The little L.A. shop was a destination for Hello Kitty fans for decades when it decided to dive into a massive new wave of e-commerce — peddling its products live on TikTok.
The first floor of the JapanLA store in Fairfax is full of stuffed toys. It houses shelf after shelf of cute Japanese characters such as My Melody, Totoro and Kuromi. Upstairs is the real moneymaker. Employees stand in front of phones, pitching the hottest new products of kawaii (cute in Japanese) culture.
While the upstairs business has brought in tens of thousands of new customers, it has also attracted trolls trying to shut JapanLA down. The haters have hacked the store’s website, harassed its hosts, spread rumors about its owner, and threatened to show up in force in front of its physical store.
JapanLA owner Jamie Rivadeneira says she has never seen cute consumers turn so ugly.
“I created JapanLA 20 years ago for adults who like cute stuff, so they can feel safe and feel like it’s OK to like toys and collect them,” she said. “To attack me is so opposite of what I stand for.”
It is a cautionary tale that points to the potential profit and pitfalls when small local businesses push back against the onslaught of e-commerce by using technology to reach a wider audience. It also demonstrates how the Labubu craze — in which people keep buying blind boxes of the same toys in hopes of getting a rare, expensive one — has turned some shops into casinos.
Rivadeneira was ahead of the curve when she opened a small toy shop in 2006 on a street off Melrose Avenue selling items featuring Hello Kitty and other Japanese characters.
From its early days, the store, called JapanLA, harnessed the internet to promote its products, using MySpace to connect with what was at the time a niche community: Los Angeles fans of kawaii culture. As it went mainstream, kawaii culture grew into a 5,000-square-foot retail space on La Brea Avenue with more than 20 employees.
Although its store continues to attract a steady flow of walk-in customers looking for the cutting edge of cute, JapanLA’s business has been turbo-charged in recent years by livestream shopping.
Livestream shopping, also called social commerce, is like the old cable shopping channels, but there are millions of shows, each serving a very specific niche, broadcasting live. The hosts interact with the shoppers watching. It started in Asia, is worth hundreds of billions of dollars in sales, and has been growing fast in the U.S.
JapanLA first dabbled in livestream shopping during the pandemic lockdown, when it had to close its store. It started on a platform called Popshoplive to sell Hello Kitty and other items, but sales didn’t skyrocket until it switched to TikTok Shop in 2023.
Today, JapanLA’s TikTok account has nearly 400,000 followers and hosts seven-hour livestream shopping sessions six days a week. The shop’s 12 bubbly livestream hosts have turned into micro-celebrities. Their customers comment in the livestream’s chat, order hundreds of products during a session, and sometimes send tips and the occasional boba.
Uma Karmarkar, an associate professor at UC San Diego who studies consumer psychology, said livestreams are effective at getting consumers to spend more because they are engaging and temporary — meaning they tap into people’s fear of missing out on a rare opportunity.
When it comes to collectible blind boxes, the effect is heightened, she said.
“You’re adding to that element of scarcity that makes blind boxes so appealing in the first place,” Karmarkar said. “You don’t know what you’re getting, and it’s effectively like gambling.”
JapanLA’s chat and sales exploded in the last two years, driven by demand for the cherubic figurines of a Japanese doll named Sonny Angels.
For certain consumers, it was the new Labubu: cute and collectible, sold in blind boxes, with certain types being rare and thus much more valuable.
Sonny Angels are three-inch plastic dolls that are generally naked, except for themed headgear and costumes.
JapanLA had unique access to the suddenly popular toys, as it had stocked Sonny Angels for 15 years. It originally had a niche following, but the fan base blew up in recent years. It was even at the center of a “Saturday Night Live” sketch featuring singer Dua Lipa.
JapanLA was auctioning the rarest Sonny Angels for hundreds of dollars, and that started bothering some fans of the fat little collectibles. In July, while taking bids for figurines from the Sonny Angels summer vacation-themed collection, one of the rare ones got a bid of more than $400. Some viewers used screenshots of the offer to accuse JapanLA of gouging.
Online detractors shared screenshots of the supposed $400 bid in a Sonny Angel collectors Facebook group with more than 30,000 members and launched a form-letter campaign, mass-emailing Dreams USA to try to get JapanLA’s retail license revoked.
“They’re trump supporters, what do you expect? Grifters,” one anonymous commenter said in the Facebook group.
“Report them for hoarding,” said another.
During livestream shopping sessions, JapanLA’s hosts received a flood of mean comments, including insults about their physical appearance and accusations that they were racist. Bad actors entered live auctions to place fake bids on items for up to $1,000 before letting the payments fail, she said.
A TikTok user made a dedicated account to “cancel” Japan. A flood of anonymous commenters spread rumors that JapanLA’s owner supports Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Rivadeneira denies the claims. A hacking attack even shut down JapanLA’s website for a day.
One Discord user posted a threat to hand out hundreds of fliers at the store’s physical Sonny Angel launch event later that morning, falsely claiming that owners supported ICE to discourage would-be shoppers. The agitator never appeared, but the threat left the staff on edge throughout the day.
The company tried to report and block the trolls, but they kept popping up with new profiles. It hired a PR firm to manage the unfolding crisis. Rivadeneira said she even scrubbed her personal social media accounts of photos of her young daughter after trolls began attacking loved ones.
JapanLA turned to Dreams, the company behind Sonny Angels, for support. The two companies decided to change the way the figurines were auctioned to avoid the gouging narrative. Now they are auctioned before they are opened rather than after, so bidders don’t know what they are getting.
Jackie Bonheim, a spokesperson for Dreams USA, said that while the company received a flood of form-letter emails from angry Sonny Angel fans, the company cannot set a maximum retail price.
JapanLA is still selling thousands of Sonny Angel dolls, but bids now tend to stay around $20.
Some fans miss the days when they would know ahead of time if they were getting a really rare one.
Nicole Fani, 40, snapped up a rare “secret” unicorn Sonny Angel for more than $300 because she had to have it for her collection of hundreds of the figures.
“I’m not going to say for anybody else they should be spending that much,” she said. “It was worth it for me.”
Fani, a Brentwood artist, considers her collection an extension of her art and has embellished some with Swarovski crystals. Because she avoids buying secondhand Sonny Angels due to potential fakes, she would have probably spent more buying dozens of sealed blind boxes in the hopes of pulling the unicorn figure.
JapanLA‘s owner says her team is working every day to block and silence trolls. She‘s still reeling from how quickly her business went from a bumper batch of orders to battling for its life.
“I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “All it takes is a few people to say bad things or say things about JapanLA, things about me, that aren’t true, for it to just go crazy.”
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