Labubu dolls: why adults are queuing up for these exclusive toys

Times

24-05-2025

This summer you may see a peculiar sight in the Arnotts store in Dublin. Queues will be forming, not for the latest Kylie make-up launch or iPhone release, but for a vending machine dispensing the must-have soft toy, Labubu dolls. And it's adults, not kids, who are trying to get their hands on the strange, yet exclusive, plush figures.
Depriving yourself of sleep for more than two weeks is the stuff of nightmares for so many of us. For Noor Hadi, however, a 22-year-old computer science graduate in Dublin, the self-inflicted act was entirely worth it.
Hadi, who lives in Lucan, is crazy about Labubu dolls, the round, furry, elf-like toys manufactured in China that are high in demand and short in supply. The dolls retail for about €20, but the problem is their exclusivity. Limited stock is drip-sold across different world markets at any one time, meaning securing one — let alone an entire collection — is often the stuff of dreams and can lead to competitive auctions.
'It was the Labubu Tasty Macaron Version 1, the first Labubu plush pendant series, and I had to stay up during the night for two whole weeks just to catch a restock and then as soon as I did, they went out of stock,' Hadi explains.
'As collectors, we like to source these things properly and I've always believed these collectibles are a way to express yourself. To some people it would be seen as a waste of money but it's really not that. For me, each character has its own story and how you connect to it makes you want to continue collecting them.'
Hadi, and many others' obsession with the toys, which are designed to hang off handbags or luggage, began when the Thai rapper and K-pop star Lalisa Manobal shared a post of herself in April last year clutching the toy. In one post, she single-handedly launched a Gen Z global fixation with the cuddly monster.
The star, better known as Lisa from Blackpink, a South Korean group and one of the world's biggest-selling music acts — they have amassed 40 billion streams and sold 20 million records worldwide — immediately became a meme with TikTok followers hitching themselves to the Labubu bandwagon.
Like most trends, the dolls, introduced in 2019 by the Chinese toymaker Pop Mart — its 38-year-old chief executive, Wang Ning, is now worth $17.4 billion (€15.4 billion) — and based on characters created in 2015 by Kasing Lung, a Hong Kong-born artist, sell like hot cakes with western consumers left to fight over limited stocks after the Asian market has had its fill.
In Ireland the only place to secure them currently is through a handful of niche stores selling merchandise and graphic novels, leaving a plethora of disappointed fans who don't manage to land one during a limited sale, or to wait for Pop Mart to open its TikTok shop solely for European buyers — a staggered affair that is likened to trying to get a ticket for a Taylor Swift concert.
And yet the craze continues to grow with posts and videos from Labubu converts pleading for help to source the elusive toys.
Many more share their 'fails', where a purchase from an unreliable seller has delivered a dud or a fake but costing the same or more as the real deal. These knock-off buys are commonly described as a 'Lafufu'.
The mystery of these purchases isn't helped by the fact that the toys come in cutesy sealed plastic packaging called a 'blind box' so what's inside remains a hit or miss until opened, unless bought from a certified seller from Pop Mart.
Kevin Lyons, manager of Forbidden Planet in Dublin, one of the few shops in Ireland that sells the dolls, says the store is completely sold out.
'It's honestly one of the most popular things right now,' he says. 'We don't have any stock and that's due to demand. The problem is that we place our orders, but they're allocated so we won't get the full order and that means less stock coming in for something that is in demand.'
And it's not just Labubu breaking hearts and wallets. Lyons is seeing a spike in interest for Smiski, small Japanese figurines famous for a glow-in-the-dark range, and Sonny Angel, another Japanese creation of tiny cherub winged boys with the slogan 'He may bring you happiness'.
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What all three have in common is they are sold as blind packaging, with collectors eagerly stocking up until they have full sets of the toys.
'None of these are in stock either,' adds Lyons, who, having worked at the store since the 1990s, credits the pandemic and the rise of TikTok for these growing fascinations.
'When we had the pandemic and we were in behind the scenes doing our mail orders a lot of people were doing TikToks with lightsabers and prop replicas from Star Wars, and you had all these things going viral and it generated more of an interest, particularly for a certain demographic, kind of mid to late teens upwards. But Sonny Angels, Smiskis and Labubus, most of them are blind boxes, so you won't know what's in the box until you open them. And those are all the rage right now.'
Plushie popularity shows no signs of slowing down. In July Arnotts will open a Pop Mart Robo Shop, a vending machine stocked with Labubu in their trademark blind boxes, already a quirky feature in Selfridges in London.
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'We've seen how powerful nostalgia is among our customers like with Jellycat, for example, where we had people travel from abroad to buy one of these plush toys,' says Edel Woods, head of home and lifestyle at Brown Thomas/Arnotts. 'The arrival of Labubu in July takes that even further, bringing a whole new wave of playful, collectible characters that spark real emotional connection.'
