The Hidden Power of “Useless” Things: PopMart’s Founder on Art, Consumer Joy, and Global Vision

Introduction: Wang Ning is the founder of PopMart, a Chinese art toy company that has grown from a small Beijing store into a cultural phenomenon and business empire. In a recent speech at a private forum, he reflected on PopMart’s 13-year journey and the philosophy behind its success . Wang shares how the company turned niche collectible toys into an enduring source of joy for adults , and why no real competitor has emerged to challenge PopMart’s dominance. He explains the value of “useless” art in a world of utility, the importance of patience and fundamentals in business, and his vision of taking PopMart global. Readers can expect to learn how PopMart blends art and commerce, taps into consumer emotions, and continually innovates to celebrate life in a changing world.

01. The Use of Uselessness: The Truly Eternal

I often face doubts like: “If you’re making these useless things, how high can the growth ceiling really be? People are rational—surely they’ll spend more money on necessities, not on these non-essential items.” Even up to now, many people don’t understand this industry; they can’t fathom why anyone would buy these art toys. The market is filled with debates between the “shorts” and the “longs” – skeptics who see it all as empty hype versus believers who see real potential.

In fact, all consumer behavior boils down to satisfying two things: a sense of fulfillment and a sense of existence. Fulfillment means a person’s material needs and basic spiritual needs are met. Existence means showing others who you are – whether you’re wealthy, have taste, or possess an artistic flair. Fulfillment or existence – which of the two is a necessity, and which is not?

Let me give an example. Imagine that overnight we all became super-rich and lived in a grand estate, and today you’re home alone. Picture the following two scenarios:

• Scenario 1: You drive out and suddenly recall you forgot to turn off a faucet. Left running all day, the faucet would waste about 40 yuan worth of water. Would you feel anxious about that?

• Scenario 2: While you’re away, the huge fountain at your estate’s entrance keeps running. One day of water + electricity for the fountain costs 400 yuan. Would you feel anxious about that?

I’ve posed these scenarios to many people. Most answer that in the first scenario – the open faucet – they would feel anxious, but in the second scenario – the constantly running fountain – they would not feel particularly bothered.

Isn’t that interesting? It’s all just water, flowing away, so why do we worry about the running faucet but not the running fountain? I’ve analyzed the reason behind this.

We assume our spending habits are highly rational – that we’d fret over each drop of water wasted. But in reality, we’re far more emotional than we imagine. The fountain actually uses more water and costs more money, yet nobody cares about it. So when we make consumer products, the question becomes: Do we lead people to the “faucet,” or to the “fountain”?

Consider this: if Molly’s head could be pulled off and used as a USB flash drive, would you still buy so many of them? Of course you wouldn’t. Because every time you bought a Molly USB drive, you’d second-guess yourself: “Why did I buy yet another flash drive? I already have several; I can’t even use them all!” If the cute figurine had a utilitarian function, it would prompt that rational scrutiny each time.

So many people think to add some practical function to a product – but they haven’t figured out whether they are leading people to the faucet or the fountain. It’s just like with music. Many years ago, when people had only just solved basic food and clothing needs, a lot of folks couldn’t understand why anyone would pay for albums to listen to music. It was hard for them to imagine that music would later become a whole industry.

Similarly, people often say that pure visual art seems to have been in decline in recent decades. I think that’s because art no longer exists much in a purely “art for art’s sake” form. Pure art is like when we go to a museum to admire human civilization – ancient murals, sculptures, and so on. But nowadays art has already integrated into our lives – printed on our clothes, on our phone cases.

I once asked some luxury brand executives why they love collaborating with artists. They understand it very clearly: art is eternal, and “useless” things are truly eternal. Any product that has a functional attribute automatically comes with a short life cycle and an inherent decay. No matter if today you buy the most advanced phone, computer, or car on the market – by tomorrow it’ll already start depreciating. This is unavoidable. Only those “useless” things can endure across time. That is the charm of art, and it’s the charm of our industry .

