Chinese toy brand Pop Mart just hit a $34B market cap, making it bigger than Mattel, Hasbro, and Bandai combined.

But it didn’t get there by fighting for kids’ attention or chasing the next Disney license.

Instead, it built a new category aimed at adults who treat toys like art.

The Bigger Story

Pop Mart’s revenue soared from $25M in 2017 to nearly $1B in 2023 – and as of last month, it became one of China’s hottest stocks.

Driving all this growth is a global subculture orbiting one breakout character: Labubu.

Never heard of it? Here’s the rundown 👇

• Labubu is a goblin-like plushie with sharp teeth and big eyes.
  
  
• It’s sparked a global frenzy – fans queue for hours to snag new drops.
  
  
• Rare editions resell for thousands, with some fetching five-figure prices.
  
  
• Celebrities like Rihanna and Dua Lipa have been photographed carrying them.

In other words, Labubu has become the centerpiece of the new “kidult” wave – collectibles treated as fashion, décor, and social currency.

So What Underlies Toy Mart’s Success?

Five smart plays that helped them bypass the competition:

1. The blind‑box gamble – You pay $15-20 for a sealed pack without knowing which figure is inside. Maybe it’s common. Maybe it’s the 1-in-144 special edition. That uncertainty turns shopping into an addiction, with collectors buying entire cases chasing rare pulls. 

2. Adult money, adult margins – By targeting millennials with disposable income instead of parents buying for kids, Pop Mart unlocked premium pricing.

3. Owning the experience – Instead of begging for Walmart shelf space, Pop Mart built 500+ branded stores and deployed thousands of vending machines across Asian cities. 

4. Original characters – Instead of Marvel or Disney tie‑ins, Pop Mart partnered with artists to build distinctive IP designed for Instagram. 

5. Engineered scarcity – Limited runs flip for five figures on resale, making FOMO part of the model. 

Together, these plays transformed Pop Mart from a niche toy maker into a cultural juggernaut.

Why You Should Care

Pop Mart’s rise is a reminder that your biggest threat might not come from the rivals you’re tracking.

While Mattel and Hasbro fought over licenses and shelf space, Pop Mart rewrote the rules – redefining buyers, distribution, and even what a “toy” can mean.

It’s the kind of left-field disruption we’ve seen before: Netflix blindsiding Blockbuster, Apple steamrolling Nokia, or Tesla forcing the auto industry to rethink the car itself.

For compete pros and PMMs, the takeaway is clear: don’t just benchmark against the usual suspects. The company that shakes your world could be the one playing an entirely different game 🤷

You weren’t hired to build battlecards.

You were hired to help your company win.

But tactical busywork is stealing your time and your influence.

That’s why we built Compete Agent – your new competitive intel operative.

Compete Agent automatically:

• Monitors every sales call for competitive threats
• Instantly alerts sellers with deal-specific responses
• Generates fresh competitor profiles in seconds
• Keeps all intel updated daily (not quarterly)

The result? Your team stops getting blindsided by competitors and starts winning more deals.

📌 Teams like Gainsight are already saving 250+ hours on research while hitting 72% seller adoption! Don’t let your competitors get there first.

See Compete Agent in action 👇 

A few weeks back, Adam was asked to pull win-loss reports on our key competitors for an upcoming board meeting.

This is a classic last-minute request that usually means dropping everything to dig through Gong recordings and CRM notes.

He ended up using Klue’s new Win Stories feature for this – and what normally would take days of work got done in an afternoon. 

Here’s how he did it, plus what these AI tools like mean for the future of win-loss. 

The Problem With Traditional Win-Loss

Building competitive win-loss reports has always been slow and painful:

• Export deals from Salesforce

• Track down buyers

• Listen to hours of calls

• Hunt for quotes

• Manually piece together trends

  Most insights stay buried in hour-long discovery calls – assuming you can even get the buyer on the phone.

That’s why we built Klue Win-Loss in the first place – to surface patterns and buyer quotes without the grind.

And now, with Ask Klue Research Mode, there’s an even faster way to dig into win-loss data on the fly.

What Win Stories Does

Win Stories automatically distills every competitive deal into a smart summary, pulling from CRM data and Gong transcripts through a competitive lens.

Each story highlights:

• The actual competitive threat (using Klue’s detection, not Gong’s hit-and-miss tracker)

• The buyer’s perspective from transcripts

• Differentiation points that mattered

• Direct buyer quotes

• Winning talk tracks

When Adam needed to review dozens of deals across three competitors, the insights were already there. No call-listening marathon required.

The Future of Win-Loss

As Ryan Sorely puts it, the future isn’t interviews vs. automation — it’s layering multiple intelligence sources.

Buyer interviews still deliver deep insight. But AI-powered analysis means you can run continuous pattern recognition in the background.

So when someone says “we always lose on price,” you’ve got hard data to push back. And when the board asks why you’re winning, you can answer with the customer’s voice — not just seller opinion.

The AI tools have finally caught up. That means faster answers, richer insights, and higher expectations for every CI team.

📌 Go Deeper: Watch Adam’s Full Win Stories Walkthrough