You may not believe it, but because I like Labubu, I became the top seller in the store this month, said Jiani, a salesperson for a luxury bag brand and an avid fan of trendy toys. In an interview with BlockBeats, she shared her sales secrets without reservation:
Instead of praising their bags for being pretty, its better to praise the Labubu hanging on their bags for their good effects. The customers will feel that you understand them very well.
This is the sixth year that Labubu has been working with Pop Mart. As early as around 2020, it had already set off a wave of popularity in the Chinese market. But what really made this trendy toy popular abroad was a series of street photos last year in which BLACKPINK member Lisa began to hang it on top luxury bags such as LV and Hermes.
Foreign fashion media: Will LABUBU be the most popular bag accessory in 2025?
As a result, more and more top stars began to show off their Labubu. Five years later, this IP swept the fashion circles of Southeast Asia, Europe and the United States, and even made it to the cover of foreign fashion media: Is LABUBU the most popular bag accessory in 2025?
Rihanna, a global fashion star, hung a pink Labubu on her Louis Vuitton tote bag when leaving the airport; Dua Lipa, a pop music award winner and a new generation of international fashion darling, posted a photo of two Labubu hanging on her orange handbag on Instagram, which became a hot search; Lisas name is very familiar to young people in China. The Instagram Story of this top Korean group member is often filled with walls of Labubu collections, making her a wild brand ambassador of Labubu.
For ordinary people, it doesn’t matter if they can’t afford Hermès. With less than 200 yuan, you can get the same style as a celebrity through Labubu, and even participate in the social consensus of the top fashion circles.
If you are lucky enough to win a hidden model with a probability of less than 1%, the price can be more than ten times higher; and even if you win an ordinary model, you can still gain emotional value and social confirmation by hanging it on your bag, taking a photo of it in your circle of friends, or posting it on Xiaohongshu.
There are actually a lot of tricks to buying different hidden models, such as whether there is a rustling sound when shaking, whether it feels harder from the side, and there are subtle differences in weight. Jiani relies on her ability to identify hidden models. When no one else can buy them or win the lottery, she can still get them and give them to her customers.
From left to right: Thai actress Hargate, Blackpink member Rose, and Singaporean billionaire Peter Lims heir Kim Lim
Labubu Waist-tie for men, bag-hanging for women has become a new trend in the fashion circle
In fact, this is not the first highlight moment for Labubu. Around 2020, Labubu had its first moment of breaking out of the circle. Blind box culture quickly swept the Z generation. It not only satisfied the expression of personality, but also triggered the game of scarcity. The joy of drawing a hidden model is like winning a lottery. In the secondary market, some Labubu has been speculated from hundreds of yuan to thousands of yuan, and the unboxing videos of drawing hidden on social platforms have become phenomenal content.
In a sense, Labubu is no longer a toy, but a financial product that can be priced, speculated and circulated.
Coincidentally, around 2020, when Labubu was first popular, another financial product with a trendy cultural IP was also extremely popular in a more virtual space - NFT, which may be very familiar to friends in the currency circle.
The climax of NFT came in an auction. On March 11, 2021, the NFT work of the famous artist Beeple was sold at Christies auction, and the price was fixed at 69.34 million US dollars at the last second. This NFT work has become the 53rd most expensive artwork in the world, and Beeple has also entered the top three of the value ranking of works among living artists.
Beeples artwork, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, sold for more than $69 million. The work looks like a mosaic of colorful pixels, but it is actually made up of 5,000 individual images. These 5,000 images were created daily by Beeple over 13 years.
The Internet has also given NFT a perfect assist. It is no coincidence that the two largest social platforms on the planet, Tencent and Facebook, have simultaneously paid attention to augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR). They imagine the future Internet to be Metaverse, a world where virtual and real can be seamlessly connected. The word NFT has also been discussed many times in the topic of Metaverse. NFT, which represents ownership, is a perfect fit in Metaverse.
In just a few months, the word NFT has spread all over the world.
