The following sentence can make a globalist scream with joy: a toy produced by a Chinese company in Vietnamese factories, designed by a Dutch artist in Belgium, inspired by Hong Kong’s independent toy culture and gained popularity thanks to a Thai K-pop star, has become the biggest cultural trend of Gen Z in 2025.
This disgusting phrase is the story of Labubu, the terrifyingly adorable stuffed monster that took over the world this summer. You’ve probably seen this trend before, but most people are still unaware of the global, decade-long history that led to it. Last week I published a report about my journey into the heart of Labubu, how this moment of cultural mania came about and where it might go.
This is an inherently international story, but it’s not the first time we’ve seen it. Think about how the world fell in love with Pokemon Go or Kpop bands like BTS and Blackpink. These are all examples of regional cultural powerhouses successfully finding a global audience for their work. What’s recent about Labubu, however, is that this is the first time a Chinese company has managed to achieve this level of success and cultural influence.
Sure, success on this scale is always about coincidences, but the more I covered this story, the more I realized the historical and economic reasons why Labubu and the toy company behind it, Pop Mart, were where they were. In many ways, it is like other Chinese tech companies that have gone from phony producers to international brands by moving up the value chain, turning production expertise into valuable technological knowledge.
The story of Labubu begins in Hong Kong in the 1970s and early 1980s, when the city became a center for toy production. From Mattel and Disney to the Japanese company Bandai, almost every major toy company outsourced production to factories in Hong Kong due to low labor costs.
Howard Lee, founder of Hong Kong toy studio How2Work, told me how this period of history shaped his childhood. “Many parents would go to factories and come home and outsource work, such as hand-painting toys at home,” he says. It was also straightforward for people to buy toys with cosmetic or functional imperfections directly from factories, so a generation of children like Lee grew up with relatively straightforward access to defective dolls and other toys, which made them long more for better ones they couldn’t afford.