Make your way to a Pop Mart store on a Saturday afternoon and one of the first things you’ll notice is the line. Winding out the door and around the store, never letting up and endlessly replenishing itself.
And while the merchandise inside is aplenty, shelves upon shelves of every cutesy trinket conjured up in the human mind hitherto, most customers enter with an obsessively calculated shopping list. At the top, at the bottom, and in every space in between is the Labubu.
Ask these people why they like the Labubu and their responses are simple.
“You can attach them to your backpack,” said one girl. “It was trending all over my socials,” said Nicole, who was looking to buy her second.
“I think it’s just a big hype, until something new comes around,” said one beleaguered employee, inundated by the crowd. But ask people what they think about the broader implications of the Labubu craze and they, like most of us, have a harder time coming up with an answer.
To clear up confusion for the unfamiliar: the Labubu is a wildly popular plush toy that has reinvigorated the successful but previously faltering Pop Mart brand. First introduced to the world in a 2015 book by Hong Kong artist and toy designer Kasing Lung (inspired by the elves of Nordic folklore from his time in the Netherlands), the Labubu gained wider visibility after a partnership between Lung and the Chinese brand that saw small, designer toys hit shelves.
The look evolved over the next few years. The Labubu became bigger. Fluffier. But it was 2024 that saw the doll become a viral sensation, starting on a zipper on a bag of Blackpink’s Lisa, then around Thailand and Southeast Asia, and soon around the world.
The plushies themselves, with many unique characters and counting, are now in such high demand that retailers not only sell out within minutes of each release, but hang signs announcing the void of the dolls to keep the constant crush of crowds out of their stores.
The plush toys have become a cultural touchstone. Far from the first, but a notable one nonetheless. With annual sales rising from their recent inception, to nearly half a billion dollars in 2024 and almost 700 million in the first half of 2025 alone. And still rising. And all because of this unlikely suspect: a doll marketed as “ugly cute,” with aggressively oversized eyes and mischievous mouths and too many pointy teeth to count. A friendly monster.
The design is a success in itself, the packaging another. Because they’re sold in so-called blind boxes, meaning you pay the same price for any of them but never know what you’re going to get. The newest release, perhaps, most hopefully, or your third Lychee Berry or Sesame Bean. Each purchase is a gamble, and results, as Las Vegas figured out decades ago, in more and more rolls of the dice.
This isn’t to say that the Labubu is the first of its kind. Indeed, it has joined the ranks of a generational lineage of massively popular trend toys.
Every generation has had an obsession that confounded the generation before them, their parents at the forefront of that. Funko Pop! figures flew off the shelves in the earlier part of this century. The Beanie Baby craze of the ‘90s has been cited as the world’s first internet sensation. Cabbage Patch Kids caused riots in the ‘80s. Prior to that, there was Barbie and Ken, the Teddy bear, and Russian dolls. The Labubu craze is simply the latest in a long tradition of others.
And yet, when people bid six figures at auctions and camp overnight to get first pick on these little plushies, the question comes up time and time again: why? Why spend so much on an inanimate object? Why wait in interminable lines for new releases? Why invest emotionally in something incapable of reciprocating the same love back? And what does this say about our generation and society? Our increasingly distressing spending habits? An inability to connect socially beyond the familiar and comforting allure of the inanimate and non-human? The sycophantic or downright mute support of dolls or Clash Royale or ChatGPT.
There is most likely a why, but there is also a clear because. And maybe that’s even more important. Perhaps even more revealing, and the simplest answer of all.
Because the world is in actuality full of tumult and chaos and unavoidable ugliness. Because there are too many people surrounding us who make us feel less social, less connected, less human. Because, simplest of all, the Labubu has made a lot of people feel good.
As with any trend, no one knows how long the cultural reign of the Labubu will last. Whether the lines will wither up or endure through Christmas or continue to make billions for years to come (and years beyond that in the eBay resale industry of unopened, pristine dolls). Like the viral sensations of years before, there will come a time when the Labubu is a relic of the 2020s and a newer, hotter plushie has taken its place, though no one can know when that time will come.
All we know now is that for however pasted on or ugly-cute or however you want to describe the smiles of the dolls, the resultant smiles they bring to the humans around us are real. Not mass produced, but singular to each and every one of their enthusiasts. Labubu-lover or not, we can all appreciate that, because it’s the most human thing of all.
So what are the broader implications of the reign of the Labubu? There are the pragmatic (“I think people just need something to latch onto,” said a man in line named Firman). There are the cynical (“I think it’s the cycle of gratification and emptiness,” said one woman). There are the humanistic, like Winona (“People just resonate…and want to take care of something”). But for all the questions we may have and implications there may be, the simplest answer of all found me by way of a nine-year-old boy when I asked him how he felt after getting his first Labubu. He clutched it tight, grinned ear-to-ear, and burst out with a single word: “Happy!”
And that’s good enough for me.
