The Global Labubu Craze: How a Misunderstood Rabbit-Eared Monster Conquered Pop Culture (And Me)

Two young women huddle on their haunches beside a low wooden display packed to the brim with Labubus. They toss back and forth the same question already looping through my own head: Which of these plush collectibles will Pop Mart grant me the luck to take home today? Will I land the 16-inch Labubu in denim overalls and a fisherman’s hat, or the keychain version with bright shaggy fur and that iconic unsettling wide-eyed stare? Can I even hope to get both?

The salesclerk at this location—Pop Mart’s very first brick-and-mortar, here in Beijing—brings us back down to earth quickly. “None of these are in stock,” she says bluntly. “You can join our fan WeChat group to get alerts when we restock.”

Of course. Labubu is far more than just that uncanny, endearing mix of stuffed rabbit, demon, elf, and bear. Labubu scored a front-row seat at Milan Fashion Week. Tourists queued for blocks outside the Louvre just to grab one from a Pop Mart pop-up. Lady Gaga dressed as the character for a concert set. Madonna served a Labubu-themed cake at her birthday party. When a Labubu drop sold out in London once, customers got into a physical brawl over the remaining stock. In Thailand, where Labubu serves as the government’s official tourism ambassador, partygoers now buy Labubu-shaped ecstasy pills. Even bootleg knockoffs, nicknamed “Lafufus,” have their own dedicated fanbase. You can’t just walk into a store and walk out with this kind of social currency—you have to earn it.

Around the world, Pop Mart guides new fans to start by following the company’s social media for drop announcements and restock alerts. Here in China, I had an extra step: scan a QR code to join a dedicated WeChat fan group. Mine was labeled “Pop Mart Beijing First Store Group No. 35.”

I do a quick, deflating calculation. The group is capped at 200 members. If 34 full groups came before this one, that means at least 7,000 diehard fans are waiting for a Labubu just at this single store—one of more than 400 Pop Mart locations across China. When the restock alert does hit, we’ll all have to tap that purchase button faster than a hummingbird beats its wings to score.

One morning at 10:57, the alert lands in the chat: a pink plush Labubu keychain, priced at 100 RMB (roughly $14), 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 they managed to get the keychain. Almost immediately, other members start asking if she’ll resell it, and an impromptu bidding war breaks out. “I’m not selling,” the lucky winner writes, but the offers keep coming anyway. In less than a minute, the bid hits 900 RMB ($126). When she doesn’t respond further, the group goes back to venting about how nearly impossible it is to score a Labubu directly from Pop Mart at retail price.

Many long-time Pop Mart fans in China have been caught off guard by how quickly the entire world has 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 both consumers and investors were obsessing over a plush doll. She ended up changing her mind. “At this point, it doesn’t matter what I think, objectively or subjectively, about whether it’s good,” Zhang explains. “There’s a global social consensus now: this is popular, this is a hit.”

In the first half of 2025, the Labubu craze pushed Pop Mart’s global revenue up by more than 200%. The company is now valued at $46 billion—ranking just below Disney and Nintendo among global entertainment and toy brands, and surpassing the combined value of the makers of Transformers, Barbie, and Hello Kitty. Outside of China’s huge tech and electronics giants, few Chinese consumer brands have ever reached this level of global success.

Where Western shoppers on Shein, Temu, or even Amazon have long associated “Made in China” with mass-produced cheap imitations, the label means something entirely new on a Pop Mart product: it signals a homegrown cultural phenomenon that’s gained global adoration, in part because (or perhaps in spite of) how hard it is to get. Aligning with the Chinese government’s major global tourism push and shifting global attitudes toward China, Labubu has become the de facto face of the country’s growing soft power—even as Pop Mart has worked to distance itself from geopolitics.

This summer, I set out on a global reporting trip to peel back Labubu’s grinning, fuzzy exterior and unpack what’s really driving this global craze. I visited Pop Mart stores in four countries, interviewed a company executive, ate at a Labubu-themed café, watched full-size human Labubu actors battle in front of a live audience, and talked to long-time fans about their journeys into (and out of) the fandom. I saw thousands 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 Labubus for my collection—and coming much closer to understanding how millions of people, seemingly out of nowhere, fell in love with this mischievous, rabbit-eared monster.

