In late April, Dana Nguyen drove out to her PO Box to pick up her mail. Nguyen was expecting a shipment of Labubu dolls from Pop Mart, a Chinese company that specialises in collectable toys. The amount of orders she received was so massive that she could barely fit it all into the trunk of her sedan.
“It was a mountain of packages, boxes on boxes,” Nguyen says. “Maybe 14 boxes or so that I had to pick up and carry by myself to my car. I kind of just stood there looking at the packages thinking, Wow, I can’t believe I got all this stuff.”
At first, the 26-year-old’s Pop Mart orders started in small increments: £40 here, £40 there. But after a few months, purchases started to become larger and more frequent. “Once I started buying the $300 big Labubu (around £230), that’s when I started spending more,” says Nguyen, who runs a facility-services company with her husband.
It was only until Nguyen had spent around $4,000 (that's almost £3,000) on Labubu dolls that she realised her habit might be getting out of control. “I looked at my credit card [statement] a couple months ago, and I was like, Damn. I spent thousands. Thousands.”
And it's happening here in the UK, too. Last month, Ashley Bushey, a 32-year-old from Corby in Northamptonshire, told the BBC that she had spend £1,000 on 13 dolls since December.
The toy that stole all the fashion girls' hearts.
Created by Hong Kong artist Kasing Lung in 2015, Labubus — a character from Pop Mart’s Nordic-inspired Monsters Collection — are known for their furry coats, beady eyes, and trademark razor-tooth smiles.
Cute and slightly menacing, the dolls have gone from niche collectable to full-blown phenomenon in the past few months, appearing everywhere online and in real life. Unboxing videos on YouTube and TikTok have amassed millions of views, while celebrities like Rihanna, Dua Lipa, and Lisa have been photographed with rare Labubus clipped onto their designer bags. According to a May 2025 report, Pop Mart’s valuation reached an estimated $34 billion (almost £30 billion), which is more than Hasbro, Mattel, and Sanrio combined. In May, sales of Labubus in the UK were put on hold after reports of full-on brawls in shops. Some fashion rental services, like By Rotation, even have Labubus up for rent for prices that start at £4 a day.
Adults collecting toys is not an uncommon pastime. The market for cute and kitschy has always been profitable, most notably with the Beanie Babies frenzy in the ’90s. But with the power of social media, Pop Mart’s influence has been swift and staggering.
Founded in 2010 by CEO Wang Ning, the company is widely credited for popularising the designer-toy category in recent years, relying on the scarcity principle, the economic model that drives profit through purposely low supply for high-demand goods, with curated drops and limited-edition collections.
All Labubus come in “blind box” packaging, which conceals the doll until it’s opened. Within each themed “series,” Pop Mart hides a “secret” Labubu — a rare design that differs from the standard collection — in scarce quantities. Pop Mart has also collaborated with fashion designers and clothing brands on exclusive Labubu apparel.
According to Jennifer Heinen, founder of Style-Mind Shift, a coaching program that bridges fashion psychology with personal development, Pop Mart has taken the scarcity principle to the next level.
“The limited-edition drops, blind-box packaging, and fast sellouts create an emotional urgency that triggers FOMO [fear of missing out], which overrides rational decision-making and boosts obsessive collecting,” Heinen says. She compares the hysteria to the streetwear boom of the 2010s. “Labubu is to collectable toys what Supreme is to streetwear: Both are master classes in engineered scarcity, identity signalling, and emotional attachment through limited access.”
Nguyen, who is a member of the Labubu online Reddit community, has warned new collectors about the pitfalls of “secret hunting,” a term used for tracking down rare Labubus. She knows some users who have spent £1,500 to £2,200 a month on blind boxes chasing secrets. “It’s 100% gambling,” says Nguyen. “You only have a chance of getting this stuff. I’ve seen [collectors] say things like, ‘I don’t have gas money for the month. If I run out of gas right now, I wouldn’t be able to go to work for the next two weeks'.”
Some Redditors have even opened up about conditions like ADHD and bipolar disorder, which have made it hard for them to stop purchases. Heinen says people who are neurodivergent can experience an “outsized psychological impact” from blind-box marketing. “When an accessory becomes a proxy for acceptance, control, or visibility, it stops being just a choice. And in neurodivergent populations, where emotional regulation already operates differently, that can become a trap,” she says.
The last time Nguyen purchased a Labubu from Pop Mart’s website was at the end of May, but in recent weeks, securing one has become nearly impossible due to high demand and a lucrative resale market.
