Emoticons Chubby cat Eggy and his feline girlfriend Pupu have been downloaded an astonishing 70 million times from Chinese communications and social media platform WeChat. Sent between users 1.1 million times a day, the feline characters have become viral stars in China, and have spawned a long list of toy and commercial collaborations with brands including Pizza Hut, Buick and Huawei. Their creator, Li Weiyi, uploaded the emoticons onto WeChat in 2016, and says Eggy and Pupu have been such a hit that he has now quit his animation advertising job to focus on Eggy creations. “I have made more than 100 short films featuring Eggy for [popular short-video app] Douyin,” he says. “Eggy’s Douyin channel has over two million fans.” Eggy is now one of the many original Chinese toys set to crack the fiercely competitive global market currently dominated by giant US and Japanese producers such as Disney and Sanrio . Li has paid factories to manufacture Eggy products and has sold them on the Chinese online shopping website Taobao. For the past year, he has been collaborating with Chinese brand licence management company Skynet, which turns his creations into spin-off toys and expands their sales reach into Southeast Asia. Chinese toys boom being fuelled by adult male consumers of collectibles Building up an arsenal of home-grown brands is a key strategy for Skynet, which was established in 2006. “In the beginning, we produced spin-off [toys] for mostly local brands like Tencent’s QQ penguin logo,” says Skynet founder Zhang Lihua. “In 2008, we bagged a licensing deal with [Chinese hit cartoon series] Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf . Within a year and half, sales of these products grew to two billion yuan (US$282 million).” The success of the cartoon franchise drew the attention of Hong Kong animation studio Imagi International , which owns the intellectual property rights to the 2009 feature film Astro Boy – a derivative of the original Japanese animation. But that did not work out well for Skynet. In 2011, Imagi bought the rights to Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf’s toy spin-offs from the cartoon’s creator, and Skynet lost the licensing deal. “Similar instances kept happening – where we lost the distribution rights after we achieved massive sales for brands. To stabilise our business, we decided to develop our own [toy and figurine] brands,” Zhang says of Skynet’s 2014 change in strategy. Besides Eggy, Zhang says, the Teddy Bear Collection is Skynet’s most successful creation, with annual sales of over one billion yuan. “In the approach adopted by Disney, they first release hit movies like Zootopia [the 3D animated comedy],” she explains. “ Sales of the spin-off [toys] ride the wave of the bumper box office. We don’t want to follow this model as it takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money. We follow the model adopted by Sanrio, which launches stand-alone characters like Hello Kitty. “Teddy the bear comes in various guises, such as a special agent, which we used when we launched a line of products to help promote the film Men in Black: International (2019) . Once Teddy has amassed wide brand recognition, we plan to produce content such as movies.” Another company, 52Toys, was founded in 2015 and pursues a two-pronged approach by working with famous brands and creating its own toys. Co-founder Chen Wei says the company’s designers create toys based on overseas brands to suit the Chinese market. “We add value to their products and help further expand their sales channels [in China]”, he says. “Given our reputation, more and more overseas brands are taking the initiative to collaborate with us.” 52Toys has licensing deals with about 60 local and overseas brands including Marvel’s The Avengers and 20th Century Fox’s Alien and Predator . To create its own figurines, 52Toys organises annual design competitions to search for local talent. In 2017, the company co-organised a contest with Tencent’s video game hit King of Glory , which spawned 125 new designs. “The contests’ theme is different every year,” says Chen. “In 2016, it was about Chinese mythology. Last year, we worked with the Shaanxi History Museum. Contestants made designs based on the museum’s historical exhibits, including terracotta warriors and artefacts from ancient Indian and Egyptian civilisations.” In 52Toys’ stable of original creations, Chen says the BeastBox collection has been the most popular with male customers. “It features various biological and robotic [toys] that can be transformed into a 5cm box. It is very popular in Japan,” he says. “For women, they love our collection of spacemen [that come] in the shape of Japanese fortune cats [the figurine thought to bring good luck].” Chen was one of the first businessmen in China to be involved in the international toy trade. In 2001, he started distributing products for McFarlane Toys, the fifth-largest action figure manufacturer in the United States. When Disney animation film Finding Nemo was screened in China in 2003, the UME Cinemas chain invited him to sell toys at its cinemas in Beijing. “They gave me the shop premises for free,” he recalls. “The Finding Nemo toys sold like hot cakes. Other cinemas later imitated this model and invited me to sell toys at their chains. “Beijing had over 10 top-notch cinemas [at that time]. I had shops in all of them. A ticket to a film cost 80 yuan then, which was very expensive. But there were many [people willing to pay that price]. That was when I realised people are willing to spend money on culture and entertainment products.” The other co-founder of 52Toys is Huang Jin, who also co-founded Sanguosha, a popular board game set in the Three Kingdoms period (220–280AD). A year after 52Toys was founded, the company bought China’s biggest anime and manga forum 78dm.net, with more than 5 million registered users. Having raised 150 million yuan from investors, 52Toys now employs 160 staff, of whom over 30 are toy designers. Inside the Beijing Toy Show Though China has yet to produce a home-grown name to rival international cartoon behemoths such as SpongeBob SquarePants and Doraemon , Chen says there are many up-and-coming Chinese brands that sell better in China than their overseas competitors. “We are the distributors for many famous local brands”, he says. One is Wuhuang, a cartoon cat in traditional Chinese watercolours. It comes from a comic series by Chinese illustrator Baicha. Another is The Legend of Luo Xiaohei, a web cartoon and animation series by Chinese illustrator MTJJ. A feature film on The Legend of Luo Xiaohei is screening at cinemas in China now.” Yeloli is another home-grown animation series that has grown into a successful toy brand in China. Launched by Jingying Group in 2013, the television series is in its seventh season with more than 100 episodes. It features a group of fairy warriors determined to save their mythological kingdom from human destruction. To take on international doll brands such as America’s Barbie and Japan’s Blythe, Jingying Group has developed more than 100 Yeloli doll figures and other spin-offs including children’s clothes, watches and video games. A spokesman for Jingying Group says they hope the magic and fantasy concept, combined with a Chinese artistic style and storytelling, will appeal to an international audience. “We have authorised Korean and Brazilian toy firms to sell our toys in their countries. The TV series has been dubbed in Taiwanese Mandarin. The first two seasons have been dubbed in English and we will launch them on YouTube soon. An African version is in the works,” the spokesman says. “We will launch more versions in different languages after gauging the international response.” The spokesman adds that company representatives this year went to toy fairs in New York City, in the US, and Nuremberg, in Germany, to promote Yeloli . “We want to learn from the overseas experience in terms of product design,” he says. “Currently, all the animation-related toy brands that enjoy universal recognition are owned by Japanese and American firms. No European brands have attained such a status. [We believe] once our animation series can crack the international market, our toys will go global.”