Pop Mart Looks To Turn US Niche Fans Into a Mass Market

The Cry Me an Ocean plush toys sat as forlornly as their name implied inside the Stoneridge Shopping Centre in the San Francisco suburb of Pleasanton.

The Chinese brand Pop Mart had placed a “Robo Shop” vending machine stuffed with the small dolls on a walkway inside the mall, but passers-by barely gave them a second glance.

A few shoppers said they vaguely recalled hearing the brand’s name somewhere, and one even name-checked Pop Mart’s viral Labubu figurines. But not a single person scanned the machine’s QR code to see what the machine would spit out.Yet across the country, it was a different story. At Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, Pop Mart is popular enough that a bevy of students has signed up for the recently formed Art and Business Club just for a chance to collaborate with the brand, according to club founder Madeline Wang.

The club’s success reflects the enthusiasm for Pop Mart among Gen-Z Americans, who like the brand’s merchandise aesthetics and “blind box” sales strategy, said Wang, a rising second-year student majoring in applied economics and management.

While blind-box retail has existed for decades, Pop Mart has taken it “to another level”, Wang said, though she acknowledged that “most people” in the United States might not be fans of the brand’s designs.

This contrast is common with Pop Mart. Like other Chinese brands targeting the vast US consumer market, it is focusing on building a following among niche customer bases through precision advertising, according to analysts.

The highly targeted strategy also helps the firm project an international image, rather than an exclusively Chinese one, allowing it to minimise potential controversy amid rising US-China tensions, they added.

It is an approach that many Chinese firms have taken in the past, ranging from personal computer developer Lenovo to fast-fashion portal Shein and social media app TikTok.

“Given the current climate of tariffs and non-tariff barriers, Chinese companies sometimes say, ‘We are not Chinese’,” said Lourdes Casanova, director of the Emerging Markets Institute at Cornell University.Chinese retailers have managed to shed their image as a source of cheap exports and restyle themselves as “conveying culture and lifestyle to global consumers” over the past few years, according to an April report by management consultancy Kearney.

In many cases, they have achieved this through “precision marketing” and social media, the report added. Pop Mart has also raised its profile in the US through tie-ins with mainstream Western brands, entering a float into last year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City and signing licensing agreements with Disney and Harry Potter.

“If you go into a [Pop Mart] store right now, it apparently skews younger and female, but is no longer so Asian-dominated,” said James Knightley, New York-based chief international economist with the Dutch financial services firm ING.

Since launching its first permanent US store in 2023, Pop Mart’s presence in the country has expanded to 37 bricks-and-mortar outlets and dozens of Robo Shops.

Overseas markets contributed 44 per cent of Pop Mart’s US$5.38 billion revenue last year, and sales in the US continue to grow strongly. The firm’s revenue from operations in America increased by 55 to 60 per cent in the first quarter of 2026, compared with the previous three months, according to a company statement released in May.

Americans buying the small collectible dolls usually do not think of China, because Pop Mart does not proactively market itself as a Chinese brand, retail analysts said.

“The branding of Pop Mart does not directly denote that it is a Chinese company, so the perception of the brand should not be influenced by its origin,” said Cathy Chao, senior director for Asia-Pacific corporate ratings at Fitch Ratings.

“As the company emphasises, it is more about having attractive IP [intellectual property] and product lines which appeal to consumers.” Other firms have taken a similar approach. Shein took off in the US during the Covid-19 pandemic through an aggressive social media marketing campaign, moving its headquarters from China to Singapore in an attempt to present itself as a global firm.

ByteDance, the Chinese tech giant behind TikTok, first gained a foothold in America by acquiring the lip-syncing app Musical.ly, which was popular among US high school students, in 2017.

But the company later ran into political problems when Washington officials grew wary of the firm’s Chinese origins. That eventually forced ByteDance to spin off TikTok’s US operations into a separate entity in January, with a majority-American board overseeing the new venture.

Some overseas consumers still worry about data privacy, product safety and after-sales service issues when shopping for Chinese brands, according to a May report by Rakuten Insight.