How Pop Mart Built a Global Toy Empire

Pop Mart’s 38-year-old founder Wang Ning grew up steeped in entrepreneurial spirit. His parents were small-town shopkeepers who sold everything from cassette tapes to fishing rods. By the time Wang graduated college, he’d already run a documentary studio, managed a budget hotel, and bought bulk holiday-themed glow-in-the-dark hair accessories to resell at Christmas. Within hours of collecting 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 lighting, hung the shelves, and arranged the displays entirely 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 places of worship—if a bit more Instagram-friendly than your average church. That’s exactly what the original store had become when I visited this year, where I knelt figuratively at the altar of Labubu. In the very beginning, though, that first location sold a random mix of trendy gadgets, clothing, and toys—whatever young Chinese shoppers at the time considered cool (that’s how the brand got its name). In fact, before I started reporting this story, I didn’t realize I’d probably visited the store in its early years. I went to college nearby, and that mall was my go-to weekend hangout. I must have walked past it hundreds of times, and popped in occasionally too. I just never found it memorable. Even so, chasing trends was profitable enough that Pop Mart expanded to two dozen stores in its first five years.

In 2015, Wang convinced an MBA classmate, Si De, to join his startup (Si would later go on to become Pop Mart’s chief operating officer). That year, they noticed something surprising: nearly a third of revenue at some stores came from just one product—Sonny Angels, Japanese collectible figurines of naked angels wearing different themed headgear. Even today, these 3-inch mini-figures are sold in blind boxes: identical packaging hides different characters, and buyers don’t know which one they got until they open the box. Wang and Si wanted Pop Mart to become Sonny Angels’ exclusive distributor in China. The Japanese company turned them down, and the two sides went their separate ways.

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, or intellectual property (IP) as it’s known in the industry. They connected with Kenny Wong, a rising Hong Kong-based toy designer best known for creating Molly, a little girl character with a blond bob and pursed lips. In 2016, they signed a deal for Pop Mart to mass-produce Molly figurines. “Our first contract with Kenny was handwritten by the two of us,” Si recalled in an exclusive interview. He and Wong still laugh about how unprofessional that first scrappy agreement was.

Pop Mart took the blind box concept and supercharged it, building unique rituals to amp up the excitement for shoppers: When picking out a box in store, buyers can lift it to check the weight and shake it to listen for the toy inside—but they can’t press the box to feel for edges, pry open gaps to peek inside, or weigh it on a scale. Devoted blind box collectors have their own slang: unwanted, unpopular pulls are called leikuan (literally “heinous item”), highly sought-after pieces are rekuan (“hot item”), and the rarest of all, yincangkuan (“hidden item”), only appears once every 72 to 720 boxes, depending on the product.

Pop Mart’s bet on Molly and the blind box model paid off, and the company quickly signed on more and more designers. In early interviews, Wang often compared Pop Mart’s strategy to that of a record label—always scouting for the next massive new talent.

Labubu first started out as a background character in a children’s book. Called The Story of Puca, the book is set in a dark, mythical forest. The story centers on Puca, a fairy, and the forest’s other residents—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 had already claimed the name.

Lung had been doodling Labubu-like creatures for most of his life. Born in Hong Kong in 1972, he moved to the Netherlands when he was 6, after his parents opened a Chinese restaurant there. He couldn’t speak Dutch, so a teacher gave him picture books with 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 to The Story of Puca. “They tend to carry a slightly eerie, 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 to jump from 2D illustration to 3D figurine. Lung partnered with Howard Lee, founder of Hong Kong toy studio How2Work, to make commemorative Labubu figurines for the book’s launch. “We ran out of time to spray-paint the first batch, that’s why the very first Labubu was all black,” Lee recalls. The pair brought 100 copies of The Story of Puca and 60 hand-painted Labubu figurines to a toy convention in Taipei in 2015. Every last one sold out.

The franchise of characters that includes Labubu, Puca, and the other forest creatures—dubbed The Monsters by Lung—supercharged Lung’s design career. In written responses to questions (the reclusive Lung sent them via Lee), he recalls meeting Pop Mart’s Wang at the same Taipei 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 was already operating dozens of stores across China, it was gearing up to expand overseas. In 2019, Lung and Pop Mart signed an exclusive contract to produce a range of merchandise based on the Monsters IP.

With Pop Mart’s backing, Labubu grew from a small-batch collectible for hobbyists into a massive line of mass-produced toys, stationery, and accessories. Avid fans also note that Labubu himself has changed over time. In the beginning, most Labubu toys had square heads and read as more menacing than cute. Today’s round-headed Labubus are plump, fuzzy, and far more approachable.

The biggest game-changer came in 2023, when Pop Mart launched a groundbreaking product: plush Labubu keychains with vinyl faces and limbs. That might not sound revolutionary now, but before that, nearly all Pop Mart’s products were either soft plushies with flat, 2D printed facial features, or hard vinyl figurines made to sit on shelves. The hybrid plush-and-vinyl Labubu keychains quickly caught on with a far wider audience. One by one, A-list tastemakers—Blackpink’s Lisa, Rihanna, Kim Kardashian, Marc Jacobs—were spotted carrying Labubu keychains as accessories. “We were excited about the design, but we truly never expected it to blow up as much as it has,” Si says. Lung calls the craze “both very happy and very surprising.”

