Pop Mart … How a small Beijing lifestyle store became a global cultural phenomenon … and what its reinvention teaches us about future brands, market making and the value of what a business could become

May 18, 2026

Pop Mart is easy to misunderstand.

At first glance, it is a toy company riding the extraordinary popularity of Labubu, the mischievous character with pointed ears and a toothy grin that has appeared on handbags, social feeds and celebrity collections around the world.

But look more closely and Pop Mart becomes a much more interesting business story.

It has built a system for discovering artists, developing intellectual property, creating physical products, engineering scarcity and surprise, building communities and turning characters into cultural phenomena. It has moved from retailing other people’s products to creating its own intellectual property; from selling toys to orchestrating experiences; and from serving an existing market to helping create a new one.

That makes Pop Mart a powerful example of two of my core ideas increasingly important to business leaders:

the Future Brand, which expands what a company can mean and become
the Market Maker, which creates new demand rather than merely fighting for existing market share.

Its remarkable growth suggests that culture, emotion and community can be every bit as powerful as technology in reinventing an industry.

The business was founded in Beijing in 2010 by Wang Ning, a young Chinese entrepreneur born in 1987 and educated in advertising at Zhengzhou University. After university and a brief period working at Chinese internet company Sina, Wang became interested in the emerging lifestyle retail scene.

The original company, Beijing Pop Mart Cultural & Creative Co., opened its first store in Beijing’s EC Mall in 2010. The location was significant: Zhongguancun, sometimes described as China’s Silicon Valley, was already becoming a centre of technology, entrepreneurship and a new generation of affluent urban consumers. Pop Mart’s original proposition was not particularly revolutionary. It was essentially a fashionable variety store selling toys, accessories, stationery, cosmetics and other lifestyle products aimed at young consumers.

For several years, Pop Mart expanded its stores but struggled to find a distinctive business model. The breakthrough came not from a strategic plan but from observing customer behaviour.

One product stood out: collectible figurines, particularly the Japanese Sonny Angel range.

Wang realised that customers were behaving differently around these products. They didn’t simply buy one because they needed it. They collected them. They compared them. They returned for more. They exchanged duplicates. They searched for rare versions.

He wasn’t just looking at a successful product. He was looking at the beginnings of a new consumer behaviour.

That observation would ultimately reinvent the company.

From retailer to IP creator

The strategic problem was that Pop Mart did not own the intellectual property driving this behaviour. Remaining a distributor meant that somebody else ultimately controlled its most important source of differentiation.

So Wang changed the business.

In 2016, Pop Mart began focusing much more strongly on proprietary and exclusive intellectual property. Its breakthrough came through collaboration with Hong Kong designer Kenny Wong and his character Molly, a wide-eyed girl with distinctive pursed lips.

Molly helped transform Pop Mart from retailer into IP operator.

This was much more significant than launching a successful toy. Owning or exclusively operating IP allowed Pop Mart to control design, product development, distribution, customer experience and economics. Instead of competing over somebody else’s products, it could create worlds of its own.

The company subsequently developed an expanding portfolio including Molly, Dimoo, Skullpanda, Crybaby, Hirono and The Monsters, the universe containing Labubu.

The corporate structure evolved too. Pop Mart International Group Limited was incorporated in the Cayman Islands in May 2019 as the holding company for the group and listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in December 2020. It is therefore publicly traded, but Wang remains highly influential. Hong Kong filings in 2025 showed him interested in approximately 48.7% of the company’s voting shares through direct and associated holdings and trust structures. The group’s ultimate holding company is GWF Holding, controlled through arrangements associated with Wang and his wife, Yang Tao.

Pop Mart is therefore an interesting hybrid: a global public company that retains substantial founder influence.

That can matter when a business is trying to create markets that require imagination, experimentation and patience rather than merely optimising quarterly performance.

The genius of uncertainty

Perhaps Pop Mart’s most important innovation was not the character itself but the experience surrounding it.

The blind-box format deliberately removes certainty from the purchase. Consumers choose a collection but do not know precisely which figure they will receive until they open the box.

Traditional retail tries to eliminate uncertainty. Pop Mart monetises it.

The psychological transformation is profound. Purchasing becomes discovery. Anticipation becomes part of the product. Rarity creates status. Completing a collection creates motivation to buy again. Duplicates encourage swapping. Secret editions generate excitement. Unboxing creates social-media content.

Pop Mart therefore doesn’t simply sell an object. It creates a small experience of possibility.

This illustrates an important innovation principle. Businesses often assume they need to reinvent the core product to create dramatically more value. Sometimes the bigger opportunity comes from redesigning the behaviour around the product.

Pop Mart combines several elements into a reinforcing system:

Characters create emotional connection, giving consumers something recognisable with which to identify.
Blind boxes create anticipation and repeat engagement, turning a transaction into a discovery experience.
Scarcity and collections create desirability, making some figures more sought after and socially valuable.
Communities and social media amplify participation, as consumers share, trade, display and reinterpret what they buy.

The result is much more difficult to reproduce than simply manufacturing another plastic figurine.

Labubu and the power of story-making

Labubu demonstrates how powerful that system can become.

The character was created by Hong Kong-born artist Kasing Lung as part of The Monsters, a world influenced by European fairy tales and Nordic mythology. Pop Mart entered an exclusive licensing relationship with Lung in 2019 and progressively expanded the character across figurines, plush products and accessories.

Labubu was unusual. It was cute but slightly unsettling, innocent yet mischievous. That ambiguity helped it stand apart from conventional children’s characters.

Then consumers started creating their own meanings around it.

Labubu became an accessory attached to luxury handbags, a collector’s object, a social-media prop and a symbol of participation in a global cultural moment. Celebrity visibility — notably through figures such as Blackpink’s Lisa — accelerated the phenomenon.

This reveals an important distinction for the Future Brand Manifesto.

Traditional brands tell stories. Future brands increasingly enable story-making. Disney traditionally created a story, introduced audiences to characters through films and then extended those characters into merchandise.

Pop Mart can work in almost the opposite direction.

Consumers encounter a character. They feel something. They collect it, photograph it, dress it, share it, exchange it and incorporate it into their identity. The community progressively creates much of the cultural story around the character.

The consumer is no longer simply an audience. The consumer becomes a participant.

From Chinese success to global phenomenon

The financial impact has been extraordinary.

In 2025, Pop Mart generated RMB37.12 billion in revenue, an increase of 184.7% in one year. Adjusted net profit reached RMB13.08 billion, up 284.5%. Proprietary products represented 99.1% of revenue, demonstrating just how completely the business had moved away from its origins as a reseller of other companies’ products.

The Monsters alone generated RMB14.16 billion, increasing 365.7% in a year and representing 38.1% of group revenue. But the portfolio is broader: Skullpanda generated RMB3.54 billion, Crybaby RMB2.93 billion, Molly RMB2.90 billion and Dimoo RMB2.78 billion. Management describes its portfolio strategy as “one dominant IP with multiple strong ones”.

Its physical and digital ecosystem has expanded just as rapidly. By mid-2025, Pop Mart reported more than 550 stores and over 2,500 Robo Shops worldwide, while ecommerce extended its reach to consumers across more than 90 countries and regions.

This is significant beyond Pop Mart itself.

Chinese companies were once primarily associated internationally with manufacturing and cost advantage. More recently, businesses such as BYD, Xiaomi, DJI and TikTok have demonstrated China’s capabilities in technology, design and digital platforms.

Pop Mart adds another dimension: the ability to create globally desirable cultural intellectual property.

Building an IP flywheel

Behind the characters is a sophisticated strategic system.

Pop Mart searches globally for distinctive artists and designers. It helps turn their creativity into scalable IP. Product designers translate characters into collections. Manufacturing converts them into physical products. Stores and Robo Shops provide distribution and theatre. Blind boxes create repeat engagement. Digital platforms create reach. Communities generate cultural energy. Collaborations take characters into new contexts.

Each part strengthens the others.

More consumers attract more artists. Better artists create stronger IP. Stronger IP generates greater retail traffic. Greater traffic provides more customer insight. More engagement makes collaborations attractive. Collaborations introduce characters to new audiences.

