POP MART

In 2024, the Labubu character — an elf-faced designer toy created by Hong Kong artist Kasing Lung and manufactured exclusively by POP MART — became one of the most widely recognized consumer products in the world, photographed on the handbag straps of Rihanna, Kim Kardashian, and Lisa of BLACKPINK before spreading to queues outside malls from Los Angeles to Seoul. The cultural moment translated directly into commercial results: POP MART reported revenue of approximately RMB 13.0 billion (around $1.8 billion) in fiscal year 2024, roughly doubling year-over-year. Wang Ning, who founded POP MART in Beijing in 2010 and led it through its 2020 Hong Kong Stock Exchange listing, retains majority control of the company.

The POP MART commercial model rests on two mechanics that distinguish it from both traditional toy retail and from general lifestyle specialty stores. The first is the blind box: a sealed package containing a random figure from a licensed series, where customers do not know which character they will receive until opening. The blind box model converts a single-product purchase into a collecting and discovery experience, with the most-sought variants trading on secondary markets at multiples of retail price. The second is the IP-licensing platform: rather than developing characters entirely in-house, POP MART signs licensing agreements with independent artists, designers, and entertainment studios, paying royalties in exchange for exclusive production and retail rights to characters for defined periods. The Molly character by Kenny Wong, the Dimoo series by the pop-surrealist artist Ayan, the Hirono character, and Labubu alongside dozens of additional active licensed IPs constitute a constantly renewing product portfolio rather than a fixed brand identity. POP MART operates more than 370 stores in China, 300-plus Roboshops (automated vending kiosks deployable in airports, transit stations, and mall corridors), and a rapidly expanding international store network.

In the United States, POP MART operates across an unusually broad range of mall types and tiers for a brand with less than five years of US retail history. Within the Malls.com network, tracked US positions include South Coast Plaza, The Forum Shops at Caesars Palace, Westfield Century City, Westfield Valley Fair, Tysons Corner Center, Oakbrook Center, Bellevue Square, City Creek Center, Somerset Collection in Troy, Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, Westfarms Mall, Twelve Oaks Mall in Novi, and Walt Whitman Mall in Huntington Station. Singapore positions include ION Orchard and Jewel Changi Airport, two of Southeast Asia’s most-visited Class A++ retail destinations. Tracked international positions outside North America include ION Orchard and Jewel Changi Airport in Singapore, Bercy Village in Paris, and locations in New Zealand and China. The Simon Property Group partnership announced in 2024, committing to more than 20 POP MART locations across Simon’s US mall portfolio, marks the single largest structured landlord-brand partnership in the collectible toy category and signals that POP MART’s US network will scale materially through 2025 and 2026.

For mall management, POP MART is a Class A specialty collectibles-and-entertainment anchor for regional and super-regional centers targeting Gen Z, millennial, and family demographics. The brand’s typical footprint ranges from 800 to 2,500 square feet, with store formats centered on the Roboshop wall (a bank of automated vending machines running adjacent to or within the store), blind box display walls, and artist-series installations that rotate approximately every 8 to 12 weeks. The resale-and-collecting behavior of the core customer base generates repeat visits at frequencies that few specialty toy or collectibles retailers achieve, and the social-media documentation of blind box opening and collection display produces organic in-store content creation by consumers that extends into continuous earned media.