A Waukesha woman with the world's largest collection of Winnie the Pooh memorabilia is giving some of it away.
The reason she is doing it is to get people excited about the new Winnie the Pooh movie which opens Friday.
Walk into the collection room at Deb Hoffman's house and it is stuffed full with Winnie the Pooh. From floor to ceiling the bear and his friends from the Hundred Acre Woods take up space.
Hoffmann's love of the bear 'stuffed with fluff' started when she was a child. She had a plush Pooh bear she carried around well after it lost its orange color.
But she didn't start collecting until she was an adult. Hoffmann saw a Winnie the Pooh phone that liked but when she went to buy it, it was gone.
"Now I had to find it. This was before eBay and internet shopping. So I put ads in papers all over the United States and finally, I found someone who had it," said Hoffmann.
She got the phone and a giant collection. Eventually, she applied for and got the Guinness World Record for the largest collection of Winnie the Pooh memorabilia. She didn't stop there and now has more than 18,000 pieces.
Her most expensive piece, a Winnie the Pooh costume she believes is worth around $15,000. Her oldest piece is from the 1940s. It is a collection of Agnes Brush stuff animals featuring the original Winnie the Pooh characters.
Hoffmann now wants others to be as excited about Winnie the Pooh as she is. So she started giving away her duplicates from her collection on her website MostPooh.com. She has been doing it until the movie Christopher Robin's release.
"These days there is so much negative in the world it's nice to turn to something that is sweet and positive," Hoffmann said.
