Miniso CO

Miniso COO Robin Liu publicly broke down the design formula driving Labubu's dominance: characters engineered with pouts, teeth, and tears that create instant visual recognition and trigger emotional connection the moment a collector sees them. Liu's analysis arrived as Pop Mart's financial results made the formula's effectiveness impossible to ignore.

Pop Mart's revenue doubled in 2024, with Labubu sales as the primary engine. CEO Wang Ning projected the company would double that figure again in 2025, reaching approximately $4.2 billion. Wang described hitting that target as "quite easy" for the company to achieve.

Central to that growth is Pop Mart's blind box model, where the specific figure inside each package remains unknown until after purchase. That uncertainty drives collectors to buy multiple boxes in pursuit of preferred characters, generating compulsive repeat purchases that fuel both sales and social media visibility. Waves of unboxing reaction videos spread across platforms as fans documented their pulls, amplifying Labubu's reach far beyond traditional toy marketing channels.

The cultural footprint matched the financial one. Footage of fans camping outside Pop Mart stores went viral, cementing Labubu as a global pop culture phenomenon rather than a niche collectible.

Miniso, which competes with Pop Mart in the affordable lifestyle and collectible toy retail segment, has been studying this playbook closely. Liu's public articulation of the formula, specifically the telegraphic physical features that photograph well and lodge instantly in memory, signals that Miniso is working to engineer its own breakout figure and compete for share in a designer toy market that has proven it can generate billions annually.

The traits Liu named are deliberately telegraphic: a pout reads in a thumbnail, teeth register at a glance, a tear communicates without text or context. For the Labubu community, that breakdown from a direct competitor is its own kind of confirmation that what collectors already knew intuitively is now being studied and reverse-engineered at the executive level.