Labubu Retro Barber Shop series cools as prices slip below retail

Pop Mart’s Labubu Retro Barber Shop blind-box series landed online on June 25 with a much quieter afterlife than the character’s biggest drops. Several standard figures were already trading below the official 159 yuan retail price, and the hidden figure premium collapsed from nearly 25 times retail to about 5 times, a sharp reset for a character that has lately been treated like a guaranteed flip.

That reversal matters because Labubu releases have often been defined by instant sellouts, queue panic and resale markups that left collectors scrambling across platforms. Retro Barber Shop did not disappear, but it did not ignite the same speculative heat. For buyers, that changes the calculus: a drop no longer has to be chased at any price just to avoid missing an overnight premium.

The shift also fits Pop Mart’s own recent messaging. The company has said the resale-driven model can break if purchases are made only for profit, with management warning that, “If purchases are solely for making a profit, this model will eventually crash.” Reuters also reported that Pop Mart increased supply of plush toys, including Labubu, by 10 times and is producing around 30 million units a month, a scale-up that makes it harder for every release to behave like a scarce trophy.

Labubu itself came out of Hong Kong illustrator Kasing Lung’s The Monsters series before Pop Mart formally licensed it into its blind-box line in 2019. The character’s leap from collector niche to global craze in 2024, helped by celebrity exposure from Rihanna, David Beckham, Kim Kardashian, Dua Lipa and BLACKPINK’s Lisa, turned every new series into a cultural event as much as a product launch. Pop Mart’s financial results show why that frenzy mattered: revenue reached RMB 13.037749 billion in 2024, up 106.9% year on year, then rose again to RMB 37.12 billion in 2025, alongside adjusted net profit of RMB 13.08 billion.

That is why Retro Barber Shop reads like more than one soft series. It sits at the point where Labubu remains a powerful IP, but the market is acting less like a guaranteed gold rush and more like a collector scene that now knows how to wait. Pop Mart’s 2026 “pit stop” framing, aimed at healthier long-term growth, suddenly looks less theoretical and more like the reality collectors are already seeing at retail and on the secondary market.