As with many things, businesses try to capitalize on trends and associate them with their brands. The goal of course is to provide a link from a popular item to their business in the hopes people will use their product or service. The same thing happened with the “piggy bank.” In the UK a bank named NatWest created a family of piggy bank pigs. As a child saved a certain amount of money over a certain period of time they received one of these pigs as a reward. You can watch the commercial for it here: or watch it below:

According to the piggy bank page there was a family of five characters; Sir Nathaniel Westminster the father, Lady Hillary the mother, Maxwell the boy, Annabel the girl and Woody the baby.

These pigs now fetch a lot of money as collectibles.

We don’t know if she’s the largest but she’s certainly quite famous. Rachel is a piggy bank that definitely brings home the bacon! In Seattle there is a famous area called Pikes Place Market. Pikes Place Market is a place where fisherman, artists and craftsmen sell their wares. The market formed a foundation in 1982 to help support low income people. They came up with the idea of creating a rather large piggy bank. The piggy bank itself is a bronze and weighs 550 pounds. It is modeled after a real life county fair winner named Rachel who weighed 700 pounds!

While it is not the official mascot of Pikes Place Market, it is definitely an integral part of it. “People from all over the world feed Rachel with pennies, quarters, checks, pesos, lira, yen, and rials, contributing $6,000 to $9,000 to the Market Foundation each year.” You can read more about Rachel here:

Now that’s a piggy bank!

For more information on piggy banks and teaching children valuable money skills, visit our website

Let’s see, take a pig, cross it with a bank and viola’, piggybank! Nope. Alright, it must have been a rich aristocrat with the last name “Piggie” or something who owned a bank. Wrong again. How about a way to teach children about greed and giving and such? Strike 3.

How in the world did we get the term “piggy bank?” It’s an accepted term we use probably without even thinking twice about. Well, believe it or not, it seems we just don’t know for sure. The closest researchers have gotten is that it comes from the fifteenth century. Back then, a lot of things were made out of a clay called “pygg.” One such item was jar like. People used it to collect their coins. Eventually, the word “Pygg” changed to pig and the pig jar became the “pig bank.” Pygg, which was probably pronounced a little differently, became “pig.” At the same time, the term moved away from the substance – clay – to the object – the bank. Thus piggy bank is synonymous to a fake pig that you put your money in.

For more information or to purchase this adorable polka-dot piggy bank, visit our website


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