Soulja Boy, a well-known American rapper with 5 million followers on Twitter, released his own NFT; Mark Cuban, the owner of the NBA championship team Dallas Mavericks, released an NFT; a dunk by superstar LeBron James was made into an NFT and sold for $250,000; top football clubs such as Barcelona and AC Milan also have their own NFTs.
In that round of NFT carnival, the most representative IP is undoubtedly BAYC (Bored Ape).
This avatar NFT project launched by Yuga Labs was launched in the spring of 2021. It was initially priced at only 0.08 ETH (about 200 US dollars) and sold out within 24 hours. It then quickly became popular as a social avatar on various platforms such as Twitter and Instagram.
Jimmy Fallon showed off his ape on his talk show, calling it the identity symbol of the next era; Snoop Dogg and Eminem performed on the same stage as BAYC at the MTV Awards; Justin Bieber spent $1.3 million to buy a rare ape; top stars such as Curry and Neymar helped promote it; artists such as Jay Chou and JJ Lin also posted BAYC avatars; traditional financial circles have also been caught up in this trend: Cai Wensheng, chairman of Hong Kong-listed company Meitu Group, and Zhu Xiaohu, partner of GSR Ventures, are both holders.
A small picture can highlight identity labels and social assets.
At the transaction level, BAYC has created a pinnacle paradigm for the assetization of NFTs: at its peak, the price of a single coin was as high as US$400,000 (approximately 150 ETH), the floor price exceeded 100 ETH, and the cumulative transaction volume of the entire network exceeded US$1.5 billion.
NFT and Pop Mart are actually doing the same thing: mobilizing a circles desire to participate, express themselves, and identify through a medium that looks like a toy.
The process of their financial productization is also surprisingly similar: all have prominent avatar/image recognition; all emphasize scarcity: rare models, limited editions; all are tied to the celebrity effect to trigger the phenomenon of hot products; and all have formed a market structure from starting at original price to secondary speculation.
Labubu is a physical NFT, and NFT is a more virtual Labubu.
But after all, there is only one Wang Ning, and the NFT circle is still not popular enough. Starting from 2022, the fate of Labubu and NFT gradually diverged.
In the second year after BAYC reached its peak, the crypto market as a whole entered a downward cycle, and the myth of NFT began to gradually cool down. BAYC, once the leader of NFT, has also become the leader of decline - the floor price has fallen from 150 ETH to below 20 ETH, and now there are only 13 ETH, which is equivalent to one-tenth of the value at its peak. Holders have got off the avatar one after another, and the once bustling community has gradually become quiet. The avatars that used to be the entry business card of the crypto circle have also begun to be ridiculed as the ceiling lock-in sign on the chain, all of which have at least $300,000 in floating losses.
However, Labubu’s popularity is growing, and it remains at the top of the trendy toy list.
The overlap between Labubus customers and those who buy luxury bags is surprisingly high, Jiani said. Some customers were just browsing around, but once I saw the Labubu on their bags, they would immediately open up and we could chat for a long time, and in the end, the customers would happily buy bags.
However, Jiani revealed that in fact, some girls went to luxury stores for the first time and bought their first branded bag in order to find a more suitable bag carrier for their beloved Labubu. With the Labubu IP, Pop Mart has actually begun to achieve the reverse sales logic of luxury goods in its 15th year.
Even in the capital market, there was a seemingly magical moment: Pop Marts stock price soared, and its K-line in recent years was almost the same as Bitcoin, which increased 20 times in 2017. Its market value even exceeded that of the parent company of luxury giant Gucci.
Looking back, it was probably difficult for Long Jiasheng, a Hong Kong artist who created the character of Labubu 10 years ago, to imagine that this somewhat weird and furry elf has now naturally become Pop Marts most profitable IP, surpassing the veteran IP MOLLY in all aspects to become the well-deserved C position.
The Labubu co-branded model, which originally cost 599 yuan, can now be sold for 14,000 yuan in the secondary market, an increase of more than 20 times; the trendy shoes co-branded with Vans have a transaction price of 2,000-3,000 US dollars in the overseas market, which is not inferior to the limited edition Yeezy; specific limited edition series (such as Big Into Energy or Wings of Fortune co-branded with Pronounce) have risen in price due to their radical design + regional restrictions (such as limited to Thailand and Singapore).