02. Industry Barriers: PopMart as the “Record Label” of Art Toys

From the day PopMart opened its doors, we’ve been doing business in plain sight. We ask: What are we selling? How do we sell it? What products are the hottest?… All that information is transparent – we play with our cards face-up. And yet 13 years on, we still haven’t encountered a competitor of similar scale. Why is that?

It’s true that “useless” things have enduring appeal – but getting people to actually spend money on a purely non-functional product is extremely difficult. The barriers to this industry are much higher than outsiders imagine.

People often ask me, “What is PopMart’s moat? What’s your barrier to competition?” I believe we have two major barriers – one soft barrier and one hard barrier.

1. Soft Barrier: Artists are a scarce resource that money cannot buy. PopMart is actually a lot like the “record company” of our industry. The artists are a bit like those virtuoso pianists or violinists from centuries ago.

Before record companies existed, those artists could only perform for a few people by selling expensive tickets to lavish ballroom shows. But after the invention of records, music could be recorded and sold all over the world, achieving true scale and commercialization.

Our role is akin to finding those brilliant “pianists” and “violinists,” then helping them achieve full commercial success. We were very fortunate to have discovered such talented artists early on.

The 1980s–90s were a golden era for the cultural industry in Hong Kong. Back then, a group of designers wanted to do pure art, but they found that fewer and fewer people were buying paintings or sculptures. So they pivoted, exploring whether art could be made into something like prints – smaller pieces, maybe editions of 50 or 100, to sell at toy conventions. Eventually they discovered that soft vinyl material (also known as “tangjiao” in Chinese) could capture perfect line work and vibrant colors simultaneously – like a combination of painting and sculpture – so many artists gradually got involved in making figures. (Note: “tangjiao” is a process of coating the inside of a mold with molten PVC, achieved by slowly rotating the mold in a furnace, so that the plastic forms an even layer.)

Art, by its nature, strives for uniqueness – every artist has their own “school” or style. By creating characters, artists can quickly establish a distinctive identity, and thus IP based on art toys was born.

In the early days, our method for scouting IP was pretty simple: we’d attend toy shows around the world. These art toys are often released in limited runs, and many enthusiasts would line up overnight to buy them. So our standard for choosing artists was literally to pick the ones with the longest queues! If people are lining up in droves, we want to work with that artist.

Over time, you realize that truly outstanding artists are very scarce resources. They’ve often spent many years honing their art, and they have strong recognition within those circles. As our platform grew, we also started attracting more up-and-coming artists with potential. Just like how the biggest, best record label draws in new talent – a kind of siphoning effect – it creates a positive cycle.

Now that our company’s scale is much larger, we can even begin leading tastes and trends. It’s a bit like the film industry: initially you need a famous star to get box office hits, but once you become a top-tier studio, it can flip so that anyone cast in your film becomes famous. As the platform grows, we can use our resources to push an IP into the spotlight and make it well-known.

So, artist talent is a soft barrier. It’s not something you can overcome just by fighting on speed, money, management, or market share. It’s a moat that can’t be crossed simply with brute force or copycats.

2. Hard Barrier: In the end, doing business comes back to the basics. I always emphasize eight characters: “尊重时间，尊重经营” – respect time, respect running the business. Over the years, I’ve seen many companies rise and fall. It usually comes down to two big mistakes: either not respecting time, or not respecting business operations. These are the two easiest errors to make.

To respect time means understanding that anything which truly takes ten years to accomplish cannot be rushed in two or three years.

To respect operations means that no matter how great your business model is, no matter how flashy the concept, in the end it all comes down to the nitty-gritty of rice, oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, and tea – the everyday details. It comes down to how you deal with people, tasks, money, and the continual troubleshooting of complex issues.

I often say we’re like that cyborg girl in the film Alita: Battle Angel – on the surface she looks like a beautiful young woman, but beneath the skin her core is made of precise mechanical parts. Our business involves a lot of fields: supply chain management, team management, strategy, storefront operations, merchandise management, and so on. For a single store, we think through extremely granular details: how should the products be displayed? How should the customer service be? We even think about something as small as who should open the store in the morning and who should close at night, to ensure the shop runs safely and smoothly.

