The Strat · Episode 26 · Objects of Desire
23 July 2026 · 14 min
Pop Mart
Sell the box, not the toy. The customer is paying for the moment before they know what is inside.
From the show notes
The Rise of Pop Mart
Published as
Ep 26- The Rise of Pop Mart
§01 — What to listen for
Wang Ning opened Pop Mart in Beijing in 2010 as a variety store and nearly went under before discovering that one product category — the blind box — accounted for most of the profit. Listen for the pivot: the company stopped being a shop and became a machine for licensing artists' characters and selling them sealed.
The economics are the point. A blind box is a lottery ticket with a floor, secondary markets price the rare pulls, and every purchase is an advertisement for the next one. Pop Mart listed in Hong Kong in 2020 and has been growing fastest outside China. The episode pairs with the Labubu one that precedes it: this is the platform, that is the hit.
The episode tells the story. The written case does what twelve minutes cannot: the business model, the moat, the statements, the valuation, and a verdict. Read the Pop Mart teardown.
§02 — The strategy, named
The mechanisms this episode demonstrates, in the same vocabulary the case library uses. Where a pattern has been written up, the claim is here; otherwise the tag is still in the queue.
- platform flywheel
Subsidise the thing customers count, and earn on the thing they do not.
- scarcity engineering
Deliberately supplying less than the market demands can be worth more than the revenue it forfeits.
- customer does the labour
Tagged across the library; the write-up is in the queue.
- category creation
Tagged across the library; the write-up is in the queue.
§03 — Go deeper
Pop Mart
Contested moat · Watch it
Your turn
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?
Wang Ning · 2016
Verdict
Watch it
If a character other than The Monsters passes RMB 3 billion in annual revenue while The Monsters is still shrinking, the platform has proved it can replace its own hit and I would pay for the machine rather than the toy. If instead revenue falls in step with Labubu's resale prices and no successor appears within two years, Pop Mart was a licensor that got lucky twice, and I should value it like a toy company.
§04 — More from Objects of Desire
How an ordinary object becomes a craze, and what the company does when the craze ends.
- 25LabubuLicense one artist's monster, hang it on a pop star's handbag, and let the resale market set the price.13 min
- 37JellycatRetire the designs, raise the prices, and turn a soft toy into something adults collect.8 min
- 38Victoria's SecretBuild the most valuable fantasy in retail, then watch the customer stop wanting it.8 min
- 39Bath & Body WorksSell a cheap thing that smells like a memory, and rotate the range so fast the customer has to come back.8 min
- 40Hydro FlaskLet a subculture adopt you, sell the surface it decorates, and know the wave will pass.8 min
- 41StanleyFind the customer your hundred-year-old brand never noticed, and let her sell the cup for you.8 min
- 42OwalaEnter a saturated market late with one genuinely better feature and a colour drop calendar.7 min
- 43CrocsStop apologising for the product. Make ugliness the point, and sell the customisation.7 min