I bought into the Labubu craze a few months ago. No, I’m not personally into the little monster doll with buck teeth; neither are my wife and our two kids, though we are all, at least notionally, adults.
I say that because Labubu seems to appeal more to infantilised grown-ups around the world than actual children. We all have had, as a colleague, the office secretary who decorated her entire desk with Hello Kitty or My Melody accessories. Strangely, it’s always either one or the other because true fans cannot be – or seen to be – into both Kitty and Melody. You can’t have divided loyalty.
It was celebrities like Lisa of Blackpink who became early adopters of Labubu and popularised the collectible. Not up on your K-pop idols? No worries, try Labubu’s older fans such as hotel heiress and businesswoman Paris Hilton and her mum Kathy, actress Michelle Yeoh and even 79-year-old singer Cher.
I was into the other craze, the hot stock-chasing kind. Kinder souls call it momentum buying; ruder and more honest ones say it’s just following the herd. That means I bought almost exactly at the top when shares of Chinese parent company Pop Mart shot through the roof and tripled in August from the start of the year. Since then, I have been under water, though I am still hopeful.
Pop Mart had just had a blowout quarter. CEO Wang Ning said it would be “quite easy” to achieve a 130 per cent annual growth, or a projected 30 billion yuan (US$4.2 billion) in sales for the full year.
Some critics, though, are not so confident. The sales are already priced in, they say, and Pop Mart – which is listed in Hong Kong – is a one-trick pony. It lacks product diversification with no other dolls that can compete in popularity. So interest in Labubu and therefore company share prices is hard to sustain. Labubu alone takes up 35 per cent of Pop Mart sales.