At the opening of the world's biggest Pop Mart store in Bangkok last August, the queue for Labubu snaked past three shopfronts, even in 35‑degree heat. Inside, buyers raced to buy the snaggle‑toothed gremlins, which were limited to two per person. But despite the retail hype, Labubu’s secondary‑market fever is cooling.
Local platforms such as Carousell in Singapore now list standard Labubu figures from about S$15 (US$12), with only rare ‘secret’ pulls still pushing in the hundreds of dollars. In fact, Labubu premiums have narrowed by around 24% from peak on reseller platforms, where fans are now bargain hunting.
In recent years, Pop Mart has built Labubu into a full‑fledged IP franchise. Even with the slowdown in speculative reselling, the sell‑through story is the opposite: in H1 2025, APAC sales were up roughly 258% year on year.
At the same time, rivals like Miniso are racing to spin up their own Labubus. The kidult mania in the region is estimated to account for 40% of global unit sales of adult‑oriented collectables and hobby toys, according to Market Report Analytics. The question is no longer whether “ugly‑cute” IP can travel, but who wins and loses as the Labubu hype eventually plateaus.
Winners: IP platforms and soothing successors
The clearest winners of the Labubu economy are the brands treating character IP as a fully-fledged franchise and not a one‑off hit. This means Pop Mart is still likely to thrive with its new iterations of kidult toys. "Pop Mart benefited because it built distribution, data, and repeatable monetisation around IP incubation, and characters like Twinkle Twinkle that are clearly differentiated in tone or narrative have a chance to emerge as the next wave," said Jacob Cooke, CEO of WPIC Marketing + Technologies.
In APAC, Pop Mart has executed that playbook aggressively. The company now runs over 130 stores across the region outside of China. This scale matters because it gives Pop Mart the infrastructure to push new IPs like Twinkle Twinkle—a collection of plush toys styled as small stars—and Mokoko, a pink, heart‑nosed character of The Monsters. The retailer rolls these new IP out via coordinated drops, data‑driven merchandising and omnichannel release calendars that mirror fashion‑hype playbooks like sneaker culture.
Miniso is emerging as the other big APAC winner. The Guangzhou‑headquartered variety retailer, which now operates around 8,000 stores globally, has moved aggressively into the same kidult collectable space with its Wakuku line, which is made up of fuzzy doll-like characters.
At Minisoland in Beijing, the Wakuku plush sold out in two hours at launch, before rolling out as an eight‑city blind‑box global exclusive across the chain’s theme‑park‑style flagships. In Southeast Asia, Miniso’s footprint in Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines gives Wakuku a different kind of advantage: mid‑mall accessibility and photo‑opp retail experiences that build brand salience among local consumers.
In addition, Top Toy, the trendy collectable toy banner under Miniso, is rapidly becoming the company's IP lab. In Q2 2025, Top Toy’s revenue grew by nearly 90% YoY, outpacing both Miniso’s core business and the wider toy market.
Lucila Lannes, a social strategist at Bread Agency, noted the post-Labubu wave will rely on the appeal of cute as major Chinese retailers build their credibility in overseas markets. She added: "The child-like, cute charms, using soft textures and pastel colours, are strategically designed to evoke nostalgia, allowing adults worldwide to feel like children again. These new characters seem to be doubling down on this nurturing aesthetic to deepen their emotional appeal. Furthermore, brands are breathing life into these IPs through social content."
Losers: Over‑extended IPs and the fatigue curve
For every Labubu or Wakuku, dozens of lookalike IPs are sliding into irrelevance. Cooke warns that ubiquity becomes a problem once an IP stops signalling taste and starts signalling saturation. When everyone can access the same character, the early‑adopter appeal fades and collectors begin to move on.
"Typically, smaller secondary IPs under the same operator feel the pressure first, because attention concentrates even more tightly on the hero character. Competitors that copied the aesthetic without owning the original narrative tend to suffer next, as consumers become more discerning and less forgiving of imitation," he added.
Those losers are visible in APAC’s data‑rich marketplaces. On platforms like Taobao, Carousell, and Japan’s Mercari, resale premiums for lesser‑known blind‑box IPs have flattened or dipped into discount territory, even as Labubu and Twinkle Twinkle maintain some level of mark up. Overall blind-box trade volume contracted by roughly 13% in 2025, with the decline almost entirely concentrated in generic, non-IP products.
Pressure is already building on smaller blind‑box IPs that lean on short‑term hype instead of sustained storytelling, Cooke observed, with warning signs evident in falling resale premiums, slower sell‑through on new drops, and steeper discounting just to clear inventory. He explained: "On social platforms, you also see engagement flattening, fewer organic user-generated posts, and a shift from ‘must-have’ language to novelty or irony. In China’s IP economy, attention is extremely data-driven."
Angela Sy, CEO of The 25 S, frames the problem as one of shallow character building. “These new spin-offs can only build equity if they move from mindless purchase to real psychological avatars for consumers. These new characters are building on IP, and IP is only valuable if they build lore and personality and background. Over-buying and saturating with characters is already happening, but the losers are the ones who don’t build a personality.”
In APAC, that “background noise” increasingly includes smaller Chinese IPs that never earned strong export narratives and regional players in markets like Indonesia and Malaysia, whose characters are crowded out by Labubu’s sheer share of shelf. In such a crowded, fast‑growing space, IPs without a distinct emotional appeal are unlikely to survive beyond a single season.
