Wang Ning

Wang Ning was born in 1987 in Henan province, studied advertising at a college attached to Zhengzhou University, ran a small shop while he was a student, and spent a few months at Sina before deciding he would rather be a founder than an employee. In November 2010, at 23, he opened the first Pop Mart in a Beijing mall. The model was Log-On, the Hong Kong variety store: toys, cosmetics, stationery, gadgets, arranged for browsing. It was a shop with taste and no particular idea, and for four years it nearly failed. Investors passed. Wang later said he was turned down by dozens of them before an angel cheque kept the lights on.

What saved the company was not a vision but a spreadsheet. By 2015 the store data showed that one shelf — Sonny Angel, a Japanese blind-box figure — was producing around a third of sales in some locations while everything else idled. Wang asked his Weibo followers what else they collected, got the same answer over and over, and flew to Hong Kong to sign Kenny Wong's Molly. Within a year he had cut the rest of the assortment, and within four he had listed the company in Hong Kong at a valuation above HK$100 billion. He was 33. He and his wife, Yang Tao, still own close to half of it.

The contested part of his record is the mechanism he built. Blind boxes are, structurally, a lottery for children and young adults, and Chinese regulators have already said so — restricting sales to under-eights and requiring odds to be printed. Wang describes Pop Mart as a platform for artists and a company that sells joy, and both are true; it is also a company whose revenue rose and fell with Molly, then rose and fell with Labubu, and whose share price has twice lost most of its value when a character cooled. He has been candid about that in results calls, which I respect. He has been less candid about the artist contracts, which are the whole business and which nobody outside the company has seen.