Charles Yee, 35, a self-described “Labubu hunter,” has sought out the plushie for family members and friends by request. Yee has mostly shopped through Pop Mart’s online app and TikTok shops waiting for restocks to happen, and has become so skilled he’s noticed a pattern.
“Usually sometime between 8:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. they restock,” says Yee. “There are days where it’s Saturdays and Sundays, and sometimes Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays as well. Mondays for the Exciting Macaron series and Have a Seat series, they actually drop it constantly around 8:30 p.m.”
But even if you wait around for these drops, there’s no guarantee you’ll secure a Labubu. Amalie MacGowan, 31, owns 10 Labubus in her collection but has never scored one directly from Pop Mart. MacGowan, who is the associate director of creative development at Teen Vogue (owned by Condé Nast, the publisher of GLAMOUR), buys from resellers like StockX and speciality stores like All In Anime. “I’ve logged on at the very specific hour or minute, and it sells out within 30 seconds, mostly due to bots,” she says.
According to Yee, the “bots” are a computer script used by resellers to buy out inventory. “It is way faster at buying than what a typical human can do,” he says. “Resellers pay for the service of the bot, and then that’s how they would secure it.”
Blind boxes from the Exciting Macaron, Have a Seat, and Big Into Energy cost £17.50 , but MacGowan has seen them priced resale from £30 to £45 each at specialty stores in the US, while StockX can cost you even more. If you don’t want to deal with blind-box gambling, you can even buy a secret Labubu from resellers, but it comes with a hefty price tag. “A ‘secret’ can probably run you up at least £300,” says Yee.
Another drawback to resale is the risk of purchasing a fake. Dubbed by fans as “Lafufus,” bootleg Labubus have become more and more common — and convincing. Yee says he knows of one-to-one replicas being sold in reused packaging with fake QR codes that direct you to a lookalike Pop Mart website.
And her pair retails for £160.
MacGowan, who has spent around $400 on her collection (around £300), has cross-referenced her dolls with authentic Labubus. “Checking the barcodes, looking at the eyes, making sure their feet move and heads can move all the way around,” she says. Despite this, MacGowan isn’t 100% certain all her dolls are genuine. “They could be really, really good dupes. When it’s not from an authorised retailer, there’s no authenticity guaranteed.”
However, it may be possible to land a genuine Labubu from resale. Lulu, a 21-year-old based in North Carolina, is considered one of the most reliable resellers online. Through her Instagram and Facebook accounts, and platforms like StockX and Mercari, Lulu has sold more than 1,000 Labubus.
“There’s often confusion between official distribution sellers, third-party distributors, and individual collectors just reselling extras versus people who buy with bots and sell at extremely high rates,” she says. Lulu considers herself a third-party distributor and works for a “sub-company of an official Pop Mart distributor,” which she claims handles international sales. Some of Lulu’s buyers order more than 1,000 sets of Labubus, though she doesn’t work with them directly. “I’m on a smaller-scale, 1-to-100-cases kind of girlie.”
If you don’t want to deal with the tricky online market, buying a Labubu from one of Pop Mart’s few US stores isn’t any less difficult. On restock days, fans used to wait overnight in lines for blocks, but now Pop Mart requires them to reserve their purchase through its app first, then pick it up in store. According to Yee, Pop Mart has also recently implemented a purchase limit per account.
The frenzy is so intense, some collectors are starting to wonder whether sellouts are actually real. “My conspiracy theory on this is that the bots are Pop Mart,” Nguyen says. “They’re making this false scarcity. I one hundred percent believe that these are not selling out as much as we think they are. They have so much inventory, but they’re only putting out maybe 20 boxes here, 20 boxes there.”
In a statement to GLAMOUR, Pop Mart denies any “artificial inventory manipulation” and maintains the company is trying its best to keep fans happy. “From a go-to-market perspective, we prioritise getting products into fans’ hands as soon as inventory becomes available,” the company said. “Our teams continue to explore ways to minimise the impact of bots and resellers, with the goal of delivering a fair, creative, and joyful experience for our community around the world.”
In the meantime, the company encourages fans to explore the Pop Mart portfolio featuring other options like Crybaby, Peach Riot, Hirono, and SkullPanda. “It’s important to remember that Labubu is just one part of Pop Mart’s growing universe of collectible characters,” the company adds.
In her post-Labubu clarity, Nguyen is taking that idea one step further: “The feeling of wanting something you can’t have is addicting, rather than the item itself,” she says. “Because honestly, I’m staring at my Labubus right now and they’re just cotton, they’re just vinyl. They’re just little plush toys, right?”
Ariana Yaptangco is the senior beauty editor at GLAMOUR.
This article originally appeared in GLAMOUR (US).
