Case 26 — Pop Mart · Wang Ning · 2016

One shelf is carrying the shop. Do you make the shelf bigger, make the shelf the shop, or make yourself the shelf for everyone else's toys?

You have run a variety store in Beijing for five years, modelled on a Hong Kong chain: toys, cosmetics, stationery, gadgets, arranged for browsing. You have a handful of locations, thin margins, and a string of investors who have passed. Your till data says something strange. One shelf — Sonny Angel, a small Japanese figure sold in sealed boxes so the buyer cannot see which one she is getting — is producing around a third of sales in some stores. You do not own the character; you buy it from a distributor like anyone else. You have asked your followers on Weibo what else they collect, and the answer, repeatedly, is Molly, a pouting girl drawn by a Hong Kong designer named Kenny Wong who sells a few hundred figures at a time to collectors. Nobody has ever sold a designer toy in a blind box at scale. You have enough cash for one bet.

Choose before you scroll. The answer is hidden until you commit.