The global collectables market (spanning designer figures, trading cards, art toys, vintage memorabilia, and more) was valued by Grand View Research at $320 billion in 2025 and is forecasted to reach a value of $536 billion by 2033 – growing at a rate of 6.9% per year, largely fuelled by adults making deliberate, emotionally motivated purchases, not children. To understand why these adults are so engaged, and what brands outside the category can learn from it, brands can take note of two companies telling the same story with vastly different outcomes (so far).
The category has undergone two waves already and is currently entering its third. The first wave built demand at scale. It made collectables mainstream by licensing a huge range of IP’s and turning FOMO into a product feature. The second wave made that demand smarter, refining the mechanics to make collecting more achievable and the product experience distinctive. The third wave, still in its early stages, centres on experience and the relationship between the brand and consumer.
If you’ve been conscious over the last fifteen years, you know what a Funko Pop looks like: that big square head, those tiny black eyes, that blank expression. Every franchise you have ever loved – Stranger Things, Frozen, Overwatch, Hello Kitty, and even The Godfather – has turned its characters into Funko Pops.
The Funko playbook relied on two main moves. Firstly, partnerships at scale: rather than betting on a single character or franchise, Funko licensed the characters of over 1,000 IP holders, making itself the default home for fandom merchandise across almost every corner of pop culture. If you loved it, you could buy it in Funko form. Secondly, and more importantly, FOMO became a product feature. Funko Pops sold as limited editions and in exclusive colourways (essentially, with the same vinyl mould but a different paint job) fostered a sense of rarity. Buyers caught the itch to collect before someone else did.
Funko’s product development model was equally distinctive. The business compressed its development timeline to just 70 days, functioning more like a fast fashion brand than a toy company, to capitalise on cultural moments while they were still happening.
For a while, it worked spectacularly. As recently as 2021, Funko reported that its yearly net income had increased by 595% since 2020 to reach a total value of $67.9 million. Then the playbook stopped working. In 2023, Funko reported a net loss of $154 million, and US sales continued to decline. In 2025, the brand issued a critical “going concern” warning that raised doubts about its ability to operate beyond the next 12 months without major financial intervention.
The cracks grew from the same place the success did: scale. With over 13,000 unique figures, the aim of the hobby – to “collect them all” – became impossible. No collector could ever hope to complete their collection. The itch couldn’t be scratched. Meanwhile, the resale market began to deflate; once scalpers couldn’t turn a profit (because of falling interest), they disappeared too, taking a significant chunk of perceived demand with them. And the aesthetic, once fresh and cute, became boring and ubiquitous. It never truly evolved: the same blank stare, same beady eyes. An unachievable goal, a collapsing secondary market, and aesthetic fatigue: that combination brought the once-unstoppable Funko Pop phenomenon to a halt.
Pop Mart scaled the same heights Funko did but then asked different questions about what to do next. On the surface, the similarities are obvious. Pop Mart also leans on IP collaborations, in its partnerships with Disney, Pixar, and franchises like Minions. They also leverage scarcity and FOMO. But the execution differs enough to produce an entirely different outcome.
Take Pop Mart’s collaboration strategy. While Funko treated licensed IP as its core product, Pop Mart treats it as a gateway. The Disney ranges act as entry points, with lower prices and wider appeal, designed to bring consumers through the door and introduce them to Pop Mart’s own original characters. The licensed product serves the proprietary one.
The scarcity mechanic is even more interesting. Funko created scarcity through limited editions: collectors had to be quick, had to be lucky, and once the moment passed, it passed. Pop Mart creates scarcity structurally, through its blind box. Buy a blind box from a series of eight characters, and collectors don’t know which one they’re getting. Some are more common than others. While Funko competed with speed, Pop Mart competes with chance. And collectors complete a collection by obtaining every figure in a given series, not the broader catalogue. They only need all eight in the current drop. That makes collections completable, which matters more than it sounds.
Pop Mart also understands something Funko didn’t: the store is a product. Rather than distributing primarily through third-party retail spaces, Pop Mart built its own, and those spaces became destinations. By the end of 2024, Pop Mart boasted 130 brick-and-mortar stores internationally, including in flagship locations at the Louvre in Paris and on Oxford Street in London.
The viral dimension matters too. The blind box mechanic is practically tailor-made for content creation. Unboxing videos reach their own audience, generating a secondary market based on reactions and reviews. People have built careers that consist of opening Pop Mart blind boxes on camera. The brand has managed to develop a product that cultivates virality on its own.
Lastly, it’s hard to talk about Pop Mart without discussing Labubu. The googly-eyed, jagged-toothed monster character, a Pop Mart original, became a genuine cultural phenomenon, worn as a bag charm by everyone from BLACKPINK’s Lisa to fans queuing outside Selfridges at 6am. It crossed over from a collectable to a status signal. But crucially, as Labubu’s cultural heat has started to cool, Pop Mart moved to position Hirono as its successor, with a standalone Hirono store now open in London.
In 2024, Pop Mart reported revenue of approximately $1.8 billion, representing a year-on-year increase of 106.9%. International markets outside of mainland China rose by 375.2%. Its market in North America alone rose by 556.9%. This is the growth of a brand that knows what it’s doing.
The signs are already emerging, even if the category hasn’t fully caught up yet.
Look at what’s happening in children’s toys: eggs that hatch, creatures that burst from cauldrons. These are products that focus not just on the toy but also on the unboxing, inviting children to participate in the creation of what they’re buying. That experience starts at the point of purchase. What makes this great for brands beyond increased interest is that these are products engineered for the camera; virality is embedded from the start.
Adult collectables haven’t caught up yet, largely because the economics don’t work at the same price points. A hatching mechanism that adds $5 to $10 to the price of a child’s toy balloons into a very different proposition for an adult buying eight blind boxes that retail at $15 to $30 each. But a recognition of the underlying principle, that the moment of engagement is the product, has started to emerge. Brands like Pop Mart won’t replicate the children’s mechanics directly, but they’ll increasingly look for touchpoints that nurture that same quality of experience and the same shareability.
Cinema is one area to watch. A Labubu film is already in development. Funko attempted to go the cinema route and failed but the reason why is the same reason why the broader brand is struggling: it doesn’t own any of its IP. Consumers aren’t emotionally invested in a Funko story because there isn’t one. Funko is a vessel for other franchises’ characters. Pop Mart’s originals, such as Labubu, Hirono, and Skullpanda, have their own lore, personalities, and fan communities, developed organically. For a film to maintain interest over ninety minutes, it needs a character and a world that audiences care about. Without its own IP, a brand can’t build either.
Packaging is another area to watch. The unboxing experience is already central to the category, but it’s going to evolve. We’ll see new physical mechanisms, which are perhaps more tactile and interactive, that make the consumer an active participant in the reveal. The goal will shift from surprise to co-creation, with the consumer playing a role in the final result.
Then there’s the store. Pop Mart’s retail expansion is already pointing somewhere interesting. The next phase calls for different types of stores, not just more of them – spaces where people want to spend time. London’s standalone Hirono store is an early signal of the trend. Physical retail spaces in general are starting to think “destination” more than “transaction”, and the collectable category is moving in the same direction too.
Strip it back and the collectable boom runs on identity, community, virality, and gambling. Funko found the formula, scaled it until it broke, and is now rebuilding. Pop Mart took the same formula, made it more elegant, and doubled revenue in a year. Whether Pop Mart has built something durable remains to be seen, but brands have a lot to learn from its attempt regardless.
Brands don’t need to sell blind boxes to benefit from the principles of the collectable economy. Plenty spend millions trying to engineer the same underlying purchase behaviours without realising it.
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