Labubu’s viral boom cools as collectors move on, Pop Mart feels strain

Labubu’s fastest rise is now the part that could hurt it. Kinly McCaffrey, a Texas content creator who says she has collected about 30 Labubus across plush dolls and vinyl figures, has built millions of views off blind-box videos and a popular clip comparing her Labubu with a knockoff she calls Lafufu. Even McCaffrey says interest in the toy, and in Pop Mart overall, has leveled out, and she has started shifting her attention toward other characters and intellectual property.

That is exactly the kind of drift Pop Mart has to worry about. The company’s 2025 annual report showed The Monsters line brought in about 14.16 billion yuan, up 365.7% from a year earlier, and became Pop Mart’s first IP franchise to top 10 billion yuan in annual revenue. Labubu, created in 2015 by Hong Kong artist Kasing Lung as part of The Monsters universe inspired by Nordic mythology, turned into the company’s defining growth engine. It also turned into a concentration risk.

Investors have noticed. Pop Mart’s stock was roughly 50% below its August high by late March and early April 2026, and Bloomberg said the selloff had wiped out about $33 billion in market value. The message from the market was blunt: strong revenue and profit are not enough if too much of the story still depends on one monster and one wave of demand. Once collectors feel they have seen enough Labubu drops, the brand’s mystique gets harder to protect.

The knockoff market says the same thing in a less flattering way. In September 2025, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said officers at Seattle’s Sea-Tac Airport seized more than 11,000 counterfeit Labubu dolls valued at about $513,000. Guangdong customs officials said they had investigated 32,000 patent-infringing goods since 2025. When a collectible becomes valuable enough to copy at that scale, the fad has already spilled far beyond the core fan base.

Pop Mart is still pushing outward. Chinese state media reported plans to grow its U.S. store network from 72 locations to more than 100 in 2026, a move that could help broaden sales beyond the frenzy around any single drop. But McCaffrey’s quieter shift matters just as much as the sales figures. When collectors start moving on to the next character, the brand is left with a harder job: proving that Labubu is more than the moment that made Pop Mart famous.