Toymaker Pop Mart on a tear: US$674 million IPO came a decade after first store opened in Beijing
- Store chain that sells collectible figures for about US$8 each, in packaging that doesn’t allow buyers to see what’s inside, is China’s biggest toys enterprise
- A distribution deal for a Molly, a Hong Kong doll, changed the focus of the company, which has ambitions to become China’s answer to Disney within five years
From a single shop in a mall in Beijing’s Haidian district to a group with 114 outlets and 825 vending machines across China, it took Pop Mart just a decade to become the biggest toy enterprise in the country.
Recalling the company’s humble origins, Pop Mart design director Xuan Yilang, who joined two years after it was founded in 2010, says there were only about seven employees in the beginning.
“Two of them went around China looking for interesting products, like phone cases and cups, to sell in the shop,” he says. “In 2012, one more shop opened. We didn’t design toys then. The two shops sold various kinds of bric-a-brac, like T-shirts and power banks with my drawings printed on them.”
The breakthrough came in 2014 when the company started selling cherubic baby doll figurines from the Japanese series Sonny Angel.
“We became their biggest distributor in China,” Xuan says. “In 2015, the products accounted for up to 40 per cent of our total sales. So we decided to cut out all the miscellaneous stuff and started looking for designer products like Sonny Angel.”
Molly, designed by Hong Kong artist Kenny Wong, was the Midas touch for Pop Mart. Created in 2006, the doll, a little girl with upturned lips, blue eyes and an attitude, had initially generated lacklustre sales in Hong Kong.