But once the “cool hunters” move on, Wall Street does too, and Wang is finding that out the expensive way.
Since Pop Mart’s peak on Aug. 26, the stock has plunged about 20%, erasing $13 billion in market cap—a quarter of his company’s worth—as the craze shows its age. The Beijing-based toymaker’s Hong Kong stock continued to dive on Monday, sliding as much as 9% in its steepest single-day tumble since the U.S. unveiled “Liberation Day” tariffs in April.
Pop Mart did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
For much of 2024 and early 2025, Pop Mart was the darling of the Hang Seng Index as Labubu dolls sparked a frenzy across Asia. But a toy with a hype built on its engineered scarcity—Labubu dolls are notoriously difficult to collect and have a thriving resale and forgery market—cannot be valuable forever.
“The whole thing feels like the inevitable life cycle of something that becomes faddish, hits saturation, and then begins to fizzle,” Brook Duffy, a social media researcher and a communications professor at Cornell University, told Fortune. “Once too much attention gets lavished on a trend, it immediately loses its social currency.”
Pop Mart’s breakneck growth hasn’t reversed yet. Sales have surged over the past two years, with revenue more than doubling in 2024 and climbing another 200% in the first half of 2025.
“As soon as you saw celebrities showing them off, that was the tipping point for Gen Z,” Duffy explained. “What was scarce suddenly felt commercial.”
The deep question is whether Labubu can have a “soft landing” from its craze and evolve from fad to franchise.
“The novelty is always going to wear off,” Duffy said. “You just don’t know when. That unpredictability is what keeps marketers up at night.”
But sustaining cultural relevance is harder than scaling retail.
“Right now feels like a critical inflection point,” Duffy said. “In a social media era, the hype cycle moves at breakneck speed. Something that was everywhere yesterday can feel overexposed today.”
For Wang, the clock is ticking: find a way to keep Labubu fresh, or risk watching his billion-dollar mascot fade into the toy box of past fads.
