Horses and Cows: Two Pop Mart Stories to Start the Year
New products—plus what Pop Mart has in common with Apple.
⏰ Wed, Dec 31, 2025 @ 3:45 PM PST
🐟 Published from Seattle, USA
🔨 Built by Chase Burns Broderick
Happy first day of January if you’re in Hong Kong. It’s 7:45 am over there. Hi!
Today, two things. The first: It’s the beginning of a big run of horse-themed merchandise—Prepare: it’s almost the Year of the Horse. Lunar New Year lands Feb. 17, 2026. The second: A history of cows. Yellow cows.
Off to the Races: Pop Mart Teases “Year of the Horse” Vinyl Plush Pendants
A “coming soon” teaser hints at Pop Mart’s next Lunar New Year collectibles
Pop Mart’s official social accounts have started teasing a Year of the Horse 2026 product rollout. The first series, called “Have a Good Run,” is vinyl-face plush pendants (plush body, vinyl face) intended for hanging/keychain-style use.
Hashtags being used in official teasers include #haveagoodrun, the series’ title. Pop Mart has confirmed the series name and hashtag in official teasers; the IP list/variant names come from what’s visible in the teaser footage and early roundups.
IPs reportedly included (7):
Labubu (THE MONSTERS)
Dimoo
Skullpanda
Molly
Hirono
Twinkle Twinkle
Crybaby
Variant names
A Pop Mart teaser video, above, lays out titles to IPs:
Great Wealth (Molly)
Sharp Wisdom (Skullpanda)
Good Health (Hirono)
Best Dream (Twinkle Twinkle)
Happy Family (Labubu)
Sweet Love (Crybaby)
Bright Future (Dimoo)
Expect a whole season of horse-themed Lunar New Year products to come. Pop Mart’s first at the gate.
Pop Mart Scalpers: Huangniu (黄牛) and China’s “Yellow Cow” Economy
Are scalpers a market failure… or the market’s way of building a supply chain faster than a brand can?
In late May 2025, a video on Xiaohongshu showed people queuing outside Pop Mart’s Westfield Stratford City store in East London when a fight broke out during the latest Labubu drop.
The video’s comments weren’t really about the toy. They were about the behavior. Xiaohongshu commenters from Malaysia to Beijing asked why anyone would throw punches over a stuffed... whatever Labubu is. More than one urged “Safety first.”
After the long queues and reported scuffles, Pop Mart UK paused in-store and Robo Shop sales of The Monsters plush toys “to ensure the safety and comfort of everyone.” Online drops would continue.
A few weeks later, Seoul looked familiar. Predawn queues snaked around flagship stores. Pop Mart Korea announced a temporary halt to offline sales of Labubu plush dolls and keyrings, again citing safety concerns. Online sales continued.
Meanwhile in mainland China, a June 30 report from Legal Daily, republished by Xinhua, described:
Ms. Zhang, a Beijing resident, witnessed the frenzy of scalpers firsthand. Recently, Pop Mart opened a pop-up store in a shopping mall in Dongcheng District, Beijing. After successfully making a reservation, Ms. Zhang arrived before the mall opened at 10 a.m. and found a long queue already formed. Many men in the queue were “fully armed,” carrying small stools and large shopping bags, constantly exchanging messages like “How many boxes do you want?” and “Go straight for the vinyl series.” At 10 a.m., the staff let customers line up to enter. The men at the front of the line began to constantly recruit new “insiders” to squeeze into the front of the queue. One man even directly asked Ms. Zhang, who was already in line, “What do you want to buy? Buy it from me later, or it’ll be sold out by the time you get to the front.”
Several men at the front of the line quickly emerged from the store, their large shopping bags overflowing with purchases. They even started doing business right there on the spot. Blind boxes originally priced at 69 yuan were being sold for over 200 yuan, and the series could only be purchased as a whole box for over 500 yuan. Because each ID account could only enter once, many scalpers, after buying their own boxes, extended offers to others at the front of the line, asking them to buy more blind boxes in exchange for payment.
“This is outrageous! With them doing this, ordinary consumers at the back of the line can’t buy anything at all!” When Ms. Zhang entered the store, sure enough, the popular styles had already been sold out.
Reporters’ investigations revealed that in order to “seize” more blind boxes, offline scalpers take turns camping out and monopolizing vending machines or stores about to launch new products, taking them away as soon as they are put on the shelves; online, scalpers use order-grabbing software and order-brushing software to clear out new products in 3 seconds, leaving ordinary consumers with no chance to buy them.
That article uses the Chinese word “黄牛,” or huangniu—a word that’s been associated with Pop Mart a lot this year.
Huangniu (huángniú) literally translates to “yellow cow.” In practice, it’s just “scalper,” the standard Chinese term you’ll see for ticket resellers and product flippers. But the word scalper isn’t very good at suggesting the scale of these operations.
There’s a chapter dedicated to yellow cows in journalist Patrick McGee’s recent book, Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company (Scribner; May 13, 2025), a book I’ve written about once before (but again, not a book club).
Apple in its bubble: Apple Marina Bay Sands on Singapore’s waterfront at night. (I took this photo while at Pop Toy Show Singapore this year.)
Here’s McGee, in Apple in China (p. 196), writing about the relentless stream of resellers at the first Apple retail stores in China in 2008. He profiles John Ford, a former Mormon missionary in charge of running Apple’s first Chinese retail operations:
“Yellow cows in the gray market”
Ford, at first unaware of how lucrative this trade was, experimented with a variety of tactics to get the resellers to go away. He tried requiring identification, or limiting sales to five per person, then two per person. In one instance he received approval to sell a scalper 2,000 iPhones, believing it would placate the man. The scalper readily complied—then showed up the next day for more. Ford was frustrated. The store sales were making him look good; the rowdiness of the lines wasn’t. He started seeking answers, wondering what sort of deal might be possible so the scalpers would stop clogging the lines and allow ordinary customers to experience the Apple Store and buy a product themselves.
The yellow cows’ responses astonished him. “You could never run me out of cash,” one told him. Ford wasn’t convinced, but the reseller took him on a short walk, down a few blocks and around a corner, then past some informal security types. They entered a room, roughly 2,000 square feet in size, lacking furniture or anything else, save for one thing: renminbi. Piles of cash in neat stacks were at the ready to hand out to migrant workers so they could buy iPhones in the tens of thousands. No experience in the Mormon missionary’s background had prepared him for this. Looking at the sea of renminbi before him, he estimated he was staring at a billion dollars. […]
The yellow cow told him: “You keep selling, and I’m going to be here buying until people don’t want to buy it anymore.” He then explained a bit about how the business worked. By hiring ordinary people in the hundreds to buy multiple iPhones each, his gang could amass the world’s most iconic product by the thousands, then have the devices shipped to another major city where the gang would be the exclusive vendor. The opportunity was vast. America had only four cities with a population over two million; China had at least forty.
The truth of Apple’s situation in China in the early 2010s is that the iPhone was insanely, uniquely, historically popular. The booming Chinese middle class, in particular, wanted the phone. And where Apple couldn’t deliver, the resellers filled in gaps.
When someone inevitably writes Pop Mart’s 2025 story, they’ll need a chapter on Labubu’s yellow cows.
