But the idea didn’t gain momentum until 2017,
when one of the Flutter engineers, Nina Chen,
suggested it on an internal mailing list.
The Flutter VP at the time, Joshy Joseph,
approved the idea and asked the
organizer for the 2018 Dart Conference,
Linda Rasmussen, to make it happen.

Once Shams heard about these plans,
she rushed to Linda and asked to own and drive
the project to produce the plushies for the conference.
Linda had already elicited some design sketches,
which she handed off.
Starting with the sketches, Shams located a vendor
who could work within an aggressive deadline
(competing with Lunar New Year),
and started the process of creating
the specs for the plushy.

That’s right, Dash was originally a
Dart mascot, not a Flutter mascot.

Here are some early mockups and one of the first prototypes: