China’s trendy blind box culture has gone overseas, setting off a global cultural boom. I would like to use this article to commemorate the process I have observed over the past ten years, from 0 to 10, from 0 to 10, and then to 1000.
I found myself one of the “most complete observers” of this process: as early as 2015, Wang Ning explained to me in detail the principle of the trendy blind box; I have seen the earliest appearance of the most important IPs in the past 11 years; I have been observing the most important milestones of the past decade……
Before 2016, it was the flood era of trendy toy culture, and the representative IP was Sonny Angel.
From 2016 to 2019, it was the pastoral era of trendy toy culture, and the representative IP was Molly.
From 2019 to 2023, it is the era of cultivation and reading of trendy play culture, which represents a very rich IP.
From 2024 to the present, it will be the nautical era of trendy toy culture, and the representative IP is Labubu. (See table below)
1. “Flood Era”
The flood era of trendy blind box culture (before 2016) and the rise of Sonny Angel.
In the “flood era” of trendy toy culture before 2016, the global trendy toy industry was still in its infancy, with low market awareness and scattered industrial chain, and Japanese IP Sonny Angel became an iconic existence in this period with its unique design concept and business model, laying the foundation for trendy toy from niche culture to mass consumption.
1. Industry characteristics in the flood era
During this period, the trendy toy market was dominated by “imported products” and lacked local original IP.
Chinese consumers’ perception of trendy toys is at the level of “high-end toys” or “collectibles”, and the market is mainly dominated by Japanese and American brands. For example, the BE@RBRICK of Medicom Toys in Japan (2001) and KAWS in the United States (1990s) have emerged, but they have not yet formed a large-scale business system.
BE@RBRICK
Domestic trendy toy sales channels are scattered, mostly in the form of grocery stores, exhibitions or purchasing, and the user group is limited to a very small number of collectors.
2. Sonny Angel’s design and positioning innovation
In 2004, the Japanese company Dreams launched Sonny Angel, which is a naked angel boy wearing different themed decorations (such as animals and fruits), with a round body shape, a raised belly and a bottle packaging design, breaking the “children’s attributes” of traditional toys and accurately positioning young women aged 16-28.
sonny angel
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Toru Tsumatani, the founder of Dreams, proposed the concept of “healing office women” and shaped it into a “companion spiritual carrier”. This design weakens the IP narrative and instead attracts users through visual cuteness and emotional resonance, becoming a model for the commercialization of “emotional value” in the early days.
3. Pioneering practice of blind box mode
Sonny Angel’s popularity is inseparable from its blind box sales mechanism. Each series contains 12 regular shapes, in fully sealed packaging, users cannot predict the specific style when purchasing, and at the same time set up limited editions to stimulate repurchase and social exchange.
For example, the weather series blind box launched in 2014 was empty online, and the second-hand price of the Xiaolongren hidden model soared to 1,200 yuan (the original price was about 46 yuan). This model not only gave birth to strategy cultures such as “pinching the box and shaking the weight”, but also derived fan communities and second-hand trading platforms, laying the foundation for the subsequent trendy toy ecology.
Sonny Angel Weather Series
4. China’s market breakthrough and industry enlightenment
In 2014, Sonny Angel quickly became the sales pillar of Bubble Mart’s offline stores. According to early data, the IP accounted for 30% of Bubble Mart’s total revenue, with annual sales of more than 30 million yuan, and at that time, Bubble Mart was only a buyer-type cultural product grocery store, and Sonny Angel’s trendy blind box only occupied a small part of the shelf.
The success of Sonny Angel has made domestic practitioners, especially Wang Ning, the founder of Bubble Mart, realize the potential of IP operation and user co-creation: on the one hand, Bubble Mart has been inspired by this to transform the trendy play track, and a new glorious era is about to begin.
5. The limitations and legacy of the Flood Era
Although Sonny Angel pioneered the commercialization of trendy toys, its limitations also highlighted the characteristics of the flood era:
- Weak cultural values:IP lacks worldview construction, relies on a single shape iteration, and user stickiness is vulnerable to the impact of new products.
- Channel clutter:Bubble Mart’s early stores sold groceries and Sonny Angel at the same time, and the same IP can be found in various channels of good and bad, and the market operation is still very primitive;
- Lack of globalization:Sonny Angel’s Japanese parent company is a very conservative traditional company, and it is not the mainstream of animation IP in Japan, and its overseas expansion also relies on agents, and it has not formed an independent brand potential.
However, Sonny Angel’s blind box mechanism, community operation, and user emotional connection model provide a paradigm for subsequent IPs such as Molly and Labubu. Its historical significance lies in the promotion of trendy toys from “niche collection” to the mass consumer market, which has become a key springboard for the industry to move from “flood” to “pastoral era”.
2. “Pastoral Age”
The Pastoral Era of Trendy Play Culture (2016-2019) and the Rise of Molly.
From 2016 to 2019, I call it the “pastoral era” of trendy play culture. During this period, with Bubble Mart’s IP Molly as the core representative, the trendy toy industry has entered the mass consumption field from the marginal niche market, showing idyllic vigorous growth and commercialization awakening.
Molly’s rise not only marks the first large-scale breakthrough of China’s local trendy toy IP, but also promotes the formation of a complete industrial chain and consumer culture in the industry.
1. Industry transformation in the pastoral era
The core feature of the pastoral era is the transformation from “art toys to mass consumption”.
Previously, the trendy toy market relied on Japanese IP (such as Sonny Angel) and overseas designers, with scattered channels and low user stickiness. In 2016, Bubble Mart signed with Hong Kong designer Kenny Wong to promote the image of Molly, a “tsundere girl” with no story background, to the market, and started the industrial production and standardized operation of trendy toys through the blind box model.
2. Molly’s “blank design” and emotional projection
Molly’s lake-green big eyes without pupils and the proud expression of the corners of her mouth have become the best carrier for users’ emotional projection.
Molly’s IP character is an artistic and imaginative girl, and her core emotional traits are tsundere, sunny, and dreamy personality traits, which have both the innocence of a child and the dream of an adult.
Molly’s original design
All of its collections combine different cultures with themes, and it is “blank” itself. This “white space aesthetics” gives users great room for imagination: white-collar workers in the workplace regard it as a “cold-faced warrior” to fight anxiety, and the student community regards it as a “healing partner” who accompanies growth. Designer Kenny Wong once admitted that Molly’s sense of blankness “allows everyone to see themselves in her”.
The author of this article takes a group photo with Kenny, the creator of Molly
3. Blind box mechanism and consumption carnival
Molly’s success is inseparable from Bubble Mart’s industrialization of the blind box model. Compared with Sonny Angel’s random gacha, the Molly series introduces the strategy of “hidden model probability announcement” (such as 1/144 rarity) and “more culturally rich series theme” for the first time.
For example, the Molly constellation series launched in 2017 combined 12 constellations with professional styling, and the sales of a single series exceeded 30 million yuan. The “uncertain reward mechanism” of the blind box activated the user’s gambler psychology and desire to collect, and the price of hidden money in the second-hand market once soared to 40 times the original price. According to statistics, the repurchase rate of Molly users reached 68.5% in 2018, far exceeding the level of the traditional toy industry.
Molly early representative: Constellation series
4. Emotional resonance and circle building of Generation Z
Another breakthrough in the pastoral era is to accurately capture the consumer psychology of Generation Z.
Molly’s “no story” has become an advantage: users give it a personalized narrative through DIY and community to change their baby. At the Weibo Super Talk and Trendy Play Exhibition, the “Baby Changer” dressed Molly as a punk rock style or an ancient lady, deriving subcultural branches such as “baby clothes economy” and “baby change tutorial”.
By holding the Beijing International Trendy Play Exhibition (the first in 2017), Bubble Mart condenses scattered players into a “subcultural circle” with identity, forming a complete social chain of “drawing boxes – drying babies – changing babies – changing babies”
Epoch-making milestone: the first Beijing International Trendy Play Exhibition
5. Industry heritage and the limitations of the times
The pastoral era left three major legacies for the trendy toy industry:
- Business Model Validation:Molly proved that local IP can achieve large-scale profitability through industrial production, attracting brands such as 52TOYS and 1983 to enter the market;
- User mind cultivation:the blind box mechanism cultivates a loyal user group with an average annual consumption of more than 5 times;
- Cultural symbol upgrade:Trendy toys have advanced from “niche collectibles” to “social currency” for young people to express their attitude towards life.
But there are also obvious limitations at this stage –
IP relies too much on modeling iteration and lacks cultural connotation precipitation; The market is seriously homogenized, and there are more than 200 domestic trendy toy brands in 2019, but 90% of them are still imitating Molly’s “cute” design.
It was not until 2019 that the industry entered the “era of farming and reading”, and diversified IPs (such as DIMOO and SKULLPANDA) gradually broke through the single aesthetic paradigm.
The pastoral era represented by Molly IP is essentially an enlightenment movement about “blank aesthetics” and “emotional commerce”. It uses expressionless porcelain doll faces to reflect the spiritual desire of China’s younger generation in the era of material abundance, and also paves a key step for trendy toy culture to move from emotional consumption to cultural identity.
3. “Cultivation and Reading Era”
The era of cultivation and reading of trendy play culture (2019-2023) and the outbreak of multiple IPs.
From 2019 to 2023, known as the “cultivation and reading era” of trendy play culture, the industry has shifted from a single IP to a multi-ecological co-prosperity, and the market presents the dual characteristics of “deep cultivation of content” and “breaking the circle and symbiosis”.
With the launch of Bubble Mart (2020) and the rise of Generation Z’s consumption power, the trendy toy industry has entered a period of rapid development, and the IP matrix has expanded from cute blind boxes to art toys, co-branded cross-border, cultural integration and other dimensions, forming an industrial pattern of “everything can be played with trends”.
1. Industry innovation in the era of cultivation and reading
The core feature of the era of farming and reading is from scale to ecology. Compared with Molly’s single hit logic in the pastoral era, IP development during this period showed three major turns:
- Vertical market segments are differentiated into multiple tracks such as cute, dark, national style, and science fiction. For example, DIMOO uses the concept of “Dream Guardian” to create a fairy tale healing style, while SKULLPANDA attracts subcultural groups with its cyberpunk aesthetic.
- The co-branded IP is deeply integrated with catering, beauty, film and television and other fields. Bubble Mart and Starbucks launched a limited edition blind box, with single-day sales exceeding 10 million; SKULLPANDA and MAC lipstick co-branded to implant trendy toys into the beauty consumption scene.
- Technology empowers 3D printing and AIGC technology to lower the design threshold, and independent designer brands have proliferated. In 2021, the number of trendy toy designers will increase by 320% compared with 2019, forming an ecological echelon of “head IP + waist creators”.
2. Deep cultivation of culture representing IP
The IP of the farming and reading era takes narrative construction and emotional resonance as its core competitiveness:
DIMOO designer Ayan integrates issues such as environmental protection and autism care into the design through the “Cloud Elf” world view. The “Coral Series” launched in 2021 is based on endangered marine life, with sales of 120 million yuan, and at the same time drives public welfare donations.
DIMOO
SKULLPANDA uses the cyborg image of the “Doomsday Girl” to construct a dystopian narrative. Its “Jungle Castle” series upgrades blind boxes into miniature art installations through gothic elements such as vampires and werewolves, and the premium of hidden models in the second-hand market is more than 50 times.
SKULLPANDA
Labubu (early stage) Long Jiasheng’s “Dark Little Shrine Maiden” IP, with a weird shape to break the aesthetic hegemony of the cute system, launched the “Sansho Fish Series” is very weird, or a square face shape, sold out in pre-sale, which caused a lot of sensation.
Labubu “Sansho Fish” series
3. Cultural integration and value upgrading
During this period, trendy toys became the carrier of the revival of traditional culture:
1) Archaeological blind box
The Henan Museum launched a series of blind boxes of “Cultural Relics Restoration”, burying bronze fragments into clay, and users need to dig and clean them with their own hands, which not only restores the archaeological process but also popularizes historical knowledge, with annual sales exceeding one million.
