Why Is Everyone Obsessed With Labubus?

0:00Hey everyone, it's Jess. I'm here to say that my colleague Michelle Hackman is here to guest host today's episode. Enjoy.

0:12Can we start with just having you introduce yourself? So hi, my name is Ebony, Ebony Hall. I am 26 years old from Georgia. Yes, I'm a mommy, mamacita. Ebony Hall has one of those jobs that you probably didn't even know existed. She's a Labubu influencer. I'm your Labuski loving bestie. That's how I kind of sum it up as far as my content creation. La Boo Boo's are the latest toys that have taken the world by storm. They're little furry monsters. Kind of creepy, but also kind of cute. They have pointy ears, big eyes, and wide, toothy grins. They look a little mischievous. It can be pretty hard to get your hands on one.

0:57But I actually managed to pick one up ahead of my call with Ebony. So I'm going to describe actually what's in my hand. So I'm holding this like pastel box. It's maybe six inches tall. And on the side here, there are like six different options of what could be in this box. I don't actually know what's in here. It doesn't say. And I'm going to open it, see what's inside. Yes, I'm so excited for you. Labubus are like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get. That's because they come in what's called a blind box. And when you open one to reveal the labubu inside, it can feel like a whole event.

1:35So you kind of lift the tab up. You see that little tab right there? Yeah. And you grab it and just... And just go like that. All right, that'll work. It's open. All right. Let's see. See, let's see. Oh, wow. You guys... Oh, was that sesame? Hello. No, that's toffee. Oh my God. Congratulations on your first LeBou baby, LeBoucey baby. It is so cute.

2:10For the record, I got a little sandy colored monster. It's part of the exciting macaron of LeBoubou collection. It's a little neutral that I think is going to look great on my backpack. If you're a frequent TikTok user, you've probably seen these toys everywhere. This is a labubo. The girls who hate labubo, they're not for you, babe. This is so cute. And for Pop Mart, the Chinese toy company that makes labuboos, business has been labubooming.

2:47Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Michelle Hackman. It's Thursday, August 7th.

3:00Coming up on the show, scarcity, scary cute monsters, and the LaBooBoo takeover.

3:22When my colleague Caitlin Wang started reporting on LaBooBoo's, she was a bit of a skeptic. Yeah, you know, when I first started looking into this, I was like, I don't know about these guys. You know, I wasn't really sure either, but as I really reported this out, spoke to people who like them, I myself started to gain a little bit of affection for them. They're really honestly kind of like cute. I think people have described them as ugly cute, which I think is maybe a little bit mean to them. People all over the Internet have fallen in love with these ugly cute little monsters. There are tons of videos of people unboxing them.

4:01Am I a grown-ass woman on the internet about to unbox a Lububu? Yes. Was I originally a hater about the Lububus, but then I remembered I was raised with Furbies, Teletubbies, and Beanie Babies, and realized that it was really never that deep and live a little? Also, yes. They also dress up their Lububus. Welcome to my series where I match my outfits to my Lububus. I bought four different outfits for different occasions. First one is for my pickleball bag. And her little hat has a really pretty flower on it. You can see the details. And people also wear their LeBuboos. They often come on a keychain.

4:36Here's my LeBuboos with its Prada outfit. And here's my Prada bag. Cute! So I got my LeBuboos matching my Prada bag.

4:51LeBuboos were introduced by the Chinese toy company Pop Mart in 2019. But it wasn't until last year that they started to take off globally after some celebrities were seen wearing them. We've seen LaBubu's dangle off, you know, Madonna, Rihanna. Lisa from Blackpink has said she loves Pop Mart. Dylan Brooks, the NBA player, was seen walking into a game with a LaBubu dangling from his hip. So there's just so much hype around these characters, and that kind of makes you want one. That's when Ebony, the influencer you heard from earlier, started to get into LaBubu's. I saw Rihanna and she had the lychee berry labubu in her photo.

5:31And I said, you know what, that's kind of cute. So once I saw that lychee berry exciting macaron on Rihanna's back, I said, you know what, let's just see. So Ebony decided to document on TikTok her attempt at snagging her first labubu. I am determined to get a labubu tonight. Like, I don't care what I have to do. I am getting a labuski. Ebony's quest to get a labubu, or as she lovingly calls them, labuskis, went viral. Her post got more than 300 ,000 views and her follower count doubled. Since then, she's leaned into Libubu content. Ebony says she's bought hundreds of Libubu blind boxes, which at the moment retail for$27.99 apiece in the U.S.