Retail is all about details. It’s inventory, it’s cash flow cycles, it’s supply chain, it’s shelf placement – it’s all the boring, trivial bits and pieces. Running a business ultimately returns to that long-term accumulation of basic, everyday work. In my view, this is a hard barrier. If something truly takes ten years to accomplish, we’ve spent ten years on it – and any would-be competitor will likely need to spend about the same amount of time as well.

03. Latest Insight: “Happiness” Might Be a Bigger Market

In the early years, we faced a lot of misunderstanding. People were completely unfamiliar with this market, so they didn’t believe adults would still buy toys – like how a bald man wouldn’t buy shampoo. Some people might also wonder, why are we called “POPMART” (literally “Popular Mart” or “Trendy Supermarket”)? It’s because at the very beginning, we were a retail channel brand – PopMart’s original idea was to gather all the products young people liked and put them together. When we first started, we sold all sorts of things: home goods, electronics, stationery, cosmetics, etc.

That actually ties back to my entrepreneurial experience in college. In my junior year, I opened a “grid store” – I divided a physical store into many small grid-like compartments which I then rented out to different people. Those people would use their rented grid to sell various small goods on consignment. It was like an offline Taobao shop. At that time, the grid store business was extremely popular. Because it offered a wide variety of items and a fun browsing experience, it was a big hit among young people.

Looking back though, the grid store model had a lot of problems behind it – things like the management model, operational efficiency, etc. But it planted an entrepreneurial seed in my heart. I wanted to keep iterating on a model like the grid store.

Around 2010, I traveled to many places for research. I saw a retail chain brand in Hong Kong called Log On, which was very similar to the business model I had envisioned – it was also an aggregation of all the categories young people like. That inspired me when creating PopMart.

However, once we got PopMart up and running, we discovered we’d fall into a kind of “vicious cycle”: If we wanted better revenue numbers, we needed more SKUs (Stock Keeping Units – unique product styles and items), which meant bigger investments, bigger stores, more staff, more complicated inventory, more complex management and training…which in turn meant efficiency would drop lower and lower, and it became very hard to form a clear consumer impression of what our brand was.

So we decided to simplify – we raised a slogan at the time: “Reduce breadth, increase depth.” That meant cutting some product categories and going deeper into others. By 2015, we discovered that out of all our categories, the one growing fastest was art toys (潮玩). So we made a very important decision—to axe everything else and focus solely on art toys .

In the earlier days, many people compared us to Lego. But now, we’re more akin to Disney . What’s the thinking and logic behind that shift?

We did in fact borrow a lot of ideas from Lego initially. I believe Lego’s greatest brilliance is that it created its own language and system, almost like a tech company would invent a new coding language or platform. (Note: The “Lego play system” was a strategy proposed by Lego’s leader Godtfred at a 1954 toy fair, when he heard buyers complain that toy makers shouldn’t just make one-off products that briefly grab the market, but rather develop an interconnected system of toys to drive repeat sales. Inspired by this, Lego’s strategy rose from “making individual toys” to “creating an entire play system,” i.e. every Lego model kit can connect and interact with pieces from other kits – trains, cars, characters, etc.)

The result is, if you want to collaborate with Lego, you have to adapt everything into Lego’s language system. That proprietary language and ecosystem carries enormous business value – far beyond the toy products themselves. This is Lego’s core competitive asset built over so many years, the most valuable thing it has.

So, from early on PopMart also set out to build our own language and system. Following that idea, we began to define the term “art toy” (潮玩) itself in our context, and to define our way of doing things. For example, we insisted that art toys should have as many standard features as possible – standard sizes, materials, “hidden edition” ratios, etc. Over time this spawned a whole set of industry lingo, like “blind box,” “shake the box,” “chase (hidden) figure,” and so on.