2) Sanxingdui co-branding
The “Blessing Priest” series launched by Sanxingdui Museum and the trendy toy brand abstracts the shape of cultural relics into Q version figures, becoming a benchmark case for the integration of culture and tourism.
The “Vegetable Elf” blind box represented by Caigou combines animals and vegetables and fruits, which is very imaginative, interesting and cute, and has set the highest crowdfunding record on Bilibili.
4. User co-creation and circle fission
The era of farming and reading has reconstructed the relationship between producers and consumers:
- Through repainting and splicing, users of the baby culture have derived subcultural branches such as “baby clothes customization” and “joint mobilization”. The video of “Baby Change Tutorial” on Station B has been played more than 500 million times, giving birth to dozens of millions of fans-level baby change teachers.
- Exhibition Economy The number of visitors to the Beijing International Trendy Play Exhibition (BTS) increased from 100,000 in 2019 to 350,000 in 2023, becoming the world’s largest trendy toy event. Users strengthen their circle recognition through “face base for baby” and “limited model lottery”.
- Second-hand financialization of hidden money transactions has given rise to the phenomenon of “trendy securitization”. In 2022, SKULLPANDA’s “Night City Series” hidden model was speculated to 23,000 yuan.
5. Limitations of the times and industrial heritage
Although the era of farming and reading has achieved market expansion, it still exposes hidden dangers: homogeneous competition has led to the withdrawal of 30% of small and medium-sized brands at a loss; IP relies too much on visual innovation and lacks cultural precipitation.
However, the user co-creation mechanism, cross-border ecological model and cultural narrative methodology left behind behind laid the foundation for the globalization of Labubu in the Age of Sail.
This “pluralism and co-cultivation” movement eventually made trendy toys leap from a subculture to a lifestyle symbol of Generation Z.
4. “Age of Navigation”
The Age of Navigation in Trendy Play Culture (2024-present): Labubu’s Globalization Journey and Paradigm Revolution
In 2024, trendy toy culture will officially enter the “nautical age”, with Bubble Mart’s IP Labubu as the core representative, and the industry will shift from localized competition to global ecological expansion.
This change is not only an extension of the business map, but also a key turning point in the transition of Chinese trendy toys from “cultural followers” to “trend definers”, and its underlying logic integrates the compound potential energy of cultural integration, technology empowerment and user co-creation.
1. Globalization Strategy: From “Cultural Transport” to “Local Translation”
Labubu’s voyage takes the reconstruction of localized narratives combined with different cultures as the core strategy, breaking through the dilemma of “cultural discounts” in traditional IP output.
- In Thailand, Labubu donned traditional Thai costumes and transformed into a “tourism experience officer” to enter cultural landmarks such as the Grand Palace, and cooperated with the Tourism Board to launch the “Badge for Travel Fund” campaign to embed consumer behavior into the local experience.
- In the North American market, Rihanna and even Kardashian have been photographed with Labubu, which means that Labubu has entered the mainstream fashion culture circle in the United States.
This model of “20% core feature retention + 80% local cultural integration” makes it a cultural translator rather than a porter in different markets, with overseas revenue increasing by 475%-480% year-on-year in 2024.
2. IP Design Revolution: Breaking the Globalization of Ugly Aesthetics
Labubu’s “ugly and cute” design subverts the traditional aesthetic hegemony –
Hong Kong artist Lung Ka-shing endowed his Nordic forest elves with mysterious genes: jagged fangs, asymmetrical round eyes and twisted limbs to form a visual counterpoint, this “flaw aesthetic” initially caused controversy about “ugliness”, but became the identity symbol of Generation Z due to its strong personality expression.
According to the data, the 18-30 year old group accounts for 82% of Labubu users, and its “evil and innocent” personality setting allows fans to spontaneously construct narratives, such as Thai players regard it as a “rebellious patron saint”, and European and American users interpret it as a “subculture rebel”.
3. The temperament of the “Dark Little Miko” is in line with the aesthetics and emotional resonance of European and American people.