We witnessed the same generation redefining ownership in two parallel universes.
In addition to on-chain avatars and offline dolls, in the larger virtual space, there is also a more secretive, more lasting, and more actively traded consensus asset market - game skins.
Although CSGO has been remade and renamed CS2, CSGO has existed for more than 10 years before that. Therefore, when discussing the skin accessories of this game, everyone is still accustomed to using the name CSGO.
Half a month ago, the CS accessories market experienced a collapse. According to the SteamDT CS accessories sector index data, after a long bull market of about half a year, the CS accessories market fell 30% from its historical peak within a week, which is almost equivalent to a 312 crash in the cryptocurrency circle.
According to Dexerto, by the end of April this year, the total market value of the CS accessories market exceeded $4.5 billion. According to CS 2 Case Tracker, in the first four months of 2025, more than 113 million cosmetic boxes were opened in the CS game. If we calculate based on $2.49 per cosmetic box key, in the first four months of 2025 alone, players contributed nearly $300 million in revenue to Valve (the company behind Steam and CS) by opening CS accessories.
Like Pop Mart, it took the CS accessories market ten years to enter the public eye.
“When CSGO was first launched, there were no in-game accessories or accessories market mechanisms. It can be said that skins saved the game.” Cookie is an old player of both NFT and CSGO: “Although this is a bit of a result-oriented approach, there are indeed many people who don’t play CS now, but they know about this game because of the surge in accessories. So this game, which has been popular since the Internet cafe era, is still popular today.”
In August 2013, CSGO introduced the accessories mechanism for the first time, and the Steam market also supported the trading of CS accessories. Later, when NFT became popular, the CS accessories market also received attention and popularity due to its similarity to NFT. But looking back at the design of the accessories mechanism at that time, we have to sigh that Valve is, in a sense, the forefather of rarity design.
CS accessories are divided into different levels of rarity, and the wear and tear and pattern templates are random. As a result, even if some accessories are not of the highest rarity level in terms of probability of acquisition, they can be sold at the highest price in the entire market due to their wear and tear and pattern templates.
Wear doesnt mean that the players skin will be worn out as the game is used, but the integrity or glossiness of the skin of the accessory, Cookie explained.
The difference between high and low skin wear of the same weapon
Pattern templates can be simply understood as a gun sometimes cannot display a complete painting. Because the skin can only cover a certain area, which part of the painting is displayed on the weapon will have a world of difference in effect.
Analogizing to NFT, a very similar example is the generative art project Ringers released by Dmitri Cherniak in 2021. It generated Ringers #879, an image resembling a goose. It was sold to 3AC for 1,800 ETH (about 5.6 million US dollars), which was one of the most expensive generative art works on the market at the time.
This AK-47 surface hardening, although both are factory new level of wear, but the left one is just a normal pattern template, you can see that the blue part is less and unevenly distributed on the weapon. The right one is the top-level #661 pattern template, the blue part is more distributed and concentrated on the muzzle and top of the gun. Therefore, the left one is only priced at around 2500 RMB on the BUFF market, while the latter is priced at one million. Although the AK-47 surface hardening is not the highest level weapon skin
Not only that, CSs sticker system and e-sports events also give accessories additional narrative value. In 2014, the sticker accessory mechanism was launched in CS. This mechanism seems simple, that is, you can put some stickers on the weapon skin. From being ignored, it later became another important accessory pillar category in CS. The disbanding of the team and the retirement of the players will make the related stickers rise.
The Titan, iBUYPOWER and other team stickers launched in the Katowice 2014 Major event (Major events are the top events in the CS e-sports event system. The official will launch stickers for teams and team members who successfully advance to the Major). Later, due to the small number of them in existence and their excellent aesthetics, they were raised to sky-high prices.
