Labubu: Lo de coleccionar BASURA está fuera de control

There's a Labubu doll that was just auctioned for $150,000 in China; a first-edition box of Pokémon cards is currently valued at 180,000 cucufloros, and while no one can quite agree on which is the most expensive Funko Pop, after visiting the rankings on more than 30 websites, the one I've seen repeated at number one the most times is the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Gold Double Funko, of which only ten exist and which a man bought three years ago for 100,000 cucufloros. Do you know what a Labubu is and why they sell so much and have gone viral? Labubus are just another symptom of the times we live in, with dolls more expensive than a luxury car, adults fighting over Pokémon cards... this decade will go down in history as the years in which the world of adult children became both crazy and profitable. Very profitable: the buyer of the world's rarest Funko, a guy who paid 100,000 cucufloros for two golden Funkos in 2022, sold them just a year later for 210,000. A few years ago, this very clever Chinese thirty-something (who's already been featured on the cover of Forbes) came up with the idea of ​​merging the spirit of Funkos (i.e., ugly dolls with hundreds of variations) with that of Pokémon cards (i.e., randomness, mystery, pure gambling) to create a line of doll collections that, in recent months, have sent POP MART's stock soaring to ridiculous levels. The clever Chinese man, named Wang Ning, is already the 10th richest person in China, and his company, Pop Mart, had a turnover of $1.8 billion last year thanks to collections like this one, or this one, but above all thanks to Labubu. This is the latest example of one of the phenomena we most enjoy studying on this channel: IF IT WORKS IT WORKS, that is, how companies manage to, through camouflage and marketing, create an aura, a psychological envelope that makes any piece of trash an object of devotion. In the case of the Labubus, it has helped a lot that the bunnies have amused people like Rihanna, or Dua Lipa, not to mention Lisa from Black Pink, who has an embarrassing video on Vanity Fair's YouTube channel that is, literally, a disguised advertisement. But there is a fine line between the passion of collecting and madness. Or there should be. At what point did it become normal for a company to charge you $200 to certify that a FUNKO POP is original? Why are there countless tutorials that, as if the Labubus were Rolexes, teach you how to distinguish a real doll from a fake? When you buy a box of Labubu, you don't know what's inside. And as I told you in the Twitter algorithm video, pigeons (and us) love uncertainty. As we see on the website, in today's Coca-Cola collection launch, you might get a regular plush toy, and you have a one in 72 chance of getting the so-called secret Labubu. Why is Labubu so successful and these others aren't? Why did one person pay $150,000 for a life-size Labubu, and on any website, from eBay, StockX, or even Wallapop, we can find these dolls at prices that make people feel unbalanced? It worries me to see toys up for auction at prices equal to monthly salaries. It gives me a feeling of suffocation, as if something bad is going to happen soon to all of us, inside and outside the store. To all of us as a society. Soon, this has to explode somewhere.