On a recent Sunday afternoon in lower Manhattan, a small shop inside the Oculus, a soaring curvilinear mall at the World Trade Center, stands out for the bustling crowd thronging its space.
“We’re out of stock,” more than one employee can be heard telling customers.
This is not one of New York’s many top-brand boutiques but Pop Mart, a Chinese designer toy brand that has become a sensation in the United States.
Its signature “blind box”, containing collectable figurines revealed only when the box is opened, runs for a mere US$20.
In a sign of the buzz around Pop Mart, Xie Feng, Beijing’s ambassador to Washington, recently cited one of its offerings, Labubu, as an example of a Chinese brand touching American consumers’ hearts.
During remarks at a US-China Business Council event in Washington in June, Xie mentioned the toy in the same breath as DeepSeek, the Chinese AI firm that took its burgeoning industry by surprise earlier this year.
