Labubu: Pop Mart made the rare thing easy to get, and the value left

Labubu is a forest monster drawn by Kasing Lung in 2015 and licensed to Pop Mart in 2019, where it sat for four years as one character among many. In October 2023 Pop Mart put it on a plush keychain. In April 2024 Lisa of Blackpink clipped one to her bag, and Southeast Asian sales jumped about 30% in a week. The franchise pulled roughly 430 million dollars in 2024, up more than 700%, and about 1.95 billion in 2025, some 38% of everything Pop Mart sold. At the 2025 peak Pop Mart was worth more than Hasbro, Mattel and Sanrio combined, on gross margins of 72%.

Then Pop Mart dismantled it. By mid-2026, according to the case study these figures come from, search interest was down 90%, the stock had lost more than half its value (about 33 billion dollars), record March results were met with a 22% drop on the same day, and counterfeit “Lafufus” made up 40% of listings on some platforms. Nobody undercut them. This is the rare autopsy with no external villain.

The celebrity was the visible part

Lisa makes a good headline, but the engine was product design. The blind box, a sealed box at 10 to 30 dollars whose contents you only see once you open it, with a secret edition at roughly 1 in 72, is a variable reward machine. Uncertainty turns a purchase into a hunt. Duplicates feel like progress (“one box closer”). Unboxing videos became free advertising that recruited new players into the same loop, and members in mainland China reached 72 million with a repurchase rate of 55.7%.

Pop Mart also kept supply deliberately below demand, which created a resale market where a 30 dollar toy traded at 300. Pop Mart earned nothing on those resales, and they were worth more to it than revenue: the resale ticker made a plush toy feel like an asset, a smart move you could not lose money on. A 72% margin on a toy is luxury territory, and it rested entirely on what the toy meant.

When the difficulty is the product

Scarcity caused chaos: fights in stores, a warehouse robbery, scalper bots. From inside the company that looked like unmet demand, money left on the table. The co-COO reached for a concert-ticket analogy: a factory, unlike a stadium, can add seats. So production went from about 300,000 plush a month in early 2024 to 30 million a month by late 2025, a hundredfold increase.

The concert-ticket logic is right for almost every product, where the buyer wants the thing and more of it prints money. Labubu belonged to a different class. Our name for it is Scarcity as the Product: the value sits in the difficulty of getting the object, and the object itself is a 30 dollar plush. Add supply to a good like that and you are deleting inventory of the actual value. The diagnostic is one honest question. If the object were freely available tomorrow, would anyone still pay the premium? For Labubu the answer was no.

It is also a sharp case of a broader law, the Principle of Transient Stability: the only way to make a value stable is to tangibilize it, and a stable value is no longer valuable. Pop Mart stabilized scarcity into abundance, permanently in stock, and in doing so spent it. Resale prices halved and some editions fell below retail. That crossing is brutal. Once the second-hand price drops under the shelf price, the asset story dies at once and the loop runs backwards: with everything in stock there is nothing to hunt, the secret edition is worth nothing so the unboxing loses its drama, and nobody new joins when your friend’s 30 dollar toy is now worth 15. Counterfeits then finished the job, flooding a status good with imitation and poisoning the authenticity it traded on.

The spreadsheet said everything was fine

Revenue kept growing while the foundation cracked: sales were up 250% in the third quarter of 2025, because shipping outran a desire that was already dying. Revenue measured the past. The signals that mattered, such as resale prices against retail or search interest, were leading indicators, and neither sat in the dashboard that drove the production plan.

The lesson travels well beyond collectibles. Before you scale an offer, find out which class it belongs to, because the same growth move can be right for a sneaker and fatal for a blind box. Then watch the premium as a reading of meaning: what the customer pays for can drift away from what they buy, and the gap shows up in the resale market long before it reaches your revenue line. If chaos forces you to relieve scarcity, the job is to find the expansion that calms the stores and the bots while the difficulty survives. Finding that line is a design problem to solve before the factory gets the order.

Pop Mart’s answer now is a rebuild on the Disney model, with a film, a park in Beijing and a bench of other characters around Labubu. Whether a blind-box creature can outlive its hype cycle the way Mickey did is still unproven.

If your margin rests on something your customers cannot easily name, train your team to see which value they are actually paying for, before a growth plan spends it.