In just five short years, take the term “blind box” for example – it went from an obscure phrase, to a trendy buzzword, to an overhyped cliché, and now it’s basically returned to a neutral term again.

As the company grew, we found that in some ways we diverged from Lego’s path. Beyond creating a language, we also built up a roster of intellectual properties (IP). And through our “language” system, we enabled everyone to recognize these IP characters. Now, prior to this, lots of people had tried for years to create a nationally beloved super IP in China, and the success rate was very low. But our model really has managed to incubate a batch of super IPs.

After that, we started to develop an entire art toy ecosystem centered around IP. In recent years, we’ve tried enriching the products and business lines around our IP characters – including games, films, spin-off merchandise, even theme parks.

Previously, our company was more heavily a “Lego model,” but now the “Disney model” portion is starting to grow. I’ve noticed many people are taking interest in our theme park business. That segment has only just begun – we’ve built a very small theme park as an experiment in this industry.

A lot of people also ask me, “Why are you getting into games? Why build a theme park? Are you trying to learn from Disney?”

That brings me to a gradual shift in our own thinking.

When we were still very niche, focused on making trendy collectibles, what we were doing was actually quite limited in scope. We were doing something about being trendy – it was a very small circle.

And what does it mean to do something about “trendiness”? It’s basically figuring out how to appear trendy, how to make young people think we’re cool.

At that time, our understanding of “trend” was: Trend is a form of superiority – I have what you don’t, I know what you don’t. It’s that sense of being ahead or above.

Back then, we spent a lot of effort cultivating that feeling of superiority – for example, culturally positioning ourselves as avant-garde, or using limited editions of our figures to create exclusivity. We wanted everyone who bought PopMart products to feel like they were so trendy and cool.

Later on, we realized that to truly expand the market – to “grow the pie” – we had to break out of that little trend circle. So we expanded from the trend circle to the fashion circle. (In Chinese, “trend” and “fashion” can both translate to fashion, but you’ll find Supreme and Zara are fundamentally different things.) We essentially went from being like Supreme and started moving towards Zara, to reach a much larger scale .

However, as we kept moving forward, I discovered that actually we can go even bigger – tap into an even larger circle, a bigger market, and fulfill an even more universal need. And what need is that? It’s the circle of “happiness.”

I feel that “happiness” might be a far bigger market. So around this broader market, we’ve been creating many products and experiences that center on companionship and joy. For example, our theme parks, and a lot of our licensing deals, are all related to bringing people companionship and happiness.

At present, aside from Disney, we are the largest domestic company in China when it comes to exporting IP through licensing – meaning we license out our characters for all kinds of products and partnerships. (This is another way our business mirrors Disney’s).

04. Looking Ahead: Our Business Has Only Just Begun

Speaking of the future, our biggest strategy is globalization and diversification. By “group diversification,” I mean developing a richer array of businesses centered around our IP; by “globalization,” I mean increasing the proportion of our revenue that comes from overseas markets.

In one respect, we have been quite lucky: we started preparing to “go overseas” in 2018, making us one of the earlier companies in China to plan for international expansion . In truth, a lot of preparation is needed for going abroad: from meeting various product specifications and standards, to adapting content to local cultures and doing translations, and then to building an entire overseas team.

In the past few years, our overseas markets have been growing over 100% annually – this year we expect triple-digit percentage growth again. I think we’re probably one of the Chinese consumer product brands – especially as a culture-based company – that’s performing the best overseas.

These last two years, no matter if you go to Southeast Asia, Japan, Korea, Singapore, or to the UK, France, the US… you can find our stores. We currently have 50+ overseas stores, and by the end of this year it should be close to 100 stores .

Our approach to overseas markets is different from some brands that just set up a token presence abroad to “look good” and then use it mainly for marketing back home (the old “export to domestic sales” trick). All of our overseas operations are driven by the goal of making money and turning a profit. In fact, our overseas business is already nearly 20% net profit margin now.

