Last time, we cracked Pop Mart’s blind boxes wide open. But here’s the bigger mystery: why are millions of twenty-somethings hoarding plush toys like they’re Birkin bags?
To find the answer, we have to rewind fifty years. To a sketch of a cat.
In this episode, we travel from Hello Kitty’s birth in 1970s Tokyo, through China’s Gen Z explosion, to a half-a-billion-dollar marketplace for cute. And we end on a cryptic question from Pop Mart’s founder that might just hint at the future of this craze.
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🌏 About Mandarin Unpeeled: Bite-sized explainers that unwrap how China really thinks, feels, and evolves, and how it is already impacting you — told by someone who’s lived, studied, and worked across both East and West.
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