Pop Mart Robo Shop brings Labubu craze to Merry Hill shopping centre

The Black Country is getting its first Labubu hunt on home turf. The Entertainer will open a Pop Mart Robo Shop inside its Merry Hill Shopping Centre store in Brierley Hill on Friday, May 22, in Unit U78D on the upper mall, giving local collectors a closer shot at blind-box drops without heading across the region.

The machine will stock Labubu alongside other Pop Mart names collectors already know well, including Molly, Hirono and SKULLPANDA. That matters because the Robo Shop format runs on speed and scarcity: limited-run boxes tend to move fast, and once a popular series lands, shelves can clear almost immediately. Labubu sits inside Pop Mart’s The Monsters universe, created by artist Kasing Lung and inspired by Nordic mythology, with Pop Mart describing the character as mischievous but kind-hearted.

For Merry Hill regulars, the practical shift is simple. Instead of relying entirely on online drops, timed booking slots or resale listings, there will be a physical point of access in the Black Country itself. That could ease the pressure of chasing Labubu through Birmingham’s Bullring or Selfridges London, where demand has already shown how quickly stock can disappear. Bullring says Pop Mart Birmingham was the brand’s first store outside London, while Selfridges has used timed booking slots for some Labubu launches.

The Merry Hill opening also lands against a backdrop of tighter crowd management around THE MONSTERS. In 2025, Pop Mart temporarily paused in-store and Robo Shop sales of THE MONSTERS plush toys in the UK because of safety concerns linked to queueing and staff pressure. That history explains why a new local Robo Shop is likely to draw both excitement and an early rush.

The Merry Hill launch is part of a wider UK rollout from The Entertainer, which says it is now the country’s biggest retailer stocking Pop Mart. Eleven other stores are set to receive Robo Shops too, including Lakeside, Brighton, Newcastle Metro, Glasgow St Enoch, Sheffield Meadowhall, Bristol Cribbs, Manchester Arndale, Belfast, Cambridge, Leeds and Cardiff, with Bluewater already operating one. Trade coverage says Bluewater was the pilot, with the broader rollout taking place over about six weeks.

Pop Mart’s own scale shows why the move lands with such force. The company says it operates more than 350 offline stores and 2,000-plus Robo Shops globally, and its 2025 results materials say THE MONSTERS, including Labubu, remained a major growth driver. For Black Country collectors, that turns Merry Hill into more than a new vending machine. It is the region’s first real offline shortcut into a craze that has mostly rewarded speed, patience and luck.