The Blind-Box Boom Cools: Pop Mart's Revenue Fell by Up to Half in a Single Quarter
Pop Mart, the company behind the world's blind-box craze, disclosed that third-quarter revenue fell 45–50 percent from last year's record quarter — the first hard evidence that the resale speculation inflating the boom is cooling.
For two years, Pop Mart could do no wrong. On Monday the company disclosed its third-quarter results, and they read like the end of an era: overall revenue down 45 to 50 percent from the same quarter of 2025, the company's first decline after a first half that was still growing 23.8 percent year on year.
The fall was steepest far from home. Revenue in the Americas dropped 70 to 75 percent, Asia-Pacific fell 65 to 70 percent, and Europe and other markets 50 to 55 percent. China itself was down 25 to 30 percent — and even there the channels split, with offline stores slipping 5 to 10 percent while online sales, the channel most exposed to resale buyers, fell by nearly half.
On the earnings call, chief operating officer Si De traced the slump to two things. Last year's third quarter was the highest-selling quarter in the company's history, setting a base no business could match. And the secondary market, where fans and resellers had been bidding up rare figures — the practice Chinese collectors call chao wa, "frying the dolls" — has visibly cooled. Online channels suffered most, he indicated, precisely because so much of their volume had been speculation-driven panic buying rather than ordinary retail.
His remedy is to hold the line on prices: the company said it would protect the brand and refuse to fight a price war, steering online sales back to normal retail rather than discounts. Whether patience will be rewarded is the open question — the story ran on Baidu's hot board and was picked up by Taiwan's Central News Agency under a blunt headline: "Pop Mart's fever breaks."
The blind box — a sealed package holding a random figure, some common, some so rare that collectors pay multiples of the retail price — made Pop Mart a global phenomenon and turned its stores into lottery halls. While the speculation runs hot, the boxes sell themselves; once it cools, the arithmetic gets unforgiving, because a collectible boom is really a market in sentiment. This quarter's numbers are the first hard evidence that the sentiment has turned.
The company insists China's market remains "steady and healthy" and that store traffic is still strong, and executives still expect the full year to close positive. The final quarter of the year will show whether shoppers who no longer expect a windfall keep buying dolls at all.