By 2024, the Monsters franchise was generating roughly $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 merchandise—more than Barbie or Hot Wheels sold in that same period. Collectors have also made small fortunes off rare pieces. In Beijing, a rare full-size mint-green Labubu statue made by How2Work in the brand’s early years recently sold at auction for $150,000.

“It’s really too popular,” Si says. “Everyone assumed we were doing intentional scarcity marketing because most customers couldn’t get one.” In reality, the company has drastically scaled up its plush production capacity. In 2024, it could make 3 million plush toys a month. Now it produces more than 30 million a month, and is targeting 50 million a month by the end of this year. In mid-June, the company started offering pre-orders for Labubu plushies with delivery a month out to cool down overheated demand while production catches up. Resale prices have dropped sharply as a result.

Even so, scoring a Labubu keychain at retail today still requires connections to a distributor, living in a country with ample supply, or just extraordinary luck. Anna, a business analyst in Hong Kong, told me she never cared much for toy collectibles, but felt socially obligated to learn about Labubu and Pop Mart once she started seeing it everywhere in her social circle. This summer, she offered a group of her friends in the US six new Labubus she’d picked up in Hong Kong, where the character is far easier to find. Her friends snapped them up immediately. “It feels really good to see a Chinese IP gain this much acceptance overseas,” she told me, pointing to Labubu’s virality as an example of Asian culture’s growing global influence. Plus, she adds: “I have access to them that my friends in the US don’t. It becomes a marker of your social status.”

My Labubu Hunt Across Two Continents

The day after I struck out on scoring a Labubu at Pop Mart’s original Beijing store, I decided to cheer myself up with a trip to Pop Land, the company’s 10-acre theme park in central Beijing—and one of the clearest signs that Pop Mart is gunning to compete with Disney. (“Our art toys are like Disney’s movies,” Wang says in A Company One of a Kind. “They use movies to reach consumers, build fanbases, and grow their IP and communities. We do the same thing through art toys.”)

Pop Land is only about 1% the size of Beijing’s Universal Studios or Shanghai’s Disneyland, but unlike those huge resorts, it sits right next to Beijing’s consulate district, just a few subway stops from the capital’s busiest business districts. It’s built within an existing urban green space, which meant Pop Mart wasn’t allowed to cut down even a single tree. Instead, the company renovated an abandoned building on the property and named it Molly’s Castle. A leafy open area became Labubu Adventure Forest, far brighter and more kid-friendly than the dark mythic forest of Lung’s original story. At one end of the forest, actors in full-size Labubu costumes perform a “Warriors Training Camp” show for crowds.

I stopped for lunch at the park’s restaurant, on the third floor of Molly’s Castle. The second I sat down and told the waitress I was dining alone, she placed a 23-inch plush Labubu in the chair across from me. My dining companion was Zimomo, the leader of the Labubu clan in Lung’s original children’s book and one of the rarest Pop Mart products on the market. Throughout my lunch, other Pop Land guests kept coming over to ask if I’d bought the Zimomo myself, and if they could take a photo with it. I felt like I was eating lunch with a celebrity.

At the table next to me sat a mother with her young daughter. I asked what brought them to the park. The mom told me her daughter, who turns 4 in less than a month, first found and fell in love with Labubu through short videos on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok. She’d considered buying two Zimomo dolls for her daughter, but they cost $200 each on the resale market, so she’s still on the fence. Just the day before, she’d seen social media posts of a friend’s daughter’s Labubu-themed birthday party, where the room was filled with dozens of rare Labubu pieces. She pulled up videos of the party on her phone to show me. “Her mom paid a fortune to get all those,” she says.

Ever since I started my own Labubu hunt, I’d known resellers—known in Chinese slang as huangniu, or “yellow oxen”—were always an option. I heard from Dong, a Shanghai-based Pop Mart collector since 2018, that most huangniu he knows use automated bots that monitor social media for restock alerts and snap up new stock the second it goes live. Dong pays a small fee to join groups where huangniu share early drop information, and now calls himself a fenniu—half fan, half huangniu. He’s already collected nearly 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.)

With all due respect to Dong, buying directly from a reseller felt like cheating, like I hadn’t actually earned my Labubu. So I followed the other common piece of fan advice: Go to Thailand.

Of all Pop Mart’s global wins