The first wave of development of the CS accessories market is somewhat similar to Bitcoin, both of which took root in the gray area. Bitcoin is on the dark web, while CS accessories are on virtual gambling websites.
Before 2016, a large number of accessories were used as gambling chips, betting on the results of e-sports games on platforms such as CSGOLounge, and even participating in roulette. This kind of play quickly pushed up the price of accessories, and also attracted minors to participate, frequent match-fixing, and other chaos, which eventually prompted the authorities to take action to rectify the situation and send cease and desist letters to many accessories gambling websites including CSGOLounge, requiring them to stop using the Steam API for unauthorized gambling activities.
The CS accessories market cooled down briefly, but it did not completely disappear. The symbolic significance of high-end accessories to players’ identity has been deeply rooted in people’s minds.
Just like Labubu enthusiast Jiani loves to watch trendy toy unboxing videos, especially hidden models, owning a dream knife in CS is the pursuit of every long-term spectator and game player, which has spawned a large number of CS unboxing videos and live broadcasts to experience the thrill of turning a bicycle into a motorcycle.
The most typical example is the CS anchor Qiezi, who became popular around 2018 and boosted the popularity of CSGO in China, Cookie recalled. At the same time, NetEases CS accessories trading platform BUFF was launched, and the cooperation between third-party accessories trading platforms and Steam entered a stable stage. Some third-party trading platforms that can freely conduct legal currency settlement have promoted the emergence of systematic arbitrage mechanisms such as hoarding and arbitrage, and also made the financial characteristics of CS accessories clearer.
During the epidemic, the number of Steam users hit a record high, with global players pouring in and the number of unboxings skyrocketing. Coupled with the rise of the NFT concept, the label of off-chain NFT has also transformed CS skins from in-game items to a member of the digital collection ecosystem - with an independent pricing system and scarce consensus.
At this stage, CS accessories also have opinion leaders, and the independent pricing system is basically complete. There are opinions on the degree of wear and tear of different guns and the value of different templates. On Bilibili, there are already many CS accessories shopping guide videos, and they are still constantly being updated. Cookie said.
It can also be seen that the CS accessories market and the NFT in the cryptocurrency circle have many similarities: the casting is random, and the rarity differentiates the value and liquidity. Rare ones are expensive but hard to sell, and cheap ones are easy to sell. Even in the CS accessories market, there are original skins such as claw knives and butterfly knives, which are like Bitcoins market indicator status in terms of price guidance.
“However, since CS itself is a really excellent game and unrivaled in the FPS track, the CS accessories market is quite active, and the liquidity is much better than NFT.” Cookie added: “Rather than saying that these things that young people like have developed hype attributes that should not exist, I would rather say that it is the group consciousness of young people that gives young people unique asset pricing power.”
Such examples appear on CS accessories, on NFTs, and continue to appear in various groups.
Let’s talk about sneakers first. In the past 10 years, Nike and Adidas may not have designed any technological innovations, but they have turned “sneakers” into financial products: a pair of AJ1 “Chicago” originally priced at 1,299 yuan can now be sold for 4,000 yuan on Douyin; Yeezy has taken off across the board after it was discontinued, with prices for some color combinations doubling; the joint series of Solomon and Asics, which used to belong to the running world, has now become a new favorite for shoe speculators.
Let’s talk about bags. From the Porter collaboration and Jacquemus mini bags that girls love, to the Supreme toolbox and LV Yayoi Kusama collaboration that boys are eager to buy, each one may be a bargaining chip that can be put on Xianyu to make money.
In the fashion circle’s chain of contempt, whoever carries a limited edition product is like having an extra string of rare NFTs in his wallet address.
Speculating on shoes, bags and NFTs seems to have some middle-class attributes, but what about cigarette cards?
Don’t laugh, cigarette cards have become a spiritual totem for the post-2010s kids on Xiaohongshu and Douyin.
Behind this is a trend of collecting cards among primary school students. From Ultraman to the My Little Pony that gradually became popular in 2023, to this years Nezha series cards, the unit price is not high, ranging from 2 yuan, 5 yuan to 10 yuan, but the company behind it has a gross profit margin of 71%, and will earn more than Pop Mart in 2024.