"The inflexion point isn't about absolute volume—it's about perceived exclusivity. The minute consumers feel they can get one anytime, anywhere, the cultural premium erodes," said Jan Harling, CEO of Virtus Media.
For Harling, the losers are easy to identify: speculators and scalpers fall first, their upside entirely dependent on resale premiums that evaporate the moment the secondary market softens. Close behind them are the late adopters who came chasing social currency, not genuine affinity—and who will just as quickly move on to the next signal brand.
Harling explained that core collectors, by contrast, are more resilient, driven by emotional investment in the character. "Interestingly, Pop Mart's smaller IPs don't necessarily suffer. In many cases, they benefit from spillover traffic as collectors rotate into adjacent characters," he added.
The real long-term casualties, in his view, are the competitors that copied the mechanics—blind boxes, scarcity drops, "ugly-cute" design—without building emotional ecosystems around them. "Scarcity can manufacture excitement; it cannot manufacture attachment," he said.
Soft power and the 'Made in China' reset
Beyond sell‑through rates, the post-Labubu economy is testing whether Chinese kidadult IP can sustain a soft power narrative.
Lannes argued that the consumer shift has already happened. “Even if Labubu doesn't survive its post-hype phase, it has already marked a before-and-after for ‘Made in China’ perceptions," adding: "But it’s not just about where it’s manufactured, it’s about design, creativity. What made Labubu a genius idea was its blind-box model. It transformed a product into an experience, an ‘unboxing’ show to broadcast to an audience."
Lannes noted that watching millions of people around the world obsess over these toys on social media is exactly what made them feel cool and desirable. She added that it is not just about Labubu. Collectively, shifts in the ways East Asian pop culture are being consumed are reshaping how people perceive quality and innovation in countries like China.
For Harling, if the pipeline turns out to be a short hype cycle, the soft power stakes extend well beyond Pop Mart. "It becomes a narrative about China's cultural export ceiling," he said. In that scenario, he warns, China risks reinforcing a familiar stereotype: exceptional at manufacturing trends, but less proven at sustaining global culture over time.
"If China follows Labubu with multiple credible, exportable IPs—not just more characters, but true franchises—this becomes a permanent evolution from 'OEM manufacturer' to 'cultural value creator'. If it doesn't, Labubu will be remembered as a brilliant, isolated moment: a global spike, not a sustained wave," he added.
Sy connected Labubu to a broader decade‑long rebranding of Chinese capabilities. Sy believes that Chinese youth are no longer just an emerging force but already a powerful, imaginative and opinionated generation to be reckoned with. She argues that this shift is visible well beyond toys, as regional commentators now cite Chinese dramas, games, fashion and consumer brands alongside technology and infrastructure as key pillars of the country’s new soft‑power toolkit.
“Labubu is born of the psychological and creative shift that’s already happened in China. From the rise of EV to Tencent to DeepSeek to creatively China defining its own aesthetic of guochao (国潮), China has shrugged off the Made in China OEM for at least a decade now," she added.
Cooke observed that this shift will outlast any single character. He pointed out that the risk isn’t China slipping back into a pure 'Made in China' OEM stereotype, but that future IPs fail to innovate beyond novelty and start to feel formulaic: “Even if individual IPs fade, the structural shift is already meaningful. Labubu helped demonstrate that Chinese creativity can produce globally resonant, emotionally engaging consumer culture, not just functional products."
For marketers, Labubu‑style IPs are rapidly becoming a way to de‑risk 'Made in China' while still riding China’s cultural momentum. Cooke noted: “Global brands are using Labubu-style IPs as cultural translators rather than mascots. In luxury, lifestyle, and even QSR, these characters soften brand entry points and make collaborations feel playful rather than transactional.
"The brands seeing real lift are those integrating IPs into broader storytelling and retail experiences, not just slapping a character onto packaging. When done well, these tie-ups shift the conversation from country of origin to emotional connection, which is ultimately what global consumers respond to.”
Lannes points to concrete examples: “Luxury brands like Loewe, Burberry, or Hermès jumped on the charm trend after Labubu’s virality. Not long ago, even Bunnings released their own version. This sparked a huge positive response across social media. For these brands, it wasn’t about the product itself, but the social currency it carried. Labubu and Sonny Angel had already shaped the landscape and built massive cult-like global followings and cast a positive light on Asian-designed IPs.
These luxury brands simply had to align with that existing momentum to leverage their relevance. In APAC, that has translated into Labubu‑inspired charms dangling off luxury totes from Seoul to Singapore, co‑branded pop‑ups in Hong Kong malls, and QSR tie‑ins in markets like Japan and Thailand, where character collaborations were already culturally relevant.
Sy describes why this matters for brands looking to localise authority without alienating younger consumers. She said: “Brands that engage with Labubu as a way to soften authority and increase engagement in Asia are the real winners. Labubu offers borrowed personality, especially for brands that need that extra entry boost. It allows them to inject personality without being too local or ‘cultural’.”
Sy added, “Global partners know there is no longer a 'Made in China' facet to look at. While it may still exist in the bowels of brands like Shein, global marketers know to leverage China is to leverage what makes China intensely authentic and distinctive."
With kidults paying at least US$10 for blind boxes and more than US$500 for high‑end figures, these toys have made one thing clear: cultural power and commercial growth now flow to brands that hard‑wire quirk into the global pop lexicon. Sy is blunt: "Even when Labubu or blind box hyper burns out, globally China has demonstrated its capacity not just for engineering but for quirk, cute and weirdness. And really, what is a better true mark of cultural strength than that.”
Source: Campaign Asia-Pacific
