Labubu and Collector Trends

[faultychips]

There's never really not something taking hobbyist collectors by storm these days, and it's certainly not a new phenomenon; we all remember the Beanie Babies craze. But right now the current thing (though honestly it's probably already losing steam) is the Labubu.

"Labubu" actually refers to a lot of different toys and artwork, being the name of a fictional species of little rabbit-eared monsters designed by Hong Kong storybook illustrator Kasing Lung. Of course, the actual Labubu craze pretty much always refers to a specific toy version by Pop Mart, which is pictured above as being fuzzy little plush figurines with plastic faces, feet, hands and ears. These toys are all very similar because, you guessed it, they're figurines from blind boxes!! Yay!!!!!! Blind boxes!!! Yay!!!!!!!!!!!

Lung first partnered with Pop Mart in 2019 and seems to have been making Lababu toys for the past 5 or so years with much success, but it seems like now in 2025 the line has hit a sweet spot of #Trending to an extent that news outlets like NPR are covering the spike in popularity. Another point of comparison, the subreddit r/labubu has 140K members and is in the top 2% largest reddit communities. It's very interesting how reddit has recently if not always become a space where people come together on trends; the Gamestop stock frenzy being a famous example, but on the less financially exciting side, there's a lot of subreddits dedicated to a kind of toy or plush where people, naturally as fans of the items, will hype each other up about their purchases and talk excitedly about what they're hoping to snag in the future.

The NPR article ends on this note:

The concept of blind boxes isn't new. It taps into a long-standing fascination with mystery and chance, according to Michelle Parnett-Dwyer, a curator at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, N.Y.
Think back to cereal box prizes, capsule toys from vending machines, or Japan's lucky bags, which are sealed bags filled with random items as a way for retailers to get rid of leftover stock, Parnett-Dwyer said. Even trading cards, such as Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh, offer a similar thrill.
" I think there's a lot of things where the popularity among adults or young adults stems from childhood nostalgia," Parnett-Dwyer said.
She added that reconnecting with your inner child is ultimately a positive thing.
" I think play is crucial for everybody at all ages. It helps us to engage with each other. It helps us in a way — it's a cliché — but it helps us to stay young," she said.

...which is kind of dismal if you really think about it, right? Gambling is so normalized in children's entertainment and toys that buying blind boxes can be called "connecting with your inner child" with a straight face. But it's not just puffy journalism to bowtie the article; many labubu fans (and toy fans in general) are in agreement that their purchases are in the name of childhood and self-care. Here's quote made just today by a top 1% commenter on r/labubu:

Healing our inner child one plushie at a time 

(This is a not completely invalid angle; people making up for lost time during childhood is nothing to sneeze at, and it's not like collectors are nuts for spending money on something that makes them happy. But what happens if the fad dies off and it turns out you didn't care that much about them when there wasn't someone on reddit to talk to about it? Is that still worth it? I'll get back to that in a second.)

Interestingly, if the reddit post I drew this comment from is a reliable sample size, a lot of current Labubu collectors are in the 27-45 year old age range, with many being around the middle at 35. Amusingly a lot of comments remark that the age demographic trends older because younger adults or teens would be too worried about seeming childish by purchasing these, but I actually think that these dolls (at least in appearance) are targeting younger adult audiences who...like cute things. I don't think there's actually that much of a stigma around purchasing these? Maybe they're right, but maybe they're also not acknowledging the fact that younger people might be slightly more concerned with saving for various costs of living over dolls. But still, reddit's userbase is certainly not the whole picture, so we can only speculate.

Now might be a good place to mention the cost of these things; one blind box of a random 6" Labubu figure is $27.99 USD (not including tax and shipping, of course). That's if you can order them though; at time of writing nearly every single Labubu product on Pop Mart's website is sold out, and the ones that aren't must be purchased specifically through Pop Mart's weird app, or through some sort of strange lottery on their site...? Just watch this youtube short and tell me if you can tell what the hell is happening and why this poor girl spent an hour swiping on a blind box page. There are multiple people in the comments on this one saying they spent hours trying to will an available Labubu into existence just so they could throw their money at it, to no avail. So what do you do if you can't get a Labubu? You buy one from a reseller! ....Who are, from some reddit anecdotes and some eBay/Mercari doublechecking, reselling blind boxes at an extra markup of $10 to $50, and selling the actual specific variants for at minimum $100 apiece. Or you could just snag one of the $15 ones, assuming of course that they or even the extremely pricey ones aren't a dreaded Lafufu, the name given to unofficial Labubu knockoffs. Funnily enough, if you aren't dedicated to having a "real" one, even fans agree that the knockoff ones can be pretty nice quality, and some bemoan that true Labubus often have arms too small for the little outfits that fans often like to customize their dolls with.

Now, I'm not going to sit here and act like I don't understand why these are popular. It is, as a matter of fact, fun to gamble. Just looking at the listings for the Labubu dolls I could feel the specter of the hunt claw at my brain. There's a secret toy you can get from this set and its only a 1/72 chance...? That doesn't sound too rare, actually... And I mean, they are kinda cute.........
But the real problem with blind boxes like these is that they often only have substance in the thrill before the reveal. Once you have what's inside and know what it is, that's gone. And you got something...well... I mean you don't hate it, but it probably wasn't what you wanted the most out of that set, right? Good reason to buy a few more, right? Hahahahahahahahahha. Mhm. I know at least from experience that when a blind box figurine is out of the box, it goes on the bedside table and then it falls off the bedside table and then it becomes beautiful fodder for the floor mites under my bed. 
If the reward at the end of this gamble is more stuff you don't have room for and 30 less dollars in your pocket, is that really worth the momentary surprise? I dunno...not for me. But maybe in a couple decades they'll be selling bins of these stuff in the antique toy store for like 5 dollars apiece and I'll pick out one I really like and get it then. I can wait....I can wait. In the meantime, it's always nice to remember that when you can't get what you want, sometimes you can just make it yourself, even when it comes to Labubu.

Though one fad that definitely won't go away anytime soon is card collecting--did you SEE how much those Pokemon Prismatic Evolution cards were reselling for?!? Even the base price? $62 for a 9 card pack set! Those ain't for kid collectors I can tell ya that much...whew!

[brilokuloj]

Now might be a good place to mention the cost of these things; one blind box of a random 6" Labubu figure is $27.99 (not including tax and shipping, of course).

I feel like I'm dying.

---

I've been reading the Lego subreddits again today. One of my favorite toy stories is how in 2023 they released an expensive set with an "exclusive" minifig of some Star Wars guy (sorry), and then scalpers fighting each other managed to take this one piece of plastic's value up to $350, so they re-released it as a $13 set and Lego fans started killing each other.

This is the piece of plastic: Clone Trooper Captain Rex, 501st Legion (Phase 2) - Blue Cloth Pauldron, Rangefinder, Printed White Arms : Minifigure sw1315 | BrickLink

[finsterhund]

Labubu have fascinated me as someone who has a recurring brief special interest in beanie babies. The design of them almost appeals directly to me, but is just idk, "conventional" enough to quell my desire to really seek them out. (If they were reptile or amphibian based monsters instead of rabbit based I imagine that would increase my interest tenfold) but with them costing almost 40 dollars (and that's directly from popmart) in my country, there's no way in hell I'd be getting one.

And the fact that they're blindboxes.
I loath I detest, I [AM hate monologue] despise blindboxes so much that it kills any goodwill I have for the market tbh. Ever since I was little blindboxes made me want to enact grandiose feats of wanton violence.
I think because I was a special brand of AuDHD hyperfocus that I actively WOULD NOT BOND with something if it wasn't one of my select species or if the design didn't particularly appeal to me. For example: if it wasn't a dog or a penguin (or dinosaurs under specific circumstances, etc) it was dead to me as a toddler. This has of course extended into my current toy collecting where, since getting back into LPS pretty much exclusively because they have axolotls now, I will not buy any species except axolotls, some dogs, and some penguins.
The majority of LPS axolotls, naturally, are sold in the damn blindboxes. But unlike labubu, you can technically figure out what code on the outside of the box corresponds to which animal you will get. I EXCLUSIVELY obtain blindboxes this way. If you can cheat. And in that way, I guess I can see an appeal in blindboxes. Purely because I have a little problem-solving inventor brain who likes to hack the stupid shit ass system for his own glory.

With labubu I am most interested in the bootlegging and fandom creation side of things. And of course hoping that this repopularizes the rubber face/plastic eyes trend in stuffed animals that died off when people decided rubberface animals from the 50s were "creepy"

in the defense of the lego people, that is Captain Rex we are talking about. But still, yiiiiiikes. Capitalism makes me want to be dead.