Even when it received its Series A funding, Kayou boldly signed a bet agreement with investors (Sequoia and Tencent), which stated that the company must complete its listing before the fifth anniversary of the preferred stock issuance date (i.e. 2026), otherwise it would trigger a repurchase, with an annualized interest rate of 8%.
The main forms of Kayou cards
You think young people are wasting money, but in fact they are creating a new kind of pricing: emotions, community, culture, aesthetics, discourse power and traffic can all be priced.
Everything can be speculated, but each generation has its own Dzi Beads.
In the theory of value investment, MEME coin and Dog coin have always been marginalized, even in the bubble-filled cryptocurrency circle. But seeing this, I think many people who once couldnt understand Dog coin and meme coin in the cryptocurrency circle should understand why young people are keen on cryptocurrency speculation.
They are more like participating in a decentralized youth culture investment - except that the target is not a company or project, but a joke, a picture, or even a sentence.
PEPE was originally just a character in an online comic by cartoonist Matt Furie in 2005, but then it evolved into a widely recognized MEME symbol on the Internet. Behind it gathered a community of countless anonymous artists who created a variety of Pepe images, which played diverse roles in different cultural contexts and social media platforms.
The PEPE meme coin was quietly launched in the spring of 2023. There was no white paper, no team introduction, or even no practical scenarios, only a picture. But within three days of its launch, its price soared by 7,000%, and its market value exceeded $1 billion. Even Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX, called himself a frog believer, and PEPE became a landmark sample of the new generation of meme coins.
In fact, all crypto tokens have meme properties, just in different amounts, including Bitcoin.
As the first successful cryptocurrency, the philosophy behind Bitcoin, its anonymous founder Satoshi Nakamoto, and its spirit of fighting against the traditional financial system all give it a significance beyond technology.
So from this perspective, Bitcoin itself is the earliest MEME, which represents the pursuit of power, freedom and system change. This symbolic meaning goes beyond its function as a currency and becomes a symbol of a cultural and social movement. Later, there were various meme crazes that you can hardly name all of them.
At the peak of this movement, the personal meme coin issued by US President Trump made unimaginable financial gains in two days. A Chinese young man born after 1995, codenamed 0xSun, became the champion of this 48-hour movement with a profit of tens of millions of dollars.
Todays meme coins are more like filling the gaps in the traditional currency circle, and are more focused on global hotspots. The Thai internet celebrity hippo, the squirrel killed by the Democratic Party, and the emoticon package that suddenly became popular on TikTok all have their own meme coins.
Behind every meme coin, there are young investors using real money to chase the most popular topics. Of course, Labubu is also indispensable.
This phenomenal IP was also popularized by the community on the chain by issuing a meme coin, which increased its profit by a hundred times in one month. In terms of yield, it is more profitable than any other financial product related to Pop Mart.
The gameplay of meme coins is almost exactly the same as CS accessories, NFT, and trendy toys: initial low price + random wealth, stimulating collective FOMO; strong graphical memory points (Shiba Inu, frog, anime avatar); community-driven, relying not on official orders but on shouting; emotion-driven, it talks about consensus before value.
You will find that this generation of young people may be using different media to do the same thing: in an era of information explosion, blurred identity, and thin sense of the future, they use an irrational enthusiasm to construct the pricing rules in their own world.
I remember Yuval Noah Harari said in his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind that Homo sapiens first exchanged interpersonal information with each other through gossip and ways, and established a stable and close interpersonal organization by getting to know each other through commenting on others. Later, people formed a common imagination through storytelling to build more general trust, such as religion, country, currency, company, etc. On this basis, it is best to add some scarcity and limited edition, and this narrative is top-notch.
So whether it is Labubu, NFT, meme coins or CS accessories, as long as it is something that can form a strong group identity, it is something that this generation of young people is keen to hype.
After writing this article, I, who had a lot of meme coins, also bought my first Labubu and sent a group message to eight friends...
