Collector Economy

What forms around a scarce object

When demand for specific variants of a collectible outruns their supply, an ecosystem grows up around the object without the brand having to build it. A secondary resale market appears, resale prices become a public signal of how much the culture values a piece, and a community of collectors organizes around chasing and trading the hardest figures to find. Pop Mart is one of the clearest recent examples, because its figures sit at the intersection of low retail price and high scarcity, the conditions that make a resale market likely.¹

The three layers

The first layer is the secondary market itself. Pop Mart's 1-in-100 Pucky Phantom Ghost figure has traded at ten times retail and more on the secondary market, and the most extreme data point, a 2019 Ghost Blue Pucky that sold at auction for $113,000 against a retail price of roughly $10 to $20, became a news story in its own right.¹ Once resale prices are visible, they change how people buy: a purchase starts to feel like it carries an option to resell, which sits somewhere between consumption and speculation.

The second layer is the financial-asset framing that follows. A market with observable prices makes collecting feel rational rather than frivolous. The $113,000 Ghost Blue Pucky headline functioned as free proof of concept, distributed by the media rather than paid for, reaching people who had never heard of Pop Mart before. It expands the audience to adult collectors and reduces the sense that buying is a waste, which widens the market well beyond children.

The third layer is community and content. Collectors who share their pulls, both the wins and the duplicates, create a steady stream of unboxing videos, comparison posts, and trading. In 2024, Pop Mart's unboxing videos drew more than fifteen billion views on Douyin alone, and more than eight hundred influencer partnerships generated an estimated $280 million in media value.¹ The brand captures that attention, a dynamic that overlaps with authentic affiliation marketing, largely without paying for it.

Why brands rarely engineer it well

Many consumer brands try to manufacture a collector economy through artificial limited editions, and most fail, because a durable secondary market depends on conditions that cannot be faked. The product has to be genuinely worth collecting on design and emotional resonance. The scarcity has to be credible, which is easier when a company controls its own manufacturing, as Pop Mart does, so that limited actually means limited.¹ And the community has to be real rather than seeded. Where scarcity is faked, secondary market pricing tends to expose it, because resale is an efficient signal that is hard to spoof.

Relationship to the surrounding mechanics

The collector economy is the larger structure that forms when the individual pull described in blind box psychology happens across millions of buyers at once. The two reinforce each other: a healthy resale market validates the blind box mechanic, and the mechanic keeps feeding new buyers into the resale market. It also depends on Pop Mart's IP character universe, since a diverse cast of owned characters gives the market more distinct objects to price and chase. The resulting cycle of collectors, content, and new buyers is what powers the company's demand-side flywheel, where each turn of secondary market attention pulls the next wave of buyers in.