That is Pop Mart’s real competitive advantage. It is not Labubu. It is the system capable of creating, amplifying and monetising cultural IP.

This distinction will become crucial. Labubu’s spectacular success also creates Pop Mart’s greatest risk. Cultural phenomena can fade rapidly. Scarcity can become oversupply. Collecting can turn into speculation. Consumers can move on.

The long-term test is therefore whether Pop Mart can repeatedly create and renew cultural relevance. One hit creates extraordinary growth.

A system that repeatedly creates hits creates an extraordinary company.

Pop Mart as a Future Brand

This is where Pop Mart connects strongly with the Future Brand Manifesto.

Traditional brand management focuses heavily on consistency: define the proposition, communicate it repeatedly, maintain visual identity and build awareness.

Future brands need to be more dynamic. They create worlds rather than products. They build communities rather than audiences. They encourage participation rather than persuasion. They create cultural meaning rather than simply communicating functional benefits. Most importantly, they expand the future possibilities of the business.

The conventional brand question is: How much value does our brand add to what we currently sell?

Preference, price premium, loyalty and reduced customer-acquisition costs all matter.

But there is another question: What else could this brand enable us to do?

Could Labubu become animation, gaming, fashion or entertainment? Could Pop Mart City evolve into a larger experiential platform? Could characters move into digital worlds? Could collaborations create entirely new categories?

A powerful Future Brand doesn’t merely make today’s products more valuable. It creates permission to enter tomorrow’s markets.

From market taker to Market Maker

Pop Mart also illustrates the central argument behind Market Makers.

Traditional strategy would define the collectible-toy market, analyse competitors, segment customers and determine how Pop Mart could gain share.

Wang Ning effectively did something different. He saw behaviours that suggested a market could become much bigger.

The strategic progression is revealing: Lifestyle retail → collectibles → designer toys → intellectual property → cultural experiences → entertainment.

At every stage, Pop Mart expanded the definition of its opportunity. That is market making. Instead of asking, How do we sell more toys?, it increasingly asks something closer to:

How do we create characters and experiences that people want to make part of their lives? That question generates a dramatically larger possibility space.

Lessons from Pop Mart

Pop Mart’s journey offers six lessons for businesses far beyond toys.

Look for behaviours before markets. Wang Ning’s breakthrough was noticing what consumers were doing differently around collectibles, rather than simply analysing the existing toy category.
Own the source of differentiation. Moving from distributing other people’s products towards controlling distinctive IP fundamentally changed Pop Mart’s economics and strategic possibilities.
Design emotion into the business model. Surprise, anticipation, scarcity, belonging and discovery are not communications tactics; they are embedded in the customer experience.
Turn consumers into participants. Communities create stories, content, trading networks and cultural relevance that conventional advertising could never manufacture alone.
Build a capability, not a hit. Labubu is enormously valuable, but Pop Mart’s enduring advantage will depend on its ability to create the next Labubu — and the one after that.
Define markets around possibilities. The biggest opportunity is rarely simply selling more of today’s product. It is imagining what else your distinctive assets could enable.

The value of what Pop Mart could become

Pop Mart began with one store in Beijing selling other people’s fashionable products.

Then it noticed a behaviour.
Retail became collectibles.
Collectibles became proprietary IP.
IP became community.
Community became culture.
And culture is increasingly becoming entertainment and experience.

That progression captures something fundamental about reinvention.

Companies do not always discover their future by predicting it perfectly. They discover it by noticing emerging possibilities, experimenting around them and having the courage to redefine themselves when something more interesting appears.

Pop Mart therefore leaves leaders with a much bigger question than how to build the next Labubu.

Don’t simply ask: How can we make our existing brand more successful? Ask: What could our brand make possible?

That is the connection between Future Brands and Market Makers.

Future Brands build relevance around what people are becoming, not merely what they bought yesterday.
Market Makers create new behaviours, new value and ultimately new markets rather than competing endlessly for existing demand.

Pop Mart started by selling products. Its future lies in creating worlds.

And its greatest value may therefore come not from what it sells today, but from the cultural possibilities it has built the capability to create tomorrow. Because the most valuable brands don’t simply win markets. They expand our imagination of what the market could become.

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