Turning Pop Mart’s Toys into a “Phygital Universe”

⏰ Fri, Jul 18, 2025 @ 3:00 PM PST
🐟 Published from Seattle, WA, USA
🔨 Built by Chase Burns Broderick

When One Little Planet first surfaced in 2019, Pucky, a Hong Kong illustrator who split her childhood between Hong Kong and Canada and later graduated from Vancouver’s Emily Carr University, pitched it as a sandbox for experimenting with her husband Vin, creator of the dead‑pan Poh. In the beginning, there was no talk of AR or NFTs. But by 2021, their Pucky and Poe blind boxes were selling out in minutes—so they enlisted Vancouver’s Polyform Design Studio to build a digital companion. Now, the team has an app that lets fans unbox virtual toys in AR, curate virtual shelves, and scan QR-card NFTs. The app demonstrates a direction more of the industry could be headed in, and it’s touring toy shoys across Asia this summer, included the upcoming Pop Toy Show hosted by Pop Mart.

Since its quiet 2021 debut, the app has resurfaced recently: notably, at a Seoul Toy Fair trial in 2024 where the first digital drop “sold out within minutes,” according to a product‑designer portfolio. Show listings now place One Little Planet—and, by extension, the app—at Booth H01 for Pop Toy Show Singapore (22 – 24 Aug 2025), alongside more than 100 other designers and vendors. Polyform’s own case study frames the project as a way to “scale beyond the capabilities of physical production,” while XR studio Frame Spatial notes the app’s multi‑language iOS/Android NFT marketplace.

What does that mean for collectors? Probably not a headline‑stealing reveal, but another small test of the art toy world’s potential digital side‑hustle. If fans bite, toy companies gain a low‑overhead revenue stream that complements, rather than replaces, physical blind boxes. Worth keeping an eye on!