Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this story
The following sentence might make a globalist cry out for joy: A toy that is manufactured by a Chinese company in Vietnamese factories, designed by a Dutch artist in Belgium, inspired by indie toy culture in Hong Kong, and made viral thanks to a Thai K-pop star, has turned into the biggest Gen-Z cultural trend of 2025.
That abomination of a sentence is the story of Labubu, the creepy-cute stuffed monster that swept the world this summer. You must have seen the trend by now, but most people are still unaware of the global, decade-long story that led up to it. Last week, I published a feature story about my journey into the heart of Labubu, how this cultural mania moment was created, and where it may go from here.
It’s an inherently international story, but it’s not the first time we’ve seen it. Think about how the world fell for Pokemon Go or Kpop bands like BTS and Blackpink. These are all examples of regional cultural powerhouse industries successfully finding global audiences for their work. What’s new about Labubu, however, is that it’s the first time a Chinese company was able to engineer this level of success and cultural impact.
Sure, there are always coincidences at work for a success of this scale, but the more I reported on this story, the more I also realized the historical and economic reasons why Labubu, and the toy company behind it, Pop Mart, ended up in this place. In many ways, it resembles other Chinese tech companies that went from counterfeit producers to international name brands, moving up the value chain as they transformed manufacturing experience into valuable technological knowhow.
The story of Labubu begins in Hong Kong in the 1970s and early ‘80s, when the city became a manufacturing hub for toys. From Mattel and Disney to Japan’s Bandai, almost every major toy company was outsourcing production to factories in Hong Kong, due to the low labor costs there.
Howard Lee, the founder of a Hong Kong toy studio called How2Work, told me how that period of history shaped his childhood. “Many parents would go to factories and come home with outsourced gig work like hand painting toys at home,” he says. It was also easy for people to buy toys with cosmetic or functional imperfections from the factories directly, so a generation of children like Lee grew up with relatively easy access to flawed dolls and other toys, which made them yearn more for the better ones they couldn’t afford.
As they grew up, many went back to the toy industry to make their childhood dreams come true. Lee first worked in advertising before starting his toy studio in 2001 to help local artists turn their 2D designs into 3D toys. This was the start of the designer toy industry, where small artists would make limited runs of toys to sell to a niche, indie circle of fans.
By the early 2000s, the toy factories had moved out of Hong Kong to nearby cities in mainland China like Shenzhen and Dongguan, which had much cheaper labor and real estate. But people in Hong Kong like Lee still had an advantage: They could act as the intermediary between the more culturally advanced toy industry in the West and the efficient factories in mainland China. “If you were a Japanese or American toy designer at the time, you’d need an American agent who had a Hong Kong agent who went to China to find the factory for you. That would take at least two to three weeks. But we’d just go directly to Dongguan and knock on the factory’s door,” Lee recalls.
Again, it was the smaller factories, which often dealt primarily in counterfeits and couldn’t get big production orders from the likes of Mattel, that helped Hong Kong designers realize their ideas. Lee worked closely with these small factories in mainland China to fine-tune the production process for different toy designs, oftentimes relying on the pragmatic wisdoms of the factory workers to experiment with new techniques. Because of this legacy, the designer toys available in Hong Kong today are often quirky, full of personality, and target grown adults as customers.
The Origin of Labubu
Labubu was born in that environment. Kasing Lung, the designer of Labubu, used to be an award-winning children’s book illustrator in Europe. In 2010, Lee saw Lung’s artwork and messaged him on Facebook to ask if he wanted to come to Hong Kong and try his luck in the toy industry.
In 2015, the first year Labubu was introduced to the world, Lee and Lung only made 60 Labubu vinyl figurines to bring to a toy convention in Taipei. They were worried they might not sell the whole batch. Production had to be compromised, too, because they couldn’t afford to use the more expensive machines that can do injection molding, so they had to rely on lower-cost manufacturing techniques using wax and copper molds. These cheaper production methods couldn’t make toy body parts that are both long and durable. “So we had to shorten the limbs, enlarge the heads, and thicken the necks,” Lee says.
The process took so long that by the time they got to the toy convention, they hadn’t had time to paint the Labubus yet. Instead, they decided to accept that the first batch of Labubus would be fully black and paint their eyes and teeth real-time at the convention, a spectacle they hoped might attract attention and sales. Painting the eyes later became a tradition at Lung’s signing events for new Labubu releases.
Hong Kong’s impact on Lung and Lee is still visible in the design of Labubu, says Derek Sulger, the chair of a Hong Kong–based luxury clothing brand and chairman of a contemporary art center in Beijing. A keen observer and practitioner in Asian culture, Sulger sees Labubu as “distinctly Hong Kong slash mainland—meaning an overseas Chinese version—of cuteness,” he says. “I can tell it’s not Japanese and I can tell it’s not Taiwanese.”
But the global success of Labubu shows that this highly specific type of cuteness now appeals to consumers everywhere. What is “Hong Kong cute” can also be an international sensation. “I am a big believer that when things are culturally authentic and culturally relevant, all of these national barriers can very quickly melt away,” Sulger says.
From Indie to Mass Market
Today, China is the undeniable center of toy manufacturing. And Pop Mart, a company founded in 2010, has used it to its full advantage to grow into a $45 billion toy empire. In the corporate biography A Company One of a Kind, Pop Mart’s CEO Wang Ning said that Chinese manufacturing prowess is one of the two historical opportunities that companies like his have benefited from. (The other is the massive size of China’s domestic market.)
What Pop Mart managed to do was to turn the niche industry of designer toys in Hong Kong into a mass-produced cultural product for everyone in the world. The company started collaborating with Kasing Lung exclusively in 2019, and it has since signed many international artists and turned their designs into made-in-China products.
When I look at Pop Mart’s history, I see a parallel with the rise of Chinese hardware tech companies. What used to be counterfeit gadget producers in Shenzhen can now make premium DJI drones that have no rivals in the world; what used to be factories for American and Japanese automakers are now producing their own Chinese-branded electric cars.
Yes, low-cost, counterfeit production is still a large part of the Chinese manufacturing economy, but it’s no longer the full picture. Stories like Labubu’s tell us that Chinese brands are increasingly leading global cultural trends too, despite the myriad of different political tensions and resistance.
This is an edition of Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis’ Made in China newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
