Wang Ning

The Beijing variety store was close to running short of money when Wang Ning went through his own sales figures and found one category outselling everything else on the shelves: Japanese designer toys sold in sealed boxes the buyