The Crazy Global Rise of Labubu, the Chinese Toy That Took Over the World
Two young women huddle low beside a cramped wooden display crammed full of Labubu plushies. They bounce the same question off each other that loops through my own head: Which of these coveted collectible toys will Pop Mart actually let me walk out with today? Will I score the 16-inch Labubu in denim overalls and a fisherman’s beanie? Or the keychain-sized version with neon fur and its iconic uncanny, possessed stare? Could I possibly get lucky enough to leave with both?
The sales associate at Pop Mart’s very first Beijing location pulls us back down to earth. “None of these are in stock right now,” she says bluntly. “You can join our fan WeChat group to get alerts when we restock.
Of course. Labubu is far more than just a viral creepy-cute mix of stuffed rabbit, demon, elf, and bear. It has sat front row at Milan Fashion Week. Tourists queued for hours outside the Louvre just to grab one from a Pop Mart pop-up. Lady Gaga performed dressed as Labubu. Madonna served a Labubu-themed cake at her birthday party. When a drop sold out in London once, customers got into a physical brawl over the remaining stock. In Thailand, Labubu even serves as the national government’s official tourism ambassador, and trendy partygoers buy ecstasy pills pressed into Labubu’s shape. Even counterfeit Labubu, nicknamed “Lafufus,” have built their own loyal fan bases. This isn’t just a toy—it’s social currency, and you don’t just walk out of the store with that. You have to earn it.
Pop Mart staff around the world tell new fans to start by following the brand’s social media for drop alerts. Here in China, I had an extra step: scan a QR code to join a location-specific WeChat fan group. Mine was labeled “Pop Mart Beijing First Store Group No. 35.”
I do a quick, deflating calculation. Each group is capped at 200 members. If 34 full groups came before mine, that means at least 7,000 diehard fans are waiting for a Labubu restock at just this one store—and Pop Mart runs more than 400 locations across China. When the restock alert goes out, we’ll all be tapping the buy button faster than a hummingbird flaps its wings.
One morning at 10:57, the notification hits the chat: a $14 pink Labubu plush keychain will go live for purchase in three minutes. When the clock hits zero, the group blows up with nothing but disappointment. Only one person claims to have successfully checked out. Within seconds, other members start begging her to resell it, and an informal auction erupts. “I’m not selling,” the lucky winner writes, but the bids keep climbing anyway. In less than 60 seconds, the offer hits $126. When she doesn’t respond again, the group goes back to venting about how nearly impossible it is to score a Labubu at retail price.
Even long-time Pop Mart fans across China have been caught off guard by how quickly the whole world caught Labubu fever this year. Amber Zhang, an analyst and partner at a Beijing-based data intelligence firm, says she once seriously considered shorting Pop Mart’s stock because she couldn’t wrap her head around why consumers and investors were obsessing over a stuffed toy. She ended up changing her mind. “At this point, it doesn’t matter what I personally or objectively think of it,” Zhang told me. “There’s a global social consensus right now: this is popular, this is a hit.”
The 2025 Labubu craze pushed Pop Mart’s global revenue up more than 200% in the first half of the year alone. The company is now valued at $46 billion—just behind Disney and Nintendo among global entertainment and toy brands, and worth more than the parent companies of Transformers, Barbie, and Hello Kitty combined. Outside of China’s huge tech and electronics giants, few Chinese consumer brands have ever hit this level of global success.
Where Western shoppers on Shein, Temu, or even Amazon have long associated “Made in China” with cheap, mass-produced imitations, a Pop Mart product carries a whole new meaning: it’s a homegrown cultural phenomenon that’s become a global obsession, in large part because (or maybe in spite of) how hard it is to get. Labubu’s rise lines up perfectly with the Chinese government’s global tourism push, and has shifted global attitudes toward Chinese soft power—even if Pop Mart itself tries hard to distance the brand from geopolitics.
This summer, I set out on a global reporting trip to dig past Labubu’s iconic grinning exterior and unpack what’s really driving this global craze. I visited Pop Mart stores in four countries, interviewed a top company executive, ate at a Labubu-themed cafe, watched full-size human Labubu performers stage a mock fight in front of a crowd, and talked to long-time fans about their experiences inside and outside of the fandom. I saw hundreds of Labubus—real and fake, fuzzy and smooth, hanging off handbags and perched on fans’ shoulders. What started as a purely journalistic assignment ended with me spending hundreds of dollars of my own money on my own Labubu collection—and getting a closer look at how millions of people suddenly fell head over heels for this mischievous, rabbit-eared little monster.
How Pop Mart Grew From a Random Mall Shop to a Global Giant
Pop Mart’s 38-year-old founder Wang Ning grew up surrounded by entrepreneurship. His parents were small-town shop owners who sold everything from cassette tapes to fishing rods. By the time Wang graduated college, he’d already run a documentary production studio, operated a budget hotel, and bulk-ordered holiday glow-in-the-dark hair accessories to resell at Christmas. Within hours of getting his diploma, he hopped on a train to Beijing. The next year, 2010, he opened the very first Pop Mart store in a mall in northwest Beijing. He wired the lighting, hung the shelves, and arranged the store displays all by himself.
In A Company One of a Kind, a Chinese-language corporate biography of Wang and Pop Mart, Wang describes designing his stores to feel like a kind of temple for fandom—if a very Instagram-friendly one. That’s exactly what the original Beijing store has become when I visited this year, where I knelt to peer at the Labubu display. But in the beginning, that first store just sold a random mix of trendy gadgets, clothes, and toys—whatever young Chinese consumers thought was cool at the time (that’s actually how the brand got its name “Pop Mart,” short for popular mart). What’s more, I didn’t even realize before reporting this story that I’d probably visited the store back in its early days. I went to college nearby, and that mall was my go-to weekend hangout. I probably walked past it hundreds of times, and stepped inside occasionally too. I just never found it memorable enough to stick in my mind. Still, chasing fast-moving trends was profitable enough that Pop Mart expanded to 24 stores in its first five years.
In 2015, Wang convinced his MBA classmate Si De to join the startup. Si would later go on to become Pop Mart’s chief operating officer. That year, they noticed something interesting: nearly a third of revenue at some stores came from just one product: Sonny Angels, Japanese collectible figurines of tiny naked angels wearing different headgear. To this day, Sonny Angels are sold in “blind boxes”—identical packaging that hides which figure you’re getting until you open it. Wang and Si wanted Pop Mart to become Sonny Angels’ exclusive Chinese distributor, but the Japanese company turned them down, telling the pair they’d go their separate ways in an email.
That rejection pushed Wang and Si to reimagine Pop Mart as a brand that would create its own Sonny Angel-style products with original character designs—what the industry calls intellectual property, or IP. They found Kenny Wong, an up-and-coming Hong Kong-based toy designer best known for creating Molly, a little girl character with a blonde bob and a pursed-lip pout. In 2016, they signed a deal for Pop Mart to mass produce Molly figurines. “Our first contract with Kenny was written by hand, by Kenny and me,” Si recalled in an exclusive interview with WIRED. The pair still laugh about how informal and unprofessional that first contract was.
Pop Mart took the blind box concept and turned it into a whole cultural ritual, building unique traditions to amp up the excitement of buying. When shoppers pick out a box in store, they can lift it to feel the weight, shake it to listen to the rattle of the toy inside—but they can’t press the box to feel the toy’s edges, pry open gaps to peek inside, or weigh it on a scale to figure out what’s inside. Devoted blind box fans even have their own slang. Unpopular, unwanted pulls are called leikuan (literally “heinous item”), fan-favorite pulls are rekuan (“hot item”), and the ultra-rare yincangkuan (“hidden item”) only appears once every 72 to 720 boxes, depending on the product line.
Pop Mart’s bet on Molly and blind boxes paid off big, and the company kept signing new designers. Wang often compared Pop Mart’s strategy to a record label: always scouting for the next huge breakout talent.
The Quiet Origins of the World’s Favorite Toy Monster
Labubu started life as a background character in a children’s book called The Story of Puca, set in a dark, enchanted mythical forest. The story centers on Puca, a forest fairy, and other residents of the woods—including 100 cat-sized elves with rabbit ears and sharp nine-toothed grins. The book’s creator, Kasing Lung, has said he named the species Labubu after an internet search showed no one else had claimed the name.
Lung had been drawing Labubu-like creatures most of his life. Born in Hong Kong in 1972, he moved to the Netherlands with his family when he was 6, after his parents opened a Chinese restaurant there. He didn’t speak Dutch, so a teacher gave him picture books with very few words to help him learn. Lung spent hours alone at home, in the apartment above the family restaurant, reading and drawing. He has said that European cartoon characters like Belgium’s Smurfs and Finland’s Moomins helped him adapt to his new home. “The ones I like most are tales about spirits and fairies,” Lung writes in the epilogue of 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 main character in the book, he was the first character to make the jump from 2D illustration to 3D toy. Lung worked with Howard Lee, founder of Hong Kong toy studio How2Work, to make commemorative Labubu figurines for the book’s launch. “We ended up running out of time to spray paint the whole figure, which is why the very first Labubu was completely black,” Lee recalls. The pair brought 100 copies of the book and 60 hand-painted Labubu figurines to a 2015 toy convention in Taipei. Every single one sold out.
The Monsters, as Lung calls his franchise of characters including Labubu, Puca, and other forest creatures, launched his career into the stratosphere. The reclusive Lung answered WIRED’s questions via Lee, and says he remembers meeting Pop Mart’s Wang Ning at the same Taipei convention a few years later. “I chose Pop Mart because we shared a lot of the same creative values, which is pretty rare,” Lung says. “They also had an excellent production team.” By that point, Pop Mart already had dozens of stores across China, and was getting ready to expand globally. In 2019, Lung and Pop Mart signed an exclusive deal to produce mass-market toys based on the Monsters IP.
With Pop Mart’s distribution and manufacturing power, Labubu went from a niche collectible for hardcore toy fans to a massive line of mass-produced toys, stationery, and accessories. Avid fans say Labubu’s design has changed a lot over the years too. Early Labubu toys mostly had square heads and leaned more into the “evil” side of creepy-cute. Today’s round-headed Labubus are plump, fuzzy, and look far more approachable.
But the biggest game-changer came in 2023, when Pop Mart launched an innovative new product: plush Labubu keychains with faces and limbs made of vinyl. It doesn’t sound revolutionary on paper, but before that, almost all Pop Mart toys were either all-soft plush with flat facial features, or hard solid vinyl dolls meant to sit on a shelf. The mixed-material Labubu keychains quickly found a massive global audience. One after another, A-list tastemakers—Blackpink’s Lisa, Rihanna, Kim Kardashian, Marc Jacobs—were photographed carrying Labubu keychains as accessories. “We were excited about it, but we truly never expected it would blow up this viral,” Si says. Lung says he’s “both very happy and very surprised.”
By 2024, the Monsters franchise was generating $425 million in annual global revenue—a sevenfold jump from the year before. In the first half of 2025 alone, Pop Mart sold $670 million worth of Labubu products—more than Barbie or Hot Wheels sold in that same period. Even collectors have made huge fortunes. A rare mint-green human-sized Labubu statue made by How2Work in the brand’s early years recently sold at auction in Beijing for $150,000.
“It’s really just too popular,” Si says. “Everyone thinks we’re intentionally doing scarcity marketing because most customers can’t get one.” In reality, the company has massively scaled up its plush manufacturing capacity. In 2024, it could make 3 million plush toys a month. Today, it can make more than 30 million a month, and is targeting 50 million a month by the end of 2025. In mid-June, the company started taking pre-orders for Labubu plushies with delivery a month out to cool down overheated demand while production caught up, and resale prices dropped significantly as a result.
Still, to score a Labubu keychain at retail today, you either need a connection to a distributor, live in a country with more abundant supply, or just be incredibly lucky. Anna, a business analyst in Hong Kong, told me she’d never been a toy fan, but felt socially obligated to learn about Labubu and Pop Mart after she started seeing everyone she knew carrying one on their bag. This summer, she gave six newly purchased Labubus to friends in the US, where they’re much harder to get, and her friends snapped them up immediately. “It already feels good to see a Chinese IP get so widely accepted overseas,” she told me, pointing to Labubu’s virality as proof of Asian culture’s growing global influence. Plus, she added, “I have access that they don’t have in America. It becomes your social status.”
Chasing Labubu From Beijing’s Theme Park to Bangkok’s Underground Resale Market
The day after I failed to score a Labubu at the original Beijing store, I decided to cheer myself up with a trip to Pop Land, Pop Mart’s 10-acre theme park in central Beijing—probably the clearest sign that the company intends to compete directly with Disney. (“Our art toys are like Disney’s movies,” Wang writes in A Company One of a Kind. “They use movies to reach consumers, build fans, and grow their IP and communities. We do the same thing with art toys.”)
Pop Land is only about 1% the size of Beijing’s Universal Studios or Shanghai’s Disneyland, but unlike those parks, it’s located right next to Beijing’s consulate district, just a few subway stops from the city’s busiest business districts. It’s built inside an existing urban green space, which meant Pop Mart wasn’t allowed to cut down or move a single tree. Instead, the company renovated an abandoned building on the property and turned it into Molly’s Castle. A leafy wooded area became Labubu Adventure Forest, though it’s far brighter and more kid-friendly than the dark, eerie forest from Lung’s original book. At one end of the forest, actors perform a “Warriors Training Camp” show wearing full-size Labubu costumes.
I stopped for lunch at the park’s restaurant, on the third floor of Molly’s Castle. The second I sit down at my table and tell the waitress I’m dining alone, she sets a 23-inch tall plush Zimomo in the chair across from me. Zimomo is the leader of the Labubu clan in Lung’s original children’s book, and one of the rarest Pop Mart products ever made. Throughout my entire lunch, other Pop Land visitors kept stopping by to ask if I’d bought the Zimomo myself, and if they can take a photo with it. I felt like I was eating lunch next to an A-list celebrity.
At the table next to me, a mother is dining with her 4-year-old daughter, who’s turning 5 in less than a month. I asked what brought them to the park. The mom told me her daughter fell in love with Labubu after watching videos of the character on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok. She’d considered buying two Zimomo dolls for her daughter’s birthday, but they cost $200 each on the resale market, so she’s still on the fence. Just the day before, she’d seen a video on social media of a friend’s daughter’s Labubu-themed birthday party, where the room was stuffed full of dozens of rare Labubu products. She pulls up the video on her phone to show me. “Her mom paid a fortune to get all of those,” she says.
Since I started my own Labubu hunt, I’ve known I could just buy one from a reseller—what Chinese fans call huangniu, literally “yellow ox,” the local slang for scalpers. I heard from Dong, a Shanghai-based Pop Mart fan who’s been collecting since 2018, that most huangniu use automated bots that monitor social media for restock alerts and grab new stock the second it goes live. Dong pays a small fee to join groups where huangniu share early drop information, and he now calls himself a fenniu—half fan, half huangniu. He’s already collected almost every Labubu product ever released, so he only buys new drops to resell to other fans for a profit. (Which, to me, sounds like he’s just a huangniu.)
Out of respect for the original hunt, it felt wrong to just throw money at the problem and call it a day. So I took another piece of advice I got: go to Thailand.
Of all Pop Mart’s overseas wins, Thailand has been the most surprising. Pop Mart initially bet its global expansion on wealthier markets like Japan and Singapore,
