Labubu, the toothy toy monster built on surprise and scarcity
Labubu is a scruffy little monster with big ears and nine sharp teeth, and in June 2025 a 1.2-metre mint-green version sold for $170,000 at an auction in Beijing. Most fans pay far less, buying sealed blind boxes without knowing which figure is inside, which is exactly the point.
The character comes from Kasing Lung, an illustrator born in Hong Kong in 1972 and raised in Utrecht in the Netherlands. Labubu belongs to his story series The Monsters, shaped by the Nordic folklore he loved as a child, alongside companions such as Zimomo, the spiky-tailed leader, and Tycoco, Labubu's skeleton-like boyfriend. The first figurines appeared in 2015, and a 2019 partnership with the Chinese retailer Pop Mart, which now sells them exclusively, brought a much larger following.
Blind boxes drive the craze. Each themed series hides a random figure, often with a rare secret design mixed in, so collectors keep buying in hope of completing a set. By 2025 there were more than 300 versions, from a $15 vinyl figure eight centimetres tall to a $960 mega edition. One New York magazine writer summed up the appeal as a hard-to-explain cuteness: kind of ugly but huggable, with a devilish grin.
Fame arrived fast in April 2024, when Lisa of the K-pop group Blackpink was seen with a Labubu keychain on her bag. The toys spread across Thailand, where some people began treating the image as lucky and put it on Buddhist amulets and sacred tattoos. Pop Mart reported 6.3 billion yuan in sales from the line in the first half of 2024, and in May 2025 it paused sales in all 16 British stores after reports of customers fighting over them.
Popularity breeds imitation, and counterfeits nicknamed Lafufus have their own admirers for their odd looks. Pop Mart's chief executive, Wang Ning, saw his fortune reach US$21.1 billion by July 2025, and Sony Pictures has acquired the rights to a Labubu film, with Paul King directing.
Source: Labubu
