It started harmlessly enough. In April 2020, fnnch began, according to one of his newsletters, “wheat-pasting COVID Bears on boarded up storefronts across San Francisco.” At the time, he said he wanted to “convert depressing storefronts into canvases for art, and encourage healthy behavior.” Then, in May, he came up with the #HoneyBearHunt. It was a more urban take on what was happening in the suburbs during the early days of shelter in place: instead of putting actual teddy bears in windows for neighborhood children, people could display fnnch’s honey bear, and kids could follow his virtual map to find them. He sold 3,500 bear window displays in four days.
In the year since, fnnch—a straight, white, former tech worker—has been bombarding San Francisco with those bears. After the initial mask and soap bears for the #HoneyBearHunt, there was a woefully ill-advised—then re-imagined—Black Lives Matter-inspired bear. There was a bear to encourage voting. There was a Ruth Bader Ginsburg bear, a firefighter bear, a teacher bear, a coffee house bear (which fnnch said symbolized the “many everyday heroes of the pandemic”), a San Francisco Ballet bear, a movie bear and, most recently, a Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence bear.
One of the reasons people kept buying the bears was because most of them, in one way or another, support a good cause. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence will receive 50% of funds from fnnch’s painting and print sales in their likeness. Mask bear and soap bear raised over $100,000 for the Safety Net Fund. Of the firefighter bear sales, 50% benefited the CAL FIRE Foundation. The SF Ballet got “50% of [related] art sales and 25% of other sales … to support their extensive COVID testing of dancers and staff.” Ten percent of the profits from the movie bear print went to the Roxie. A line of T-shirts donated 25% of sales to St. Anthony’s, a nonprofit community organization. As fnnch himself noted in one of his regular newsletters, he “went from raising or donating $12,000 in 2019 to $293,000 in 2020.”
