Pop Mart, 52Toys and PonyStar capture global fancy with original designs

Big black eyes, a pair of rabbit ears, four tiny paws and a big mouth with sawtooth-shaped teeth. Meet Labubu, the creation of Beijing-based collectible toy company Pop Mart. It's become one of the most popular toys in the world and probably the hottest in Southeast Asia.

Last year, the sixth Labubu theme store opened in Thailand, and sales on the first day hit 10 million yuan (US$1.4 million). In Vietnam, according to Vietnamese e-commerce analyst Metric, sales of Labubu toys in the second quarter of 2024 rose sixfold from the first three months of the year to 52 billion Vietnamese dong (US$2.07 million).

Pop Mart is not the only Chinese designer toys finding success overseas. A year after opening its first shop in Thailand, Beijing-based 52Toys now has 10 stores in Bangkok, covering all the commercial hubs in the Thai capital.

Meanwhile Guangdong-based toymaker PonyStar reported revenue of 100 million yuan just a year after its founding, with 70 percent of its income derived overseas. Nearly 1 million of its plush doll brand OUOZZZ were sold on Amazon and its own website in the first year after release, ranking top in Europe and North America.

"Chinese designer toy companies began to explore overseas market in 2018, and now they have made significant inroads," Li Yongjian, an economic and financial researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said in his recent "Report on the Development of the Designer Toy Industry in China."

Li cited distribution networks, offline stores and cross-border e-commerce for the trend's "substantial growth" in overseas revenue in recent years.

Of course, China has long been known as toymaker to the world. In the first seven months of last year, China produced 79 percent of all toys sold in the United States and Europe. But in the past, most toys that appeared on overseas shelves were contract manufactures for offshore brands. Nowadays, Chinese companies not only sell toys, they design them.

Labubu is a prime example.

Based on Nordic mythology and European fairy tales, the Labubu character was originally created by Hong Kong artist Kaising Lung, first appearing in his children's book "The Monsters" in 2015. Today, the image of Labubu is better known than the book itself because of Pop Mart's adaptation.

The Labubu series has grown to at least 33 product lines, with different outfits for different countries. A doll may be the image of a Thai princess, or it may wear the uniform of the Argentine national soccer team. Sometimes it mirrors wood elves or musicians.

"We discover and develop designers from all over the world," said Chen Xiaoyun, vice president of Pop Mart, in an interview with Chengdu Economic Daily. "We hope that our toys and the culture they convey will be embraced by different regions across the world."

Labubu seems to have an exemplary job of market research.

Last year, a small Labubu plushie was found on the purse of Thai princess Sirivannavari. South Korean singer Lisa, also a fan of Labubu, posted pictures of her posing with Labubu on social media and also issued a video on how distinguish Labubu and another character, Zimomo.

A vendor on the Chinese second-hand app Goofish said she didn't realize how trendy Labubu had become until she got a midnight message from a Thai in Shanghai asking about the plushie she was selling on the platform.

"She didn't speak Chinese and I speak only a little English, so we communicated through online translation," said the vendor who goes by the screen name "Sugared Peach Soda." "I wasn't aware of foreigners using Goofish before, to be honest."

Labubu also saved the stock market performance of Pop Mart.

China's first listed company in the fashion toy industry, Pop Mart went public on the Hong Kong stock exchange in December 2020. Its market value peaked at HK$150 billion (US$19.26 billion). Although it plummeted to HK$13 billion in 2022, Pop Mart's share price has soared over 340 percent in the past year, raising its market value close to HK$120 billion.

Meanwhile, 52Toys developed different intellectual properties for different countries to cater to local customs.

Its action-figures brand Beastbox has won market shares in Japan and North America through a unique design that can perfectly contain the figures in a cube box by moving the joints.

"We have different strategies for consumers in different regions," said Chen Wei, founder and chief executive of 52Toys. "For instance, Japan has a very mature action-figures toy market, and the cube box design gives them a brand new experience."

Beastbox also functions in collaboration with established intellectual properties. It has released action figures themed on the American movie series "Aliens" and "Transformers," and on the Japanese animation series "Neon Genesis Evangelion."

The success of Beastbox was evident in an X post by world-renowned Japanese video game designer Hideo Kojima. He posted four pictures of a Beastbox figure based on a robot in the Chinese sci-fi movie "The Wandering Earth 2."

Although Chinese designer toy companies have definitely made their mark in overseas markets, they still face challenges.

Researcher Li believes that overcoming cultural differences is still a lesson that every toy company needs to master, and it might be a hard lesson.

The differences include consumption patterns as well as buyer psychology. For example, Pop Mart found that consumers from Japan and South Korea enjoy the process of opening a "mystery box," not really caring if they get what they want in the box, while people in North America might be dissatisfied with what they find inside.

Similarly, consumers in Southeast Asian love to buy designer toys from independent stores in commercial hubs, while those in North America tend to buy them in hypermarkets such as Walmart and Costco, according to 52Toys.

"There are actually few references or experiences for Chinese designer toymakers to draw upon when it comes to overseas markets, so that companies need to make trial runs, step by step," said Li. "In addition, it would be nice to see more Chinese stories integrated into these designer toys in the future."