A Journey Into the Heart of Labubu

Two young women squat by a low wooden display bristling with Labubus. They ask each other the same question that’s on my mind: Which of these plushie collectibles will the Pop Mart toy company allow me the privilege of taking home today? Will I get the 16-inch-tall Labubu with denim overalls and a fisherman’s hat or the keychain Labubu with bright fur and possessed eyes? Can I get both?

The clerk at this Beijing store—Pop Mart’s first location—gives us a reality check. “None of these is in stock,” she says curtly. “You can join our fan group chat and wait for the restocking alert.”

Of course. Labubu isn’t just a creepy-cute stuffed rabbit-demon-elf-bear. Labubu sat front row at Milan Fashion Week. Tourists lined up at the Louvre to buy a Labubu from the pop-up store. Lady Gaga dressed as Labubu in concert. Madonna served Labubu cake at her birthday. When Labubu sold out in London once, customers started a brawl. In Thailand, where Labubu is the government’s official tourism ambassador, trendy partygoers buy Labubu-shaped ecstasy pills. Even knockoff Labubus, called Lafufus, have their own devoted fans. You can’t expect to just leave the store with social currency. You’ve got to earn it.

Around the world, Pop Mart employees will tell you to start by monitoring the company’s social feeds for news and alerts. Here in China, I’ve got an additional option: I can scan a QR code and join a dedicated WeChat group. Mine is called “Pop Mart Beijing First Store Group No. 35.”

I do some quick, dispiriting math. My group is capped at 200 members. Assuming 34 other groups filled up first, at least 7,000 eager fans are looking to buy a Labubu. And that’s just at this store, which is one of more than 400 that Pop Mart operates in China. When the restock alert arrives, we’ll need to hit the purchase button faster than hummingbirds beat their wings.

At 10:57 am one morning, news hits the chat: A pink plushie keychain priced at 100 RMB (about $14) will be restocked in three minutes. The time comes, and the group erupts with disappointment. Only one person says she got the keychain. Soon, others start asking if she’ll resell it. An auction ensues. “I’m not selling,” the lucky buyer writes, but the bidding goes on anyway. In less than a minute, it reaches 900 RMB ($126). When she doesn’t reply again, the group goes back to venting about how hard it is to buy a Labubu from Pop Mart at the original price.

Many in China, even longtime Pop Mart devotees, have been surprised at how the world suddenly adopted their tastes this year. Amber Zhang, partner and analyst at a Beijing-based data intelligence company, says she once seriously considered shorting Pop Mart’s stock because she just couldn’t understand why both consumers and markets were going crazy over a plushie doll. She changed her mind. “At this point, it’s no longer about whether I objectively or subjectively think it’s good,” Zhang says. “There’s actually a social consensus all over the world that this is popular, this is a hit.”

In the first half of 2025, the Labubu craze helped grow Pop Mart’s global revenue more than 200 percent. It’s now worth $46 billion—ranking just below Disney and Nintendo in the same industry and more than the makers of Transformers, Barbie, and Hello Kitty combined. Outside China’s electronics and software powerhouses, there are few consumer brands from the country that have been so successful around the world.

Where Western buyers browsing Shein or Temu (or, for that matter, Amazon) may associate “Made in China” with an abundance of cheap imitation, on a Pop Mart product it means something new: a homegrown cultural phenomenon that is idolized globally despite—or perhaps because of—its inaccessibility. Coinciding with a major tourism push from the Chinese government and buoying attitudes toward China across the world, Labubu has become the de facto face of the country’s growing soft power, even if Pop Mart would rather distance itself from geopolitics.

This summer, I embarked on an international journey to get beneath Labubu’s grinning exterior and unpack the squishy polyester stuffing inside. I visited Pop Mart stores in four countries, interviewed a company executive, dined at a Labubu-themed café, watched human-sized Labubus fight in front of an audience, and talked to longtime fans about their journeys in or out of fandom. I saw many, many Labubus, real and fake, fuzzy and smooth, hanging off purses and sitting on shoulders. While my interest began as purely journalistic, by the end I’d spent hundreds of non-reimbursable dollars on Labubus of my own—and gotten closer to understanding how millions of people, out of nowhere, fell in love with a mischievous rabbit-eared monster.