It's not just furry charms and trinkets selling big, however, as the adult toy market, which exploded in 2020 when people were stuck in their homes, switched from buying out of boredom to chasing nostalgia, finding comfort in brands synonymous with their childhoods.
Global Insights, a research company, estimated the global toy market was worth $114.4 billion last year, with growth expectations from $120.5 billion in 2025 to $203.1 billion in 2034.
Circana, another market research and analytics firm, found in a study of toy sales across 12 global markets in 2024, including the US, Australia, France and Germany, that licensed toy sales grew 8 per cent and accounted for 34 per cent of the total toy market. Pokémon was the top-selling toy property globally, followed by familiar classics such as Barbie, Marvel Universe, Hot Wheels and Star Wars.
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'Lego Botanicals emerged as the top gaining property, reflecting the trend towards toys targeted at adult consumers, tapping into the mindfulness trend and toys for better mental health,' the Circana research noted.
According to Statista, the global data platform, the toys and games market in Ireland is expected to be in the region of $313.64 million this year. The market is dominated by Hasbro, Mattel, Lego and Spin Master, with action figures, dolls and emerging niche toys among the big sellers.
Jason Flood, 48, from Dublin's city centre, who owns Heroes and Villains, an online store selling comics and toys, has seen nostalgia fuel adult demand for collectibles in recent years.
'I'm a 1980s kid that never grew out of my love for comics and toys from that time,' he says. 'Now nostalgia is my business and I sell comics and toys from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and I see people relive moments from their childhoods all the time whether it's a dad pointing out action figures he had to his children or a family now collecting GI Joes or He-Man characters together. I basically turned my hobby into a career.'
Flood's own unabashed appreciation of older toys and comics stems from what he calls 'a time travel effect', where you relive moments of your childhood triggered by the reference of a cartoon character or even the sight of a boxed doll that you had longed for but never owned. Suddenly, as an adult, and with money of your own, that happy childhood memory is once again within reach.
'Although I sell online I try to put on displays at shows so I can meet people and my customers face to face,' he explains.
'When I attended Comic Con last year, I put on a display to celebrate 40 years of Transformers and recreated battle scenes like I saw as a child in Arnotts and Switzers at Christmas time. Two things happened: people either went 'I'm so old' because the toys were 40 years old, or would gather their kids and go 'I had that one, and I had that one …' And you see that kind of family interest growing now with, say, a display of He-Man figures, and the kids would say, 'Dad, we don't have She-Ra or that version of Bear Man.' So it's the next generation appreciating what was really important to us as children and sort of history repeating itself.'
Why is there such a want to hark back to days of old? Shane O'Mara, professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin, says nostalgia often presents as a 'bittersweet blend of affectionate exaggeration and genuine longing'.
'It is a multifaceted psychological phenomenon, deeply rooted in our biology and culture,' he says. 'Once diagnosed as a potentially fatal 'homesickness' among 17th-century Swiss mercenaries, nostalgia is now seen as an adaptive emotion that bolsters wellbeing, forges social bonds and sustains a coherent sense of narrative self.
'By bringing past and present together, nostalgia reveals itself as a wonderful, if dangerous, emotion — by longing for that which has gone, it traps you in something that can never be again, but by merging nostalgia with thinking about the future, it can help shape how you approach tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow — what you might yet become.'
For Lyons, however, what nostalgia has done for the toy buying world is something far more important by making a niche market once derided and dismissed as more mainstream, accessible and acceptable. Yes, there are transient trends such as Labubu that come and go, but Funko Pop!, Ninja Turtles, Pokémon, Star Wars, anime and manga show no signs of slowing decades on.
'It's no longer just a niche thing where people would be criticised for buying stuff like that with terminology such as 'nerd' and 'geek',' Lyons says. 'That doesn't tend to be the case any more. You know, the world is more of an open place, which is great for everybody.'
Hadi agrees. With 30 Labubu dolls displayed in her room alongside an impressive collection (she has 145) of another popular Chinese character called Hirono, a small boy figurine seen to represent human emotions, she says their power lies in self-expression.
'We're so caught up with everything that's going on in the world at the moment and there's just so many negative things,' she says. 'But there's also positive things like collecting these figures, and if you feel even an ounce of happiness from doing this, then go ahead and do it. It's not a waste of money for a little plastic toy and there's nothing wrong with it. I think everyone has an outlet for self-expression and this is mine.'