Labubu: 700 euros on blind boxes resold as an investment

Labubu: 700 euros on blind boxes resold as an investment

A young woman flies Madrid-Barcelona and back in a single day to buy Labubus. Another travels from Logroño. An American couple tours Europe on a mission from their daughters: don't come home without the dolls. The store Pop Mart peine on Barcelona's Portal de l'Àngel has become the epicenter of a craze mixing collecting, k-pop and a word repeated in every queue: investment. The plush monster, ugly and endearing in equal measure, sells in blind boxes priced between 12 and 240 euros. No one knows what they've bought until they open the box.

What is a Labubu and why people pay up to 240 euros

The Labubu is a plush doll with a unsettling grin made by the Chinese company Pop Mart, which already operates in several European cities. It is sold as a blind box: the buyer pays without knowing which specific figure the package contains. Prices range from 12 to 240 euros, and opening one works like a lottery. If a rare model comes out, its resale value skyrockets. If it's a duplicate, the buyer is left with a clone they already had.

The craze has an identifiable trigger: Lisa, the singer from the South Korean group Blackpink, showed one of these monsters off and dragged her fan base along with her. Fan culture did the rest. It is no coincidence that Pop Mart planted its store on the Portal de l'Àngel, the same street where k-pop fans film their dance routines in the middle of the public street.

Four-hour queues and resale as the selling point

On Saturday, queues of up to four hours formed to enter a shop that customers themselves describe as austere. This Tuesday the wait was shorter, but security staff were still managing the entrance. Outside, envious glances went to anyone wearing an exotic or expensive model. Inside, the queue started all over again.

The economic argument underpinning the phenomenon is resale. A buyer who traveled from Madrid with her partner on a same-day return flight summed up the calculation: "We've spent 700 euros but I think it's an investment. Depending on which Labubu I get, I'll be able to resell it." The reasoning has its own internal logic and an obvious flaw: you pay for an asset whose value depends on someone else paying more later. In July, an auction house in Beijing sold a human-sized figure for 130,000 euros, a record for the toy.

The buyer profile: from Logroño to the United States

The queues draw a map that goes far beyond Barcelona. One customer came from Logroño to get a tattoo and, while she was at it, buy a large Labubu for the owner of a Chinese restaurant in her hometown. An American couple traveling around Europe received instructions from their daughters: don't come home without the dolls. A shop assistant sums up where people come from: Girona, Valencia, Madrid, Ukraine.

Many of the buyers use names other than their birth names, pseudonyms from the anime universe. One of them boasts about receiving her first Labubu in Paris three years ago and declares that "all these people are late to the party." Another admits she will spend "whatever I can" and complains that many people are buying to resell. The collection as identity, the doll as a badge of belonging.

The economic reading: tulips on a credit card

The comparison running through the analysis is the Dutch tulip mania of the 17th century. An object with no cash flow, no service and no productive use, whose price depends solely on the expectation that someone else will pay more. The objection is obvious: whoever buys a record listens to it, whoever buys a book reads it. Whoever buys a Labubu can only look at it or resell it.

Some argue that this is not a financialized economy but a fake financialized economy: real financialization is what puts savings into seeds or microscopes in the hope that production will be worth more than the investment. Buying an object that generates no service is not investing, it is speculating on the hope of a greater fool. The full calculation, with the breakdown of what is paid per box and what is recovered through resale, yields a margin that only works if the craze doesn't cool down.

The precedent nobody wants to remember

The history of collecting is full of objects that were once worth fortunes and are now worth nothing. Cabbage Patch dolls, pink-haired Trolls, porcelain figurines. People spent considerable sums. Now they pile up at flea markets. The question is not whether the Labubu is ugly or pretty, but how long it takes a fad to stop being one.

The day the craze passes, the dolls will still exist. The 700 euros, not so much.