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.