These are the small things: acrylic charms, rubber straps, pouches, pin badges, sticker sets and desk pieces. Individually none of them is a project — that is the point. They are what people add to an Ensky order when the puzzle is already in the basket, and what they buy when a whole kit is too much to give.

Everything is licensed and printed in Japan to the same high-quality standard as the larger lines, so the characters are on-model and the colour is the studio's. Ghibli, Pokémon, Kirby and Sanrio carry most of this page; the Japanese scenery and seasonal pieces fill in around them. A charm is a tiny canvas and the design has to survive being reduced to four centimetres, which rules out more artwork than you would expect.

Where an item is a blind box — you get one figure from a set and not your pick — we say so in the entry, in the first line. Where a pack contains several pieces we give the number. That is the information people most often tell us was missing elsewhere, and there is no good reason to make anyone guess.

As a gift they are low-risk: a fan of a show gets something they will actually carry, and nobody has to find table space. Parents buy the pouches for the same reason they buy toys with no small parts. Collectors buy the straps in threes. If you are taking a chance on somebody else's taste, a charm is the cheapest way to be wrong.

The latest runs tend to celebrate a film anniversary or a season, and they are not reprinted. Questions we are asked often — sizes, what a set contains, whether a strap fits a phone — are answered below; anything more personal can go to our inbox. The quiet excitement of this line is in how a desk looks after six months of it, which is not something a product photo shows.

Most of this page is printed on the same paper and board as our jigsaw and paper theater lines, in the same Japanese plant, under the same official licence. A sticker sheet featuring Totoro is held to the colour standard of a 1000-piece puzzle, because it is the same file and the same press. Fans playing the collect-them-all game with the blind boxes tell us the design matters more at this size than at any other: a charm has one angle, and it either looks like the character or it does not. The latest runs celebrate a film anniversary; the high-quality finish is what makes a four-centimetre figure worth keeping on a desk instead of in a drawer.