Move over, Barbie: Chinese toymakers set sights on cracking global market with local designs
- An increasing number of Chinese toys are poised to crack the competitive global toy market now dominated by giant US and Japanese manufacturers
- Creative minds in China are busy creating new toy brands and merchandise that appeal to both a Chinese and international audience
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.