Wang Ning, Pop Mart’s 38-year-old founder, grew up being instilled with the entrepreneurial spirit. His parents were small-town shopkeepers who sold everything from cassette tapes to fishing rods. By the time Wang graduated from college, he had already run a documentary studio, operated a budget hotel, and bulk-purchased holiday-themed glowing hairbands to sell at Christmas. Within hours of receiving his diploma, he hopped on a train to Beijing. The next year, 2010, he opened the very first Pop Mart store in a shopping mall in northwest Beijing. He wired the lights, hung the shelves, and arranged the furniture himself.

In A Company One of a Kind, a Chinese-language corporate biography of Wang and Pop Mart, the founder talks about designing his stores to feel like places of worship (if perhaps more Instagrammable). That’s certainly what the original Pop Mart store had grown into when I visited this year and knelt at the altar of Labubu. In the beginning, though, that first store sold a random assortment of trendy gadgets, clothes, and toys—whatever young people at the time would consider cool. (That’s how it got the name.) In fact, before I reported this story, I hadn’t realized that I likely visited the store in its early years. I went to college nearby, and that mall was my usual weekend hangout. I probably strolled past it hundreds of times and entered occasionally too. I guess I hadn’t found it memorable. Yet the business of chasing trends was lucrative enough that Pop Mart expanded to two dozen stores in its first five years.

In 2015, Wang persuaded a classmate of his in his MBA program, Si De, to join his startup. (Si later became the company’s chief operating officer.) That year, they noticed nearly a third of the revenue in some stores came from a single product—Sonny Angels, Japanese collectible figurines that look like naked angels in various types of headgear. These 3-inch mini-figures are, still today, sold in “blind boxes,” meaning different figures are put into identical packaging and buyers don’t learn which one they have until they unbox it. Wang and Si wanted Pop Mart to become Sonny Angels’ exclusive Chinese distributor. The Japanese company refused and said, in an email, that they should go their separate ways.

For the first time, Wang and Si thought about turning Pop Mart into a brand that manufactures Sonny Angel–like products with the company’s own character designs, known in the industry as intellectual properties. They found Kenny Wong, an up-and-coming toy designer based in Hong Kong who was best known for creating Molly, a little girl doll with a blond bob and pursed lips. In 2016, they signed an agreement for Pop Mart to mass-produce Molly figurines. “Our first contract with Kenny was handwritten by Kenny and me,” Si recalled in an exclusive interview with WIRED. He and Wong would later laugh together at how unprofessional that contract was.

Pop Mart took the blind-box concept and pushed it even further, establishing unique rituals to amp up the excitement: When picking out a box in the store, a buyer may lift it to feel its weight and shake it to hear the sound it makes—but may not press the box to feel the toy’s edges, pry open the gaps to peer inside, or place it on a scale. Devotees of the blind box speak their own jargon. The ugly and unwanted results are called leikuan (heinous item), the adored ones are rekuan (hot item), and the rarest prize, yincangkuan (hidden item), is found only once in every 72 to 720 boxes, depending on the product.

Pop Mart’s bet on Molly and blind boxes paid off, and the company kept contracting with new designers. In interviews at the time, Wang often compared Pop Mart’s strategy to that of a record label—always scouting the next huge talent.

Labubu came into the world as a background character in a children’s book. Called The Story of Puca, it’s set in a dark, mythical forest. The story revolves around Puca, a fairy, and the forest’s other residents—including 100 cat-sized elves with rabbit ears and pointy nine-toothed smiles. The book’s author, Kasing Lung, has said he named the species “Labubu” after an internet search revealed no one had claimed the name.

Lung had been doodling Labubu-like creatures for much of his life. Born in Hong Kong in 1972, he moved to the Netherlands when he was 6 because his parents owned a Chinese restaurant there. He couldn’t speak Dutch, so one teacher gave him picture books with fewer words to read. Lung spent long hours at home, upstairs from the restaurant, silently reading the books and drawing. He has said that European cartoon characters, like the Smurfs from Belgium and Moomins from Finland, helped him assimilate. “The ones I like most are tales about spirits and fairies,” Lung writes in the epilogue to The Story of Puca. “They tend to carry a slightly eerie and unsettling atmosphere—something that makes me both like them and fear them.”

Though Labubu wasn’t the protagonist in the book, it was the first character to go from 2D to 3D. Lung worked with Howard Lee, the founder of a Hong Kong toy studio called How2Work, to produce commemorative Labubu figurines for the book’s launch. “We ended up not having enough time to spray-paint, and that’s why the first-ever Labubu was fully black,” Lee recalls. The two men brought 100 copies of The Story of Puca and 60 hand-painted Labubu figurines to a toy convention in Taipei in 2015. All of them sold out.

