Pop Mart: the IP company the market priced as a fad
Pop Mart sells small vinyl figures inside sealed boxes for $27.99 each. You do not know which one you are getting until you open it. In 2024 this business did RMB 13.04 billion in revenue, up 106.9 percent year on year, at a 66.8 percent gross margin. By late 2025 the founder, Wang Ning, had been worth as much as $27.5 billion and then lost most of it, his fortune cut to roughly $13.6 billion after the stock fell 40 percent. The whole arc, boom to wobble, happened because of a single character with serrated teeth named Labubu. This is a teardown of a company that built a genuine IP machine and then let one product convince the market it was a fad.
Perception
The world reads Pop Mart as a toy company. The stores look like toy stores. The vending machines, which Pop Mart calls Roboshops, look like toy machines. The blind box mechanic looks like a gachapon dressed up for a mall.
Wang Ning has spent years arguing against this read. His framing is precise: “At our core, we are an IP company. If we were simply a blind box company, we wouldn’t need to put so much effort into developing our IPs.” He describes the blind box not as the product but as the grammar: “Cultural companies often have their own ‘language.’ For Lego, it is building blocks. For Pop Mart, our language started with blind boxes.” That is a positioning statement disguised as a humble origin story, and it is doing a lot of work. It reframes a slot-machine purchase as the entry point to a character universe.
The pitch the company tells about itself is emotional consumption. You are not buying a toy. You are buying a small jolt of surprise, a desk companion, a way to signal taste without a logo. That framing is what lets a Chinese manufacturer sell vinyl at fashion margins to Gen Z buyers in Bangkok, Los Angeles, and London. The perception gap is the whole business: customers feel they are collecting art, the market suspects they are chasing a meme, and Wang needs both to be partly true.
Structure
Pop Mart occupies a position no competitor holds cleanly. It owns or co-owns the intellectual property, it controls the retail, and it manufactures at scale. Most of the field does one of those things, not all three.
| Brand | Model | IP source | Entry price | Positioning |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Funko | Licensed pop-culture figures | Other people’s IP (Marvel, Disney, sports) | $12–$15 | Fandom merchandise at volume |
| Sonny Angel (Dreams) | Blind box collectible | One in-house character family | $25–$30 | Single-character cult object |
| Sanrio | Character licensing | Owns Hello Kitty and friends | Licensed, varies | Asset-light heritage licensor |
| Bearbrick (Medicom) | Art-object collaborations | Collab-driven, blank canvas | $50–$1,000+ | Designer collectible as decor |
| Pop Mart | Owned IP plus vertical retail | Co-owned artist IP, roster of 13+ | $27.99 | Emotional consumption engine |
Funko is the cautionary structural mirror. Funko built a roughly $1 billion business renting other people’s fandoms, which means it never owns the upside and carries inventory risk on whatever movie underperforms. Sonny Angel proved the blind box mechanic can mint a cult, but it rides one character family and cannot diversify out of its own face. Sanrio owns characters and licenses them out, an asset-light model that throws off royalties but cedes the retail relationship. Bearbrick treats the figure as art furniture and sells scarcity at the top of the market.
Pop Mart took the most expensive path: own the characters, run the stores, make the product. In 2023 its proprietary IP generated around RMB 4.2 billion in licensing across 217 active partnerships spanning fashion, food, automotive, and finance. That is the Sanrio royalty engine bolted onto the Sonny Angel mechanic bolted onto a vertically integrated retail footprint of roughly 130 stores and 192 Roboshops across 100 countries by the end of 2024. The structure is the actual product. Labubu is just the first thing it shipped at scale.
The blind box is the moat and the liability
The mechanic that built the company is also its single largest unmanaged risk. Blind boxes create artificial scarcity, secondary-market speculation, and a purchase loop that behaves like low-stakes gambling. That loop drove resale prices for third-generation Labubu to multiples of retail, and then drove them down roughly 80 percent from peak when Pop Mart scaled plush production to around 30 million units a month, ten times the prior year’s rate. The company says the resale crash helps it, because speculation was never the customer it wanted. That is the correct read. It is also an admission that the mechanic recruited the wrong buyers first. Regulators in China and the United States have begun scrutinizing blind box sales to minors. A brand whose grammar is a gambling loop has built its identity on a sentence regulators can edit.
Alignment
Here is what makes Pop Mart strategically interesting rather than merely large. It runs the cross-cultural expansion playbook backwards.
The standard model for a brand crossing borders is localization: adapt the product, translate the story, hire a market team, soften the foreignness. Pop Mart did close to none of that. It exported a Chinese-incubated aesthetic and a Chinese retail format into Western and Southeast Asian markets mostly intact, and the markets came to it. Overseas revenue grew 375.2 percent in 2024 to RMB 5.07 billion, 38.9 percent of the total. Southeast Asia grew 619.1 percent. North America grew 556.9 percent off a small base to RMB 720 million.
Wang is explicit about the direction of travel: “China’s excellent manufacturing industry and strong market can become a platform for artists around the world to incubate IPs, which are incubated in China and go global later.” Note who the artists are. Labubu came from Kasing Lung, a Hong Kong-born, Netherlands-raised illustrator who created the character for a picture book called The Monsters. Molly, the IP that built the company after its 2016 partnership, came from Hong Kong artist Kenny Wong. Pop Mart’s cultural fluency is structural, not performed. It does not run a “global inspiration” campaign. It signs artists from multiple cultures, gives them creative autonomy and shared ownership, and lets the figures carry whatever they carry.
This is the same lesson the quiet-luxury houses keep teaching, arriving from the opposite end of the price ladder. Cross-cultural range that lives in the work travels without a localization budget. Range that lives in a marketing deck flattens on contact. Pop Mart is a manufacturer in Beijing teaching luxury brands a positioning lesson they paid consultants to miss: if the object reads as desirable across cultures, you do not need to explain it in each one.
Identity
The identity problem is arithmetic. Labubu, sold through The Monsters series, generated RMB 3.04 billion in 2024, a 726.6 percent jump, about 23 percent of revenue. By the first half of 2025 The Monsters was RMB 4.81 billion, roughly 35 percent, and by full-year 2025 it climbed toward 38 percent. A company that wants to be read as a house of brands is becoming, in the market’s eyes, a single character with a stock ticker.
The portfolio is genuinely deeper than the headline. In 2024, four IPs each crossed RMB 1 billion: The Monsters, Molly, Skullpanda, and Crybaby. Thirteen artist IPs each cleared RMB 100 million. By the logic of a balanced IP studio, this is a healthy roster. By the logic of a stock, one character at 38 percent is concentration risk, and concentration risk priced at a P/E above 100 against a sector average near 13 is how you get a 40 percent rout when resale prices cool.
The deeper identity question is what these characters actually are. Labubu, Molly, Dimoo, and Skullpanda are faces, not stories. They have a look, a vibe, a color palette, and almost no narrative. Disney characters survive decades because they live inside stories you re-watch. Hello Kitty survives because Sanrio turned a face into a fifty-year licensing grammar with a settled meaning. Pop Mart characters are beautifully designed surfaces waiting for a reason to exist beyond the next drop. That is fine while the drops are hot. It is the thing that decides whether Labubu is the next Hello Kitty or the next Beanie Baby.
Foundation
The proof points are real and they are large. Revenue RMB 13.04 billion in 2024, up 106.9 percent. Net profit up 203.9 percent to RMB 3.31 billion. Gross margin 66.8 percent, the kind of number you expect from software, not vinyl. A retail and Roboshop network across 100 countries. A 40,000-square-meter theme park, Pop Land, open in Beijing’s Chaoyang Park since September 2023, with zones built around Molly, Dimoo, and The Monsters. A licensing book of 217 partnerships. At its 2025 peak the company touched a market capitalization around HKD 336.8 billion.
What could break the positioning is already visible. The single-IP concentration is the loud risk. The blind box mechanic carrying regulatory exposure is the quiet one. The resale-price collapse is the one the company has correctly reframed as healthy, because a brand that depends on scalpers does not control its own demand curve. And the valuation itself is a liability: when a stock is priced for permanent hype, every normal cooling reads as collapse, and a 40 percent drawdown wipes $14 billion off the founder’s net worth on a quarter that still posted records. The fundamentals did not break. The story the price was telling did.
Expression
The retail expression is excellent and the narrative expression is thin. Pop Mart stores are clean, bright, and built around the discovery moment. The Roboshops turn a vending machine into a brand touchpoint. Pop Land turns the characters into a physical place. The packaging is the product. As a system for manufacturing the feeling of surprise at the point of sale, it is close to best in class.
What is missing is everything that turns a face into a franchise. Pop Land is a photo backdrop, not a story world. There is no series you watch, no canon you learn, no reason Labubu means anything specific beyond “the cute toothy one.” Sanrio spent decades giving Hello Kitty a settled identity that licensees can build on without diluting. Disney sells the same characters for ninety years because the stories renew the meaning. Pop Mart sells aesthetics that renew through scarcity, which is a faster engine and a shorter one. The company knows this. The push toward animation, games, and theme parks is the attempt to retrofit narrative onto characters that became famous without it. The open question is whether you can install a story after the hype, or whether the story has to come first.
The positioning gap
Pop Mart’s positioning is nearly resolved at the structure level and unresolved at the meaning level. It owns its IP, controls its retail, and prints fashion margins on vinyl. That is a defensible machine. The gap is that the machine’s output is currently one character carrying 38 percent of the company and most of the narrative, and the market cannot tell whether it owns a studio or a fad.
The work is to make the company legible as a house of brands before Labubu cools, not after. Three moves follow from that. Decouple the identity from the hit: report, market, and merchandise the roster so Molly, Skullpanda, and Crybaby read as co-equal franchises, not Labubu’s supporting cast. Install narrative under the faces: a character with a story survives a cold quarter, a character with only a vibe does not, and the animation and games push has to lead the IP rather than trail the figures. And keep doing the one counterintuitive thing the company already gets right, which is welcoming the resale-price decline, because a brand that owns its demand outlasts one that rents it from scalpers.
Pop Mart has built the rarest thing in consumer products, an IP factory that actually makes hits. The next phase is convincing everyone, including its own shareholders, that the factory is the asset and Labubu is just the first thing off the line.