Labubu Was Never for Everyone

There was a moment in early 2024 when it felt like everyone in East Asia was either chasing, flexing, or quietly reselling a Labubu.

A puffball elf with spindly limbs and cartoon fangs, Labubu wasn’t conventionally cute. That was the point. Its creator, the Hong Kong artist Kasing Lung, described it as one of “The Monsters”—a character born from unease, mischief, and a kind of fairy-tale discomfort. What followed was anything but quiet. Labubu, released through Pop Mart’s blind-box format, exploded. It became a social code, not just a collectible. You’d see it clipped to Céline bags in Beijing, nestled into Jacquemus crossbodies in Seoul, stuffed into moody film snapshots on Xiaohongshu. Entire subreddits mapped resale trends like stock tickers. A rare first-generation model sold for $150,000 in Beijing.

Lisa from Blackpink posted hers, and the price floor jumped overnight.

It made sense. For many of us—raised between hyper-digital saturation and IRL drift—Labubu landed at the precise intersection of chaos and comfort. Ugly-cute, soft-sharp, limited-edition but emotionally indulgent. If you knew, you knew. If you didn’t, that was fine. Labubu wasn’t trying to explain itself.

Then came the backlash.

Not in Asia, where hype was already cooling in quiet, graceful waves. But in Europe, where Labubu arrived late and loud. TikTok swirled with frenzied unboxings, then with ridicule. A plushie with vampire teeth? Possessed by Pazuzu? “Adult McDonald’s toy” was one of the kinder comments. Some users literally lit theirs on fire and called it a cleansing ritual.

Pop Mart’s London flagship briefly shut down sales after overnight queues became unmanageable. But the mess wasn’t about supply and demand. It was about something deeper: Labubu no longer made sense.

Cultural translation doesn’t always fail. But it falters when there’s no context to carry it. In Asia, Labubu tapped into decades of aesthetic codes—kimo-kawaii, character lore, the emotional safety of collectibles in unstable times. It carried memory and mood, not just design. In Europe, that scaffolding wasn’t there. What arrived was a fangy creature with no recognisable lore and no social meaning beyond TikTok virality. Without Lisa. Without Monsters. Without blind-box culture. It became noise.

And it wasn’t the first time. JNBY’s attempt to launch its kidswear line abroad ran into cultural landmines. Be@rbrick sidestepped this by turning itself into a blank template—fashioned by collaborators rather than misunderstood by consumers. Even Hello Kitty, in her hyper-commercialised form, is easy to read anywhere. Labubu never had that neutrality. It carried too much of its context.

There’s something interesting about what happens when you take a niche symbol and try to scale it. Sometimes, the magic stretches. Other times, it breaks.

I don’t think Pop Mart misjudged the demand. But they underestimated how emotional logic travels. Labubu didn’t fail because it was weird. It failed because it meant too much in one place and too little in another. In Beijing, it could carry a whisper of rebellion, a wink of childhood, a badge of in-the-know-ness. In Berlin, it just looked like a stuffed goblin.

We talk about globalisation as if it’s a matter of access. That if you can ship something and market it, it should land. But resonance doesn’t work like that. Resonance is messy, slow, and sometimes untranslatable.

Labubu wasn’t made for the world. It was made for those who needed it at the time. Those who found it comforting in its ugliness, familiar in its strangeness. It belonged to a specific cultural moment that couldn’t be cloned.

And maybe that’s fine.