The Monsters, as Lung calls the franchise of characters that includes Labubu, Puca, and other forest creatures, turbocharged his career. In written replies to questions from WIRED, which the reclusive Lung sent via Lee, he says he recalls meeting Pop Mart’s Wang at the same toy convention a few years later. “I chose Pop Mart because we shared many of the same creative values, which is quite rare,” Lung says. “They also had an excellent production team.” Even as Pop Mart operated dozens of stores in China, it was preparing to expand overseas. In 2019, Lung and Pop Mart started an exclusive contract to produce certain kinds of toys based on the Monsters IP.

With the help of Pop Mart, Labubus transformed from hobby figurines for collectors to a vast catalog of mass-produced toys, stationery, and accessories. Labubu itself, as avid fans recall, has also changed. In the beginning, most of the Labubu toys had square heads and looked more evil than cutesy. The round-headed Labubu toys today look plump, fuzzy, and friendly.

The biggest change, though, was in 2023, when Pop Mart came up with a ground-breaking product: plush keychains with faces and limbs made of vinyl. That might not sound particularly innovative today, but most of the toys sold by Pop Mart before then were either soft plushies with flattened facial features or hard vinyl dolls designed to be placed on tabletops. The plush-and-vinyl Labubu keychains soon found themselves a much wider audience. One by one, influential tastemakers—Lisa from Blackpink, Rihanna, Kim Kardashian, Marc Jacobs—were photographed in outfits accessorized with Labubu keychains. “We were very excited about it, but we truly did not expect it to be as viral as it is,” Si says. Lung says he’s “both very happy and very surprised.”

By 2024 the Monsters franchise was generating about $425 million in annual global revenue—a sevenfold increase over the previous year. In the first six months of 2025, Pop Mart sold $670 million of Labubus, more than the sales of Barbie or Hotwheels in that same period. Collectors, too, have made fortunes. In Beijing, a rare human-sized statue of Labubu in mint green, made by How2Work in the early years, was recently auctioned for $150,000.

“It’s really too popular,” Si says. “Everyone thought we were doing scarcity marketing because most users couldn’t get one.” In fact, the company has significantly ramped up its plushie production capacity. In 2024, it could manufacture 3 million plush toys every month. Now it can make more than 30 million, and it’s targeting 50 million per month by the end of this year. In mid-June, the company began preselling Labubu plushies with delivery dates a month later to quench overheated demand while supply caught up. Labubu’s resale price dropped significantly.

Still, to get a Labubu keychain today, you need to have some connection to a distributor, live in one of the countries with more supply, or just be very, very lucky. Anna, a business analyst in Hong Kong, told me she wasn’t a fan of toys but felt socially obliged to learn about Labubu and Pop Mart as she started seeing people in her life wearing one on their purses. This summer, she offered some friends in the US six new Labubus, freshly picked up from a store in Hong Kong, where they were easier to get. Her friends quickly snapped them up. “You already feel good about it when you see a Chinese IP being so widely accepted overseas,” she told me, pointing to the virality of Labubu as an example of Asian cultures’ rising influence. Plus, “I have the access that they don’t have in America,” she said. “It becomes your social status.”

The day after I failed to secure a Labubu from Pop Mart’s original store, I decide to console myself with a visit to Pop Land, the company’s 10-acre theme park in central Beijing—and perhaps the clearest sign that it intends to come for Disney’s lunch. (“Our art toys are like Disney’s movies,” Wang says in A Company One of a Kind. “They use movies to reach consumers, cultivate fans, and build IP and fan communities. We do it through art toys.”)

Pop Land is about 1 percent the size of Universal Studios in Beijing and Shanghai’s Disneyland, but unlike other theme parks, it sits right by the consulate district and a few subway stops away from Beijing’s most populous business areas. It’s in a city green space, which meant that Pop Mart wasn’t allowed to move even a single tree. Instead, the company renovated an abandoned building on the property and named it Molly’s Castle. A leafy area became Labubu Adventure Forest, though it looks much brighter and more kid-friendly than Lung’s original depiction. At one end of the forest, actors put on a “Warriors Training Camp” in full-size Labubu suits.