Labubu not only has a sense of “ugliness and cuteness”, but also has the temperament of a “dark little shrine maiden”. This temperament belongs to a subconscious archetype of all mankind, with the magic of pan-culture and the emotional appeal that can cross regional and national cultural barriers.
Labubu echoes the witches of European Gothic culture, reminiscent of the Gothic romance of Tim Burton’s film “Zombie Bride”; At the same time, it is also in line with the spirits of the legends of oriental monsters. Her temperament is mixed with the contradiction and tension of danger and innocence at the same time, so it has also aroused strong love in Europe and the United States, such as Spain, France, South America and other places.
While Disney princesses were still selling crystal slippers fairy tales, Labubu had transformed into the dark gospel of the new century – a new global IP, and must learn to discover new fairy tale powers in the abyss of the human subconscious.
4. Product micro-innovation brings more emotional value
Labubu breaks through the limitations of a single material of traditional figures, adopting a hybrid design of enamel body + plush accessories (such as plush ears and tails), which not only retains the modeling accuracy of plastic, but also increases the soft touch. In 2024, Bubble Mart’s plush category revenue surged by 1,289% year-on-year to 2.832 billion yuan.
The plush material gives Labubu the characteristics of a twistable shape, allowing users to freely pose funny poses and enhance the fun of playing (such as the hidden model of the “High Energy Front” series, which can be posed upside down).
The “High Energy Ahead” series is divided into 7 emotions (love/joy/self, etc.), and strengthens emotional connections through color psychology. For example, the “Id” hidden model is all black, symbolizing the pursuit of Generation Z’s true self.
LABUBU “High Energy Ahead” colorful doll
5. Cultural upgrading: from emotional consumption to cultural value community
Trendy toys have reached a critical juncture from providing emotional value to cultural value, and Labubu has become a key IP in this promotion period.
emotional value is individual, emotional, and interesting; Cultural values are group, ceremonial, and proud. An IP or a group of IPs must develop into a certain culture to have a longer life cycle.
Just as Barbie dolls formed Barbie culture and Lego toys formed Lego culture, trendy toys are also becoming trendy toy culture. It now has not only emotional value, but also cultural value.
From now to the future, Bubble Mart and trendy play IP will defend, persist and expand globalization of cultural values.
AI-generated images: LEGO, Barbie and MOLLY
5. “Cultural Paradigm”
After entering the fourth stage of the nautical age, the trendy blind box has become a global paradigm breakthrough of China’s new culture.
Although trendy toys originated in Japan, the first to form an industrialized scale, trigger a consumption frenzy, and spread to the world was created by local Chinese brands in the hot land of China. The trendy toy industry has not only ushered in a prosperous era in China, but also successfully entered overseas markets, setting off a consumption boom around the world. Labubu’s globalization outbreak has revealed the ultimate code for China’s IP to go overseas: to overcome geopolitical barriers with cultural potential energy, support ecological expansion with digital infrastructure, and resolve trade frictions with emotional connections.
When the grandmother in Spain cried with joy at the newly bought Labubu, the long queue of European and American people lined up in front of the Bubble Mart store in the Louvre in Paris, and the Bubble Mart store at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom was also crowded with college students from all over the world, China’s trendy toys have evolved from a commodity to a carrier of cultural soft power. This sailing movement, which began with the “ugly elf”, is redefining the discourse pattern of global pop culture.
The Spanish grandmother who circulated on the Internet cried with joy when she received LABUBU
For a long time, Chinese products “going global” often can only take the route of low prices and followers, and it is generally believed that “only Made in China, not created in China”. Now, China’s trendy toy industry has broken this prejudice, gone overseas with its own innovative culture, and occupied the global high ground of the trendy toy ecosystem, becoming a creator of fashion trends, rather than a simple follower and imitator.
What trendy toy culture should do in the “Age of Navigation” should be to “become a leader in global pop culture”, and build a super IP ecology with online and offline linkage through product cross-border, narrative cultivation, user co-creation and technology breaking. Its success is not only about Bubble Mart’s performance, but also about allowing China to define a global pop culture standard.
