DIY-ing is the Newest Phase of China’s POPMART Craze

By now you have certainly heard of Chinese pop toy brand POPMART. In top tier cities in China, you can see traces of the brand almost everywhere. From POPMART stores, to vending machines, to little toys sitting on your colleagues’ desks! Most of its consumers are from younger generations. Well, their love towards the brand doesn’t stop at buying its iconic blind boxes. There is now a group of people who are devoted to DIY-ing those toys. They design, wash out the original design of toys, repaint them or add new accessories that they find somewhere else and post the final work on social media.

Though it is still a niche hobby, more and more young people have begun experimenting with POPMART DIY.

Why are POPMART Toys Popular for DIY?

POPMART is popular among Chinese young people

POPMART was founded in 2010. It really took off around 2016 and the company filed an IPO in 2020. Rocket speed.

Besides its cute IPs and toys, what people love about it is the blind box idea. You know that’s something you like inside, but you are not sure which toy you will get from the collection. That’s the charm of the unboxing process. It is easy to get addicted to it.

POPMART positions itself as a trendy pop toy brand like be@rbrick. Usually, pop toys cost more than ordinary ones, and their prices range from several hundred RMB to thousands of RMB, and they are often limited. But with POPMART, a typical toy only costs 59 RMB, some are a bit higher but they are no more than 100 RMB. Therefore in terms of DIY, it also costs less to make mistakes. And that’s one of the reasons why the brand is favored by those DIY designers.

POPMART’s IPs are not attached with specific emotions

The brand has many IPs with different characters. For example, its most popular IP is Molly, is a girl who loves cosplay and often has all sorts of interesting ideas. Dimoo, on the other hand, is a boy who are a bit funny but introverted; Skull Panda is a girl who can visit space using magical power and she looks a bit goth (in a cute way).

Those IPs have different identities. However, they are not defined with any emotion or mood. This gives those DIY designers room to picture their imagination and turn it into reality on those toys. Also, because POPMART’s IPs are popular, it is like trend-jacking or news-jacking. Those DIY toys gain attention online naturally and quickly.

DIY Pop Toys are Beneficial for POPMART’s Future

Writing this article reminds me of another one in which we talked about the importance of UGC. The article is about how Honey Snow City’s song overshadowed Nayuki Tea’s IPO.

POPMART is lucky that this niche community of talented DIY-ers are creating more buzz about the brand. It’s hard to find something that can trigger people to post about your brand, let alone voluntarily spending hours DIY-ing your products and posting their amazing creations.

DIY designers inspire POPMART’s designers to work harder

This is a blunt way to say but it’s true, as DIY designers create amazing works.

Yan Wuhao (言吾豪) is one of those popular POPMART DIY designers. He has signed with an MCN called Paqu (葩趣), which belongs to POPMART. Yan loves creating toys in series. For example, he once used Dimoo toys to create a few characters from a viral mobile game Honor of Kings. The series is very welcomed, and it has 5,394 likes on Little Red Book, while the average likes of his other posts are between 100-1,000. A collection or a series is also something that people can follow and build up connections with the designer.  Yan says it is a good thing for the DIY industry to develop as it will push POPMART’s own designers to work harder and gives them different angles and inspiration.

POPMART focusing on finding new talent and diversifying top IPs

POPMART knows it needs to constantly be adding new IPs to keep consumers interested.  Like we mentioned before, its most popular IP is Molly. In 2019, the IP helped the brand generate 456 million RMB, taking up 27.1% of its total revenue. But in 2020, Molly’s contribution decreased to 357 million RMB sales, which was only 14.2% of the total amount. This was largely because POPMART added many new IPs and those began to take up a larger share of the company’s revenue.

Together with the rise of a bunch of talented DIY designers, POPMART has been working hard in creating new IPs. The Skull Panda collection that we mentioned before was launched in 2020. The girl doesn’t look like sunshine but very sad and quirky. And this is the point that wins so many young people’s love.

Just one second after it was launched on Tmall, its sales quickly broke 3 million RMB and all of the collection’s stock was sold out on that day. Within three months, the IP had contributed nearly 40 million RMB sales, and consumers often find it hard to get one. Have you bought POPMART before? What do you think about its future?

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