6:12As far as how much I've spent, I have spent thousands on Libubus. Many of them she ends up reselling. Her personal collection of just over a dozen Libubus sits on a shelf, a labubu altar framed with neon lights along with other figurines. Are you like guarding these things with your life? Are you actually wearing them? Yes, I'm guarding them with my, well, I won't say that. I do, my labubus go out into the world. They are well-traveled, okay? They go to McDonald's with me. We go to Walmart together. Yes, my favorite labubu that I wear down, I wear it outside the world, everywhere I go. It's going to be my Fallen Wild labubu.

6:50It's the plush pendant. Why do you like them so much? What's the appeal? It's the fight more so than the product, I feel like. I will always say that. I think the appeal is not so much in the product, but in the ways or methods that we have to go through, the trials and tribulations that we have to go through in the part of our battlefields to get the products. Put me in that moment. What happens when there's about to be a drop? What do you do? So initially, we would get a countdown and you would just have to prepare yourself, Like kind of mentally prepare yourself and your TikTok to go through this process of fighting over 20 ,000 people for potentially 200 items, maybe.

7:29Maybe 100 sometimes. They'll even drop five. So you really don't know until after the drop. How can you put yourself in position to beat 20 ,000 people? Click fast and pray hard. Click fast and pray hard. This is like me trying to get concert tickets on Ticketmaster. Yes, that is a perfect example. Okay, if you want to see Yancey front row, you're going to make sure that LTE is up to date. You're going to make sure that your Wi-Fi is paid up. For Ebony, she waits with bated breath to buy LaBuboos online. Other people may have a Pop Mart store nearby. Most are in Asia, but the company is expanding quickly in the U.S., and those stores can get pretty crowded.

8:15Our colleague Caitlin was in L.A. and saw the frenzy firsthand when Pot Mart announced its latest drop of LeBouBou's. Michelle, when I tell you it was the craziest experience I've ever had, I've really never seen anything like it.

8:31What was it like? Yeah, there were over 2 ,000 people there before 10 a.m., which is when the store opens. Why? They were all lining up, trying to get their hands on this new lapupu. There were people who I'd met who were there since 8 p.m. the night before. There were people in line. There were people still streaming in. And keep in mind, I was there at 6 a.m. The store wasn't going to open for another four hours.

9:06And what happened when the store opened? Yeah, well, they had planned for this in-person shopping drop, right? They had a certain amount of LeBubu sets, and they were going to sell them to people who shop in-store. There were so many people there, and the crowd got rowdy enough that they actually canceled in-store shopping for the LeBubus. Things got so out of hand that the store decided to sell the LeBubus online. What do you make of all the commotion? Like, what is driving this devotion that's getting people to line up 12 hours before this store opens? I think it's a really interesting exercise in collectibles and in scarcity.

9:46And they're just so hard to get. They're sold out all the time, except for when Pop Mart does a drop. And they do do a drop every week, but they sell out within minutes. And so this kind of all just drives this sort of crazy, crazy hype. And that's why you have people lining up for hours and hours trying to be the first in line to make sure they can buy one. The hype behind La Boo Boo's has been a major break for the toy's maker, Pop Mart. The company has been around since 2010 and makes all kinds of blind box collectibles. They've enjoyed relative success, especially in Asia. They were doing really well before La Boo Boo's.

10:26They were growing really, really steadily in 2017. They had about 21 million USD in revenue, and by 2022, they were looking at 642 million. Pop Mart likes to collaborate with popular artists. That's where Labubu came from. The character was created by a Hong Kong artist named Kai Sing Leung. And they consider these toys high-end. So even though Pop Mart's toys are popular with kids, the company says they actually aim for a different demographic. They're aiming for this sort of what they call a kid-old customer, someone who is an adult, someone who has their own spending money, but really loves nostalgia, wants to collect these items.

11:14They're collectibles more than they are toys. What has the Lububu done to Popmart's business overall? It has made it go crazy, is the short answer of that. I mean, Popmart was a big company, especially in Asia beforehand. But Lububu and the growth of Lububus have really turbocharged Popmart's sort of status, especially here in the States. Pop Mart's revenue has doubled in just the last year, reaching$1.8 billion and turning the Chinese toy maker into a global phenomenon. But their rise has faced some bumps. That's next.

