Case study · retrospective
Hindsight, not a call. It is easy to line the dates up afterwards. Nothing here is a claim that Early Trends flagged Labubu before the craze, and nothing here is a reason to buy one as an investment.
Retrospective Toys & Collectibles
What it is
Labubu is a character in The Monsters, a story world by Hong Kong-born artist Kasing Lung, who grew up in the Netherlands. Channel News Asia describes the world as inspired by Nordic fairy tales, begun in 2015, with elves, fairies and monsters. Labubu has pointed ears, a serrated grin and fur, and is written as kind-hearted in a way that still causes trouble. In 2019 Lung signed an exclusive licence with Pop Mart. The dolls are often blind boxes: you buy a sealed pack and find out which figure you got when you open it. The BBC notes series names including Big into Energy, Have a Seat, Exciting Macaron and Fall in Wild.
When each signal would have lit
The late-biased order most write-ups use is celebrity, then short video, then search, then resale. The earlier detectors in our method are specialty scarcity and restocks. Labubu had both, and the celebrity posts came in the middle of that, not at the start of the object’s life.
| When | Signal | What was public |
|---|---|---|
| 2015, then 2019 | Character, then a retailer | The Monsters begins as an artist’s world. Pop Mart takes the licence in 2019 and sells blind boxes. This is a product existing, not yet a craze. |
| Before April 2024 | Specialty hunt and resale | The Standard, writing about the Lisa wave in Thailand, said the Exciting Macaron keychain was already scarce among art-toy buyers. It put resale around 1,000–1,300 baht against about 550 baht in the shop, with people pre-ordering from abroad. That is a collector-community signal. It does not need a K-pop post. |
| April 2024 | Celebrity seed | The BBC says popularity soared when BLACKPINK’s Lisa posted Instagram photos with Labubu. The Los Angeles Times (5 November 2024) describes a video of her hugging a large plush, then bag charms, and notes she was not a brand spokesperson. Channel News Asia describes an Instagram story with a giant plush and a charm. This is the moment most timelines start. It is real. It is not the first public signal. |
| From April 2024 | Restock sell-outs | The Los Angeles Times: since April, every new release and restock of the plush sold out, usually within minutes. Lines, fights, counterfeits and resellers followed. A restock that vanishes in minutes is the scarcity signal, repeating, not a one-off unboxing. |
| 2024–2025 | Short video and the five-second face | The grin reads in one glance, and a blind-box opening is a built-in short clip. We score that as a format advantage. We are not quoting a view count, and a format is not a sell-out. |
| February–May 2025 | The late celebrity pile-on | The BBC: Rihanna photographed with a Labubu on a Louis Vuitton bag in February; Kim Kardashian shared a collection of ten in April; David Beckham posted one in May that his daughter had given him. If your detector is “a famous person is holding it,” you are now a year past Lisa, and further past the collector hunt. |
What we are not waiting for
Search interest is the question “what is that on the bag?” It moves after the pictures are everywhere. We are not pasting a Google Trends chart we did not pull, so we do not invent a peak date. Resale above retail is in the Thai shop-versus-resale range and in the queues the Los Angeles Times described. We never recommend buying to resell. Counterfeits were part of the same wave, which is why this page has no marketplace button.
Crowdfunding does not apply. Pop Mart is a retailer, not a Kickstarter. The early detector here is specialty scarcity plus restocks that sold through in minutes, not a pledge total.
Why there is no Where to buy
The Los Angeles Times reported counterfeits and resellers alongside the real drops. We did not verify a stable official Amazon listing for one specific Labubu series, so we are not tagging a guess. If you want one, use Pop Mart’s own shop and accept that a blind box is a toy, not a savings plan.
Sources
- Channel News Asia — The Monsters, the 2019 Pop Mart licence, and Lisa’s posts
- BBC — April 2024 Lisa posts, and the 2025 celebrity photos
- Los Angeles Times, 5 November 2024 — minute-scale sell-outs, lines, counterfeits
- The Standard — Exciting Macaron already scarce among art-toy buyers, with the baht resale range
- Wikimedia Commons — shop-window photograph by Sandor Somkuti, CC BY-SA 4.0