How Hong Kong Gave Rise to Labubu

The following sentence A Globalist can shout for joy: a toy built by a Chinese company in a Vietnamese factory, designed by a Dutch artist from Belgium, inspired by the Indi toy culture of Hong Kong, and made a Thai Kap star viral thanks, the largest geni-jade cultural trend of 2025.

The hate of a sentence is the story of Labubu, the CryP-corty stuffed monsters that spread the world this summer. You must have seen this trend right now, but most people are still unaware of the decade long story worldwide. Last week, I’ve published a Characteristics About my journey in Labubu’s heart, how this cultural mania moment was created and where it could go from here.

This is an inherent international story, but this is why we haven’t seen it for the first time. Think of how the world fell Pokémon Go Or Cape Band like BTS and Blackpink. These are the successes of the worldwide audience for their work, examples of all regional cultural power houses industry. What is new about Labubu, but for the first time, any Chinese company was able to make this level of success and cultural impact engineers.

Of course, there is always coincidence in working for the success of this scale, but the more I have reported in this story, the Labubu and the toy companies behind it, pop mart, the historical tihassic and economic reasons I have understood more. In different ways, it is analogous to other Chinese technology agencies that went to the international name brands from fake producers, removed the value chain because they transformed manufacturing experience into valuable technical knowledge.

The Labubu story began in the early 1970s and 9s in Hong Kong, when the city became a production center for toys. From Matel and Disney to Bandai in Japan, almost every major toy company was outsourcing in Hong Kong factory, due to low labor expenditure.

Howard Lee, the founder of the Hauk Kong’s toy studio, told me how that period of history has turned his childhood. “Many parents used to go to the factory at home and come home with outsourced gig work like hand painting toys,” he said. People were easy to buy toys with cosmetics or effective imperfections directly from the factories, so children like Lee grew up with relatively easy access to a generation of defective dolls and other toys, which made them more urge to afford it.