In 2025, Pop Mart sold 100 million Labubu dolls. Revenue grew 185 per cent to RMB 37.1 billion (US$5.49 billion). Net profit grew 293 per cent. By almost any measure, it was one of the best years any consumer company has had this decade.
The market still wiped roughly US$33 billion off the company’s value from its August 2025 peak. On the day the record results were announced, the stock dropped 20 per cent intraday.
This looks like a paradox. It is not. It is one of the clearest lessons available to founders right now about the difference between two things that are constantly confused: product loyalty and brand loyalty.
They are not the same. One is fragile. One compounds. And most founders cannot tell which one they actually have until the market forces the answer.
What the Pop Mart numbers actually show
In 2024, the Monsters series, which includes Labubu, was 23 per cent of Pop Mart’s total revenue. In 2025, it became roughly 40 per cent.
The other characters did not collapse. Molly grew 40 per cent to RMB 2.9 billion (US$429.3 million). Skullpanda reached RMB 3.5 billion (US$518 million). Crybaby and Dimoo each crossed RMB 2.7 billion (US$399.6 million). The portfolio grew.
But the dependency on one character grew faster than the diversification did. That is what the market reacted to. Investors were not pricing the results. They were pricing the structure of the results.
A Chinese analyst, Xia Yuchen, put it precisely in Securities Times. Emotional value, he said, is a traffic entry point, not a business endpoint.
Pop Mart sold emotion at the moment of purchase. What it has not yet proven is that it can convert that emotion into loyalty to Pop Mart itself, rather than loyalty to whichever character happens to be in demand.
The diagnostic question every founder should ask
Here is the test. If your hottest product disappeared tomorrow, would your customers stay?
If Pop Mart stopped selling Labubu, would buyers move to its other characters, or would they leave to find the next hyped collectible elsewhere? The evidence so far suggests they would leave. They came for Labubu. They were never really there for Pop Mart.
This is product loyalty. The customer is loyal to the thing, not to the company that made the thing. It can produce enormous revenue. It can produce a viral year. What it cannot produce is durability, because the moment the product cools, there is nothing holding the customer in place.
Brand loyalty is the opposite. The customer is loyal to the company, the point of view, and the promise. The specific product becomes the entry point, not the whole relationship. When the product evolves, or even when it is replaced, the customer stays.
The reason this matters is that the two look identical on a revenue chart and completely different on a five-year horizon.
Why founders confuse the two
Most founders confuse product loyalty with brand loyalty because, in the early stages, they genuinely are hard to tell apart. A product that is selling well and a brand that is being built both look like growth.
The confusion becomes expensive later. A founder who believes they have brand loyalty will make decisions assuming customers will follow them into new products, new categories, and new pricing. A founder who actually only has product loyalty will watch those customers disappear the moment they are asked to follow.
The Pop Mart situation is useful precisely because it happened to a company doing extremely well. It is easy to spot fragility in a struggling company. It is much harder, and much more instructive, to spot it in a company posting record numbers.
What this means for how you build
The practical takeaway is not that hot products are bad. A hot product is one of the best things that can happen to a company. The mistake is treating a hot product as proof that you have built a brand.
The product gives you attention. What you do with that attention determines whether you build anything durable. If you use the window to deepen the relationship between the customer and your company, the product becomes a foundation. If you simply ride the product, you are building on something with a half-life.
The founders who build companies that last treat every hot product as borrowed time that must be converted into something more durable before the heat fades.
Pop Mart still has time to do this. It has the revenue, the reach, and the capital to build genuine brand loyalty on top of the Labubu phenomenon. Whether it does is the question that will define the next five years of the company.
The same question applies to every founder reading this, at every scale. You may already have product traction. The harder question is whether you are converting it into brand loyalty or just enjoying it while it lasts.
One of those is an asset. The other is a moment.