There was a line of hundreds of people in front of the Pop Mart store in Los Angeles at 4:45 a.m. on Friday.
Korin Reese arrived thinking she was somewhat early and was stunned to find customers already waiting. Some brought stools and foldable chairs to sit on, while others came with bags full of snacks and drinks. Ms. Reese heard that some of the people in line had been there since 10 p.m. the day before.
They, like Ms. Reese, wanted to get their hands on the latest series of a new key-ring doll called the Labubu, which is sold exclusively at Pop Mart, a Chinese collectibles retailer. The dolls, which belong to a tribe called The Monsters, are the latest in a long line of iconic collectible characters from Asia, including Hello Kitty — now a 50-year-old matriarch — Sonny Angel and Gudetama.
Labubu dolls are fuzzy little Nordic elves with snaggletoothed, mischievous grins and impish ears. They’re all female, they’re kindhearted, but sometimes, as they go about spreading joy, they get into trouble. “Well-intentioned” trouble, though, said Emily Brough, head of licensing at Pop Mart North America. “It’s never malicious.”
The creatures, conceptualized in 2015 by an artist born in Hong Kong, Kasing Lung, began as characters in a children’s book series. In 2019, Mr. Lung signed a partnership with Pop Mart to turn the storybook elves into collectible designer toys. Pop Mart’s first Labubu series, called the Exciting Macaron, was released in October 2023.
Each time a new Labubu has been released, it has sold out within minutes online. (Each doll costs roughly $30, but some limited-edition items can cost more.) They have spawned communities — in real life and online, where fans discuss tips on how to score dolls or dress them up and share images of their collections — and have turned into unexpected fashion accessories, often juxtaposed against luxury handbags.
The success of Pop Mart, the Chinese company behind the brand, has been somewhat recession-proof, according to Bloomberg, with its stock and profits rallying despite global economic uncertainty and trade war concerns. The company reported $1.8 billion in revenue in 2024 — a more than 100 percent increase from the previous year. The Labubu dolls and The Monsters tribe contributed about $400 million in revenue last year — a growth of 726 percent from the previous year — making it among the company’s top-selling products.
It was last year when the popularity of the dolls really took off, crossing over from the world of niche hobby collecting into the mainstream. Last spring, Lisa, a member of the pop group Blackpink and one of the stars of “White Lotus,” posted a picture of her Labubu dangling off a Louis Vuitton bag on her Instagram story. And in the fall, she opened up about her obsession with Pop Mart and the dolls in an interview with Vanity Fair. “I spent all my money” at these stores, she told the magazine.
Then in February, the pop star and fashion icon Rihanna was spotted with a Labubu, also clipped onto her Louis Vuitton bag; the singer Dua Lipa was seen with one, too. This week, the actress Emma Roberts posted an Instagram story of her latest haul of four Labubu dolls, set to the Britney Spears song “Oops! … I Did It Again.” In March, Pop Mart opened a pop-up store at the British luxury department store Harrods, leading to lines of fans snaking around Knightsbridge, eager to get the doll.
One of the ways Pop Mart has built interest in the dolls is by releasing some of them in a “blind box” so that buyers don’t know which doll is hidden inside. That distribution strategy is what “keeps fans interested” and constantly on their toes, said Joshua Paul Dale, the author of “Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired Our Brains and Conquered the World.”
In December, it was that mysterious hype that got Martin Andre Navarro Nibungco, a 22-year-old musician, stopped at an airport. He was returning from a vacation in Bangkok to his home in Los Angeles with 12 Labubu dolls in his suitcase to gift to his friends. He had to transfer to a domestic flight at the San Francisco airport and, while going through airport security, six Transportation Security Administration agents descended on his suitcase and took him aside.
“Everyone was like, ‘Oh, my god, we need to know what you guys got? What do you think you guys got?’” Mr. Navarro Nibungco said in a phone interview. He opened his suitcase, and “one of the agents took one of the boxes through the X-ray,” he said.
When Mr. Navarro Nibungco carries his Labubu around (he clips to his belt loop), he has found that it often serves as a fun conversation starter with strangers. “The association with the Labubus is only comfort,” and it opens the door to a harmless, politics-free chat, he said. It’s “escapism.”
“People are patiently waiting and are willing to pay 20-something bucks despite whatever is going on with the world right now,” he said. “That says something.”
In response to the Labubu craze, entire mini industries have sprung up on sites like Etsy and AliExpress, where creators sell tiny outfits specifically designed for the dolls, car seats for them to sit in and even little handbags for them to carry.
At 10 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, the day before the new Labubu line was to release in U.S. stores, the dolls were supposed to drop online. But the Pop Mart website and app crashed because they were inundated with more traffic than the company had prepared for, Pop Mart said in an email. On Reddit, users shared that they were panicking and fervently refreshing the website.
When the site and app were back up, the dolls had already sold out.
“So I was like, you know what? I’m just going to go down and actually try to physically pick these up,” Ms. Reese, 42, a financial planner in retail, said in a phone interview. “I expected there to be a line but I didn’t think it was going to be that serious,” she said, adding that it was “literally the Hunger Games.” There were long lines at other Pop Mart locations as well.
At one point, the crowd in Los Angeles was growing restless, Ms. Reese said, with people pushing one another to reach the front. Amid the chaos, a woman in front of her fell to the floor. In the end, Ms. Reese left empty-handed. It didn’t matter — she already had six dolls at home.
Online, too, many Labubu enthusiasts — who speculated that bots buying up the inventory to resell it were responsible for crashing the website — felt defeated when they couldn’t score a doll. “DID WE WASTE AT LEAST AN HOUR OF OUR TIME WAITING FOR THE ADORABLE STUPID LITTLE COLLECTABLE DOLLS,” one user wrote in a post. “Yes.”
“Twas a hard battle,” the user wrote, “but we must play the waiting game now.”
Alisha Haridasani Gupta is a Times reporter covering women’s health and health inequities.
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