BEIJING: Small, fuzzy and having sharp teeth, Chinese toymaker Pop Mart’s Labubu monster dolls have taken over the world, drawing excited crowds at international stores and adorning the handbags of celebrities such as Rihanna and Cher.
Beijing-based Pop Mart is part of a rising tide of Chinese cultural exports gaining traction abroad, furry ambassadors of a “cool” China even in places associated more with negative public opinion of Beijing, such as Europe and North America.
Labubus, which typically sell for around $40, are released in limited quantities and sold in “blind boxes”, meaning buyers don’t know the exact model they will receive.
The dolls are “a bit quirky and ugly and very inclusive, so people can relate”, interior designer Lucy Shitova told AFP at a Pop Mart store in London, where in-person sales of Labubus have been suspended over fears that fans could turn violent in their quest for the toys.
“Now everything goes viral… because of social media. And yes, it’s cool. It’s different.”
Pop Mart has bucked the trend, spawning copycats dubbed by social media users as “lafufus” and detailed YouTube videos on how to verify a doll’s authenticity.
Brands such as designer womenswear label Shushu/Tong, Shanghai-based Marchen, and Beijing-based handbag maker Songmont have also gained recognition abroad over the past few years.
“It might just be a matter of time before even more Chinese brands become globally recognisable,” Yang said.
Through viral exports like Labubu, China is “undergoing a soft-power shift where its products and image are increasingly cool among young Westerners,” said Allison Malmsten, an analyst at China-based Daxue Consulting.
Malmsten said she believed social media could boost China’s global image “similar to that of Japan in the 80s to 2010s with Pokemon and Nintendo”.
Video app TikTok — designed by China’s ByteDance — paved the way for Labubu’s ascent when it became the first Chinese-branded product to be indispensable for young people internationally.
Joshua Kurlantzick from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), an American think tank told AFP that “TikTok probably played a role in changing consumers’ minds about China”.
Cultural exports can “improve the image of China as a place that has companies that can produce globally attractive goods or services”, CFR’s Kurlantzick told AFP.
The Labubu dolls have taken the world by storm, and a Beijing auction house sold one four-foot-tall sculpture of the viral plush toy character for more than $150,000
