Labubu becomes a symbol of China’s growing global cool

Stefan Hoops did not just name-check Labubu. The DWS chief said his family already knew Shein well, and that his daughters were also avid Labubu fans. On a recent business trip to China, he even looked for Crybaby collectibles to bring back to Germany so they could impress their friends. That kind of family-to-friend-circle demand is exactly how Labubu escaped the toy aisle and became a shorthand for Chinese cool.

Labubu started in 2015, when Hong Kong illustrator Kasing Lung created the character as part of The Monsters series. Pop Mart says the world around it was inspired by Nordic mythology, and the company turned Labubu into one of its flagship IPs through blind-box drops and plush-format releases. That mix mattered. The character was easy to recognize, easy to collect, and easy to show off, which helped it travel far beyond the core designer-toy crowd.

The numbers show how big that move became. Pop Mart’s 2024 annual results put revenue at RMB 13.037749 billion, up 106.9% year on year. In the same report, revenue from THE MONSTERS, MOLLY, SKULLPANDA and CRYBABY each passed RMB 1 billion for the first time. Labubu was not an isolated craze. It sat inside a larger IP machine that has turned character branding into a serious business.

The collector upside also pushed Labubu into another tier. On June 10, 2025, a human-sized Labubu figurine sold at a Beijing auction for 1.08 million yuan, or $150,275.51, setting a new record for a blind-box toy. Celebrity fans including Rihanna, Lisa of BlackPink and David Beckham helped amplify the frenzy, while Pop Mart said strong global demand was driving a threefold rise in first-half revenue and an even bigger jump in profit. The toy’s appeal was no longer just cute or novel. It had become status, display and social currency.

That attention also brought copycats. Chinese customs seized more than 40,000 suspected fake Labubu products in June 2025, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection later intercepted more than 11,000 counterfeit Labubu dolls at Seattle’s airport in September 2025. Pop Mart now describes THE MONSTERS as a global designer-toy line, and the broader message is hard to miss: Labubu has become one of the clearest symbols of how Chinese brands are being read abroad, not as factories first, but as makers of taste, fandom and cultural value.