John's run of show: Aug 29

A deep dive into the POPMART/ Labubu timeline

John Coogan and Brandon Gorrell

Aug 29, 2025

Happy Friday, we are live. The current thing is Labubus.

Here’s John’s run of show. 👇

Labubu Lessons from Beanie Babies

The last big collectible toy craze I remember was Beanie Babies. When I was a kid, my friend would pull up BeanieBabies.com — basically a digital catalog of stuffed animals that had blown up in the late ’90s. You could even feel the difference between dial-up and DSL: the site’s image-heavy pages loaded way faster on a better connection. The business rode the dot-com boom hard. In 1998, Ty, the maker of Beanie Babies, pulled in an estimated $1.4 billion in sales, making it one of the fastest-growing toy companies ever. Two years later, the market collapsed. Prices on the secondary market cratered as supply flooded in and speculators fled.

Now it’s Labubu’s turn. Pop Mart’s revenue tripled in the first half of 2025, already surpassing all of 2024. International sales are driving the surge. The appeal has a lot of layers: blind boxes make it a gambling-adjacent product, with rare dolls acting like loot drops; the whole “loot crate” mechanic from gaming is now in physical form. And then there’s the China angle — the country has dominated manufacturing for decades, but genuine cultural exports have been rare. (Yes, TikTok, but that’s more platform than content; it reflects local culture wherever it lands.)

You can dislike Labubu on those grounds and sit the craze out. What interests me is the long-term shape of the market. In the TikTok fight, the U.S. response wasn’t to ban it but to compete with Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. So if you’re Ty (Beanie Babies) or Mattel (Barbie), don’t you need a blind-box play? The vibe has shifted. A new meta is here. Just as video games went free-to-play with microtransactions, can a toymaker really compete today without a mystery-box, pseudo-gambling product?