I stop for lunch at the park’s restaurant, on the third floor of Molly’s Castle. The minute I’m seated at a table and inform the waitress I came alone, she puts a 23-inch-tall plush doll in the chair opposite me. My dining buddy is Zimomo, the male chief of the Labubu clan in the original children’s book and one of the rarest Pop Mart products sold. Throughout my lunch, other Pop Land visitors keep coming over to ask whether I bought the Zimomo doll myself and if they can take a picture of it. I feel like I’m dining with a celebrity.

At the table next to me is a mother with her young daughter. I ask what brought them here. The mom tells me that her daughter, who’s turning 4 in less than a month, found and fell in love with Labubu through watching videos on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. She thought about buying two Zimomo dolls for her daughter, but they cost $200 each on the resale market, so she’s still debating. Just the day before, she saw on social media that a friend’s daughter had a Labubu-themed birthday party, where the room was stuffed with dozens of rare Labubus. She shows me videos of the party on her phone. “Her mom paid a lot to get these,” she says.

Since I began my own Labubu hunt, I’ve known the option exists to go to a reseller, often referred to in China by the slang term huangniu (literally “yellow ox”). I heard from Dong, a Pop Mart customer since 2018 in Shanghai, that many huangniu he knows use bots that monitor social media for restock announcements and grab new merchandise the millisecond it drops. Dong has paid a small amount to join group chats where huangniu release early information. He calls himself a fenniu now—between a fan and a huangniu. He has already collected most of the Labubu products ever released, so he’s only buying new ones to sell to other fans for a profit. (Which, to me, sounds like he is a huangniu.)

With due respect to Dong, it feels wrong to just throw money at the challenge and call it a day. So I follow the other piece of advice I get: Go to Thailand.

Of all Pop Mart’s overseas successes, Thailand has been the most unexpected. Pop Mart initially placed its global expansion bets on wealthier countries such as Japan and Singapore, but it was the Thai market that became a runaway success after Lisa, the Thai K-pop A-lister, became an outspoken fan of Labubu. The stores in Thailand have been some of the company’s top money-printing machines, with per-store revenues “number one in the world by a wide margin,” according to Si. Among Chinese fans, the conventional wisdom is that Pop Mart has been rewarding the Thai market with more supplies of popular toys, so even a casual traveler should be able to grab one.

I set my sights on a special keychain released only in Thailand, dressed in a glittery gold traditional Thai garment. Chinese fans call it “Thai sis” Labubu. It sells for about $30 at a Pop Mart store, but within China, resellers are asking for as much as $110.

At first, Bangkok is as much of a disappointment as Beijing. In each of the five malls I visit, the long lines outside Pop Mart are only for people who snatched up a reservation online, which book up within about 10 seconds of being posted. Then, at a mall called Terminal 21, I notice something weird about the Starbucks right across from Pop Mart. Almost half the seats are occupied by customers with paper bags full of unopened Labubu plushies. Every five minutes or so, someone finishes checking out at the store and delivers the Labubu they bought to this Starbucks, and someone sitting here takes the unopened boxes, checks the receipt, and pays them through a QR code.

Nam, a Starbucks employee, tells me that I’ve stumbled on an underground Labubu reselling market. The sign that says “Please refrain from any buying/selling within the store” hasn’t stopped the resellers from making it their trading hub. “They do the transactions outside the store and then just sit in here, so there’s nothing I can do,” Nam says.

One reseller catches my eye. She has probably 100 plushie keychains piling up around her on the floor. I approach her and learn that she’s from China. She says she owns an Airbnb business there but travels to Bangkok often, and she makes sure to bring some Pop Mart products back home to resell every time. She, too, failed to grab a reservation for purchases online yesterday. For a box of six keychains that sells for about $100 from the store, she’s paying nearly $400; when she brings them back to China, she can sell them for about $500.

The relationship between Pop Mart and these resellers fascinates me. On one hand, the sky-high demand for Labubu has allowed anyone, Thai or Chinese, to profit from becoming an amateur scalper. But without these resellers, would there be as much Labubu hype driving up prices? The only people who seem to lose out in this overheated market are the real fans without means. (For the record, Si says the company “absolutely despises” huangniu and is constantly strategizing to block them from buying its products.)

