Kansas City Vietnamese food truck finds bigger audience with Labubu pop-ups
Dragon Wagon KC started as a Vietnamese food truck, but Labubu pop-ups turned Ling Vong’s line into the real draw and pulled collectors into Kansas City events.
Labubu sold enough to change the business. At Dragon Wagon KC, Kansas City’s first Vietnamese food truck, Ling Vong found that the dolls she began carrying in 2024 were drawing more attention than the banh mi, pho and coffee that built the truck in the first place.
Vong and her partner Jamie started selling Labubu as part of Dragon Wagon in early 2025, then turned the side hustle into KC Monsters. The shift reflected how fast the character, created by Hong Kong artist Kasing Lung and first introduced in his 2015 The Monsters picture-book series, had moved from art toy to collector obsession. Pop Mart’s blind-box packaging helped fuel that leap, and by the time Labubu hit local pop-ups, the dolls had become the item people arrived early for.
That demand changed what the truck looked like in practice. Vong said the toys began to eclipse the food-truck menu, pushing her to pivot again. Instead of treating Labubu as a novelty add-on, she folded it into the truck’s identity and used it to pull shoppers toward the rest of the operation. The strategy was simple: get people in for Labubu, then introduce them to Vietnamese food, coffee and other small businesses around the booth.
The payoff came at community events, where Dragon Wagon became a stop for both collectors and families. Vong brought Labubu to multiple Asian community gatherings in May, including Taste of AAPI in West Bottoms and the AANHPI festival at Zhou B Art Center. A Dragon Wagon Labubu pop-up also ran outside Made Mobb in Crossroads on May 18, showing that the dolls were not confined to malls, online drops or specialty toy stores. They were showing up wherever the local crowd already gathered.
That matters for collectors because it points to where the hobby is actually spreading offline. In Kansas City, Labubu is now part of food-truck culture, festival culture and neighborhood retail at the same time. For Vong, the dolls are not a detour from the business. They are the reason a Vietnamese food truck can stop a crowd, turn a quick purchase into a longer stay and make a pop-up feel like the center of the scene.
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