Another thing that sets us apart from many other brands is our insistence on directly-operated stores. A lot of companies, to expand quickly, will choose franchising. But we run all our stores directly.

At the moment, our overseas revenue is still not a huge portion of the whole, but by our estimates we’ll achieve at least 1 billion RMB in overseas revenue this year, which would be a bit over 10% of the company’s total revenue. What’s more important is that the overseas segment is growing very fast. So I believe it won’t take many years for our overseas income to reach 50% of the total. The U.S. market in particular is performing exceptionally well – we’re likely to invest even more heavily this year and next year into the U.S. market’s growth.

That’s our expectation for the future as a whole.

Earlier this year, I was strolling down a street in the UK when I was suddenly hit by a feeling: our business is only just beginning. I saw these streets teeming with people, saw all those globally famous brands. It struck me how much more we still could do overseas. There is so much potential out there in the wider world waiting for us to explore.

05. Bonus: Every Company Must Find a Way to Sustainably Invest in IP

A lot of people question: If an IP doesn’t tell a story, how long can its vitality really last?

Let me first ask everyone: What important IPs live in the minds of our generation? How were they formed?

For example, Journey to the West, My Fair Princess, Legend of the White Snake – these all became major IPs. Maybe it’s because they had great stories and characters, but we believe a crucial factor was the element of time – time spent accompanying the audience.

When we were kids, every summer vacation the TV stations would start broadcasting those shows, and our generation watched them over and over. That long period of repeated companionship imprinted them in our minds as IPs – even super IPs for a whole generation.

Now the biggest problem is that time has become fragmented – young people just don’t have the time anymore. If you open a video streaming app now, you’ll find most of the TV series listed you’ve never watched (and don’t plan to), or you just watch a three-minute plot summary. So using traditional television shows to nurture an IP has become harder and harder – the show might not even get the chance to catch fire before the next one is already up in the queue.

Of course, we don’t deny that telling a good story can still create an IP. It’s just that the ROI and efficiency of that approach is getting lower and lower. We want to find a more efficient way to establish IP recognition and realize its commercial value.

We’re not stubbornly insisting on which path is right or wrong. There’s no need to get hung up on the old playbooks – there may be many different paths to reach the same destination.

Ultimately, the key to an IP’s lasting vitality is continuous, healthy investment into it. Think about why Star Wars is such a phenomenon. They’ve made like a dozen films in the franchise, and they keep using commercial means to continuously invest in, reawaken, and iterate on that IP. Mickey Mouse is the same way – it stays relevant because it’s constantly reintroduced and refreshed. Conversely, if you ever stop investing in an IP, it can quickly be forgotten.

So every company needs to figure out a method for sustained and healthy investment in their IP – to keep it alive and thriving.

Lastly, I want to say a couple of words about a term everyone’s been talking about lately: “generation gap” – in other words, differences between age groups. (Note: “generation gap” here refers to the disparities, disconnects, or even conflicts in values and choices between different generations.) People often discuss the generation gap in terms of technology. But I’ve found that brands also experience a kind of generation gap.

For instance, many of us today understand consumer marketing in a certain way. Take the oft-mentioned idea of “consumer upgrades” – it’s about people gradually realizing that besides working, they should also enjoy life. In other words, “live in the moment, enjoy life” – forget the bad things, go ahead and eat and drink and be merry. Under this mindset, the highest phrase we could think of was “enjoy your life,” and we built our products and advertising around that idea 【celebrate your life】.

One day, I saw an advertisement by a British brand. It advocated “celebrate your life.” That really struck me! I felt that the word “celebrate” is just brilliant. Celebrate entails more occasions than enjoy; its emotional intensity is higher, too.

This exemplifies what I mean by the generation gap. I realized that different people – from different generations or cultural backgrounds – have vastly different understandings of branding, of consumption, even of civilization. This insight pushed me to iterate our own marketing strategy.

So here, I hope that all of us can not only enjoy your life, but truly celebrate your life. Let’s not just enjoy living, but celebrate living to the fullest every day.