There, sitting in the Starbucks and monitoring her phone, the Chinese reseller is generous enough to give a compatriot some tips for buying a Labubu. She shows me photos of two Labubu plushies, commonly referred to as “the King” and “the Queen” by fans. Apparently, the store actually has these two in stock today, even though it made no public announcement. If I just walk up to the cashier and request them, an employee will find them for me. “Go to the store and take a look. Next time if they have something else in stock, I’ll let you know too,” she says.

I walk up to the Pop Mart cashiers and tell them I want the King and the Queen. The cashier takes out two boxes from below the counter wrapped in a thin layer of tissue. I walk out of the store with my prize, clutching the precious Labubus that, three minutes ago, I’d never even heard of. Do I need them? Do I even like them? I don’t know, but I can always resell them later, right?

At a Pop Mart press conference in August, executives were asked the inevitable question: Is Labubu’s popularity sustainable? Will people keep talking about them next year? Isn’t this just a repeat of the Beanie Babies bubble of the late 1990s, complete with fluffy toys, manufactured scarcity, and online FOMO?

Wang Ning, whom Forbes has deemed the 10th-richest man in China, fielded the question with a surprisingly triumphant answer, breaking from his usual reserved style. “I would counter with a question: Perhaps this year you haven’t talked much about Mickey Mouse, Naruto, or Hello Kitty, but does that mean they have no value anymore?” He went on, “It’s like we have discovered a gold mine, and everyone is excitedly talking about it. But once the clamor of the crowd goes away, does the gold mine disappear?”

Wang also offered another answer to the question that day. In front of the cameras, seven male executives from Pop Mart—a head-scratching sight for a company whose revenue overwhelmingly comes from young female consumers—sat behind dolls of seven of Pop Mart’s top-grossing characters. Labubu took center stage, but the others served as a reminder to the audience that the company has many more IPs in its back pocket. Four other characters (Molly, Skullpanda, Crybaby, and Dimoo) each sold more than $150 million of themed merchandise this year. In a long research note, Goldman Sachs analysts drew a parallel not to Beanie Babies but to Disney and K-pop music labels. The popularity cycle of cartoon characters or K-pop idols lasts about two to three years, they wrote, but can be extended if the companies keep releasing new products or entering new geographic markets. The strongest companies build a conveyor belt of new icons that become new fads.

In a way, Pop Mart’s path has already been paved by the companies that came before. But this is the first time a Chinese company has gotten so close to becoming a Western cultural staple. Brands from other countries have gone through that perception shift before, notes Derek Sulger, the chair of a Hong Kong–based luxury clothing brand founded in 1994. Toyota, Sony, Samsung. “I haven’t heard anyone criticizing anything for being Japanese or Korean in a long, long time,” he says. “I think the same kind of ebb and flow that we’ve seen elsewhere is very, very, very likely to happen” with made-in-China products, he says.

Observers of American internet culture have noted a vibe shift this year, an embrace of Chinese coolness. Just look what happened in January when the US government attempted to ban TikTok over its ties to the country: Users began preemptively flocking to an even more Chinese alternative, RedNote. Even on US-made platforms, people marvel at videos of gleaming Shenzhen factories, the cyberpunk aesthetics of Chongqing, and, yes, Labubu.

After I returned to the States with my King and Queen Labubus, I kept having stress dreams about restocking announcements. I was still thinking about the one that got away: “Thai sis.”

I thought about how great it would feel to own the golden-robed Labubu. When people asked me about my prize, as they most definitely would, maybe I’d tell them my Pop Mart odyssey—how a journalist set out to understand the Labubu mass psychosis of 2025, only to fall prey to it himself, how I battled bots and huangniu to get mine, that what makes a Labubu special isn’t its resale value but the lengths people go to obtain it and the online community they build in helping each other get one. Maybe I’d mention the surreal theme park in Beijing that’s being expanded to twice its size and the cartoon series that’s in production, potentially keeping this Chinese cultural juggernaut going long into the future. And maybe the person listening to me, by the end, would want a Labubu of their own.

I spent an anxious week checking the Thai Pop Mart store and local ecommerce platforms. Buying a Lafufu “Thai sis” felt like a cop-out, and I agonized over contributing to the scalper economy.

Finally, though, I gave in: I told a friend in Bangkok to just buy one from the resellers in the mall, no matter the price. Eventually, he got one for $75. It flew thousands of miles and now sits in a corner of my living room in New York, still in its original plastic packaging. After all, it’s too precious to hang on my backpack. I haven’t been to a Pop Mart store since.

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