Pop Mart’s Labubu — the snaggle-toothed, long-eared forest elf now clipped to handbags from Seoul to Milan — is routinely framed as a uniquely Chinese pop-culture export.
Its commercial story is indeed Chinese, but the visual and cultural lineage runs through the Netherlands, and specifically through Dick Bruna’s Miffy. That link helps explain Labubu’s global readability — and why its moment may last longer than a typical micro-trend.
Labubu began as an illustrated character by Hong Kong-born artist Kasing Lung, who spent formative years in the Netherlands and later licenced the design to Pop Mart in 2019. The plush-vinyl hybrids took off internationally in 2024–25, helped by tight supply, constant “blind-box” drops and celebrity visibility. Pop Mart reported about US$1.8bn in 2024 revenue, with roughly US$423m attributed to Labubu.
The Miffy parallel starts with geography. Miffy (nijntje), created in Utrecht in 1955 by Dick Bruna, is ubiquitous in Dutch visual culture. Lung has spoken about growing up in the Netherlands and mixing Asian and European styles; that biographical path makes exposure to Bruna’s minimalism almost a given.
It also shows in form. Bruna’s rabbit is built from thick lines, simple geometry and a disciplined palette that critics often connect to Dutch modernism. Labubu is noisier — nine teeth, a ruffled tuft of hair — but its tall ears, rounded, childlike proportions and front-facing stare rhyme with Miffy’s economy of shape. In short: Miffy supplies the “readable silhouette” that makes a character work at postage-stamp scale; Labubu adds the contemporary “ugly-cute” twist.
There are clear differences. Bruna’s philosophy is restraint — the tiny “X” for a mouth, flat colours, the avoidance of fuss — whereas Lung’s elves are deliberately chaotic and expressive. But an antecedent needn’t be a template. In the same way that Murakami took the kawaii visual vernacular into fine art, Labubu takes a Dutch children’s-book grammar and routes it through the designer-toy economy. (Lung himself cites mixing Asian and European idioms.)
Miffy aside, there are other Western inputs worth noting. Uglydoll (launched 2001) normalised plush “misfits” for a mass audience, opening space for snaggle-toothed charm. Troll dolls (popular from the 1960s) established a European folklore look — pointy ears, comic menace — that Labubu updates. And the collector mechanics are hardly novel: Ty’s Beanie Babies built a 1990s frenzy on engineered scarcity and retirements; MGA’s L.O.L. Surprise! (2016–) mainstreamed the blind-package ritual; Funko taught a generation to chase limited “variants” signalled by stickers. Labubu synthesises these strands: soft-vinyl aesthetics, blind boxes, short runs and a fluid crossover with fashion.
Marketing execution matters as much as genealogy. Pop Mart’s “drop” cadence and scarcity discipline produce queues and repeat purchases, while the plush keychain format turned Labubu into a wearable status marker. Instagram-ready celebrities accelerated the shift from shelf collectible to accessory. The combination has been unusually powerful: in mid-2025, third-party trackers reported U.S. sales growth for Labubu of c.5,000% year-on-year, and Pop Mart has guided to a sharp profit increase on the back of the frenzy.
Why does the Miffy connection help explain that momentum? Because Miffy is a proven, transnational design language: minimal forms read crisply on small surfaces, at distance and in photographs. Characters that compress well into icons, keyrings and patches tend to travel. Labubu leans on that legibility while offering a deliberately imperfect grin that signals individuality rather than perfection — a useful posture in a trend cycle that rewards “distinctive but cute”.
The risk, of course, is the Beanie Babies problem: when scarcity ceases to feel authentic, the heat can go out quickly. Two factors argue for a softer landing. First, the visuals rest on a durable grammar (Miffy’s silhouette logic rather than a one-off gimmick). Second, Pop Mart can broaden the IP — books, apparel, collaborations — as Funko and Sanrio have done with their own stables. The shift from drop-driven hype to character-led brand is difficult, but not unprecedented.
A final note on provenance. There is no public record of Lung declaring Miffy a direct inspiration; rather, the link rests on geography, exposure and obvious formal echoes. That is enough to treat Miffy as Labubu’s most persuasive Western antecedent — with Uglydoll, Trolls, Funko’s chase culture, L.O.L. Surprise’s blind-box ritual and the Beanie model rounding out the family tree. If Pop Mart can keep quality high, police counterfeits and keep character at the centre of the brand, Labubu has a path to outlast the typical TikTok-era fad. The ears — drawn in Utrecht in the 1950s, reimagined in Antwerp and Hong Kong — are already built for it.