12:07After my very first Labubu unboxing with Ebony, I called another Labubu expert. My eight-year-old niece, Olivia.

12:18Hi, Liv. Hi. Look what I got.

12:26It's a LeBubu. It's so cute. Olivia is a proud LeBubu owner. I have the yellow one with, like, a blue-pink heart, and it's tied to its belly, and the, like, the string is, like, blue, and there's, like, a bow in the front. But I'm also calling Olivia because they need her help with something. She happens to be an avid LeBubu authenticator. If it has 10 teeth, then it's definitely fake. Okay, but how many teeth does it have to have? It has to have nine. Okay. And even some fake ones have nine, I think. Olivia, let's count, let's count. Hold on. I think. One, two, three. Luckily for me, it looks like this LeBubu is the real deal.

13:22But I had to double check. And that's because, since they're now so hard to get, there's been an explosion of counterfeits. There's a name for these fake LeFoufous. I think we got LeFoufous. We got played. LeFoufous. My colleague Caitlin says that even these fake LeFoufous have garnered a dedicated fan base. Something really interesting that I don't think I've seen with something so popular is that people are proud to own dupes. So people are showing off their LeFoufous and their LeBoufous, and it's sort of just become this, like, inside joke. It's a Lefoufou, but I don't care. I wanted one so bad, so.

13:59I went to my local dollar store and found Lefoufous, honey, and they were only$15, so. I bought Lefoufous at a pawn shop in Vegas. Or are they Lefoufous? One thing is clear. The Lefoufou industrial complex is in full swing. Not only are counterfeit sellers making a killing off Lefoufous, there's also an entire secondary market for the real thing. I mean, it's the scarcity model, right? There are more people who want Lububus than they are able to sell them for. And if you really want one, they're on eBay, they're on Facebook Marketplace, they're on StockX, often selling for double the price. For some really rare Lububus, resales have had them going for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

14:48A global collectible craze. These Labubu figurines have gone viral. One rare edition selling for$230 ,000.

14:59So what happens when Labubu shopping gets out of hand? In Asia, some countries have looked to rein in Labubus and similar toys. For example, the Chinese government has banned sales of blind box toys to children under the age of eight. And in Singapore, they've proposed capping the retail price of blind boxes. I mean, a lot of people have made the comparison that a blind box, pulling a blind box, opening it, is kind of a form of gambling. Because you're investing in this anticipation, you really want this big payoff, and you just don't know what you're going to get. So what has Popmart said about that?

15:37Yeah, Pumert's response to the regulations has really been that they have never intended themselves to be marketed towards children. On their boxes and their website and everything, they say the product is for 15 plus. The company says they're also looking to expand beyond blind boxes. They're offering tech accessories. They're offering other kind of stuffed toys, plush toys. all in the hopes that people are connecting with their IP. And that sort of connection will drive sales beyond the blind box model. In China, Pop Mart has even opened a theme park called Popland, where you can go and mingle with life-size Labubu characters.

16:25If you love Pop Mart as much as I do, you've come to the right place. Outside of China, Pop Mart's sales have more than tripled in the last year, and overseas revenue now makes up nearly 40 % of the company's sales. Do you think the boo-boos are almost like another passing fad? Like, you and I probably grew up with Beanie Babies, you know, but more recent generations have had Squishmallows and Tamagotchis. You know, is this like going to be a passing fad, or do you think the boo-boos are here to stay? I think that's the big question for Popmart. I mean, obviously they've taken advantage of this moment and taken advantage of it well, but how do they create this lasting empire off of this viral moment?

17:08I think that that kind of remains to be seen, but what they are trying to do, like I mentioned, is connect their customers with that IP, and so it sort of breeds some sort of loyalty. I spoke to an analyst while I was working on this piece, And he told me that we should probably start looking at Potmar as something more similar to Disney. I mean, look at the theme park, right? They're really banking on their own intellectual property, their own characters, the stories and the narratives they create to build this empire. Wow. So do you think we're going to end up with like a Le Boo Boo movie, almost like the Barbie movie?

17:52Never say never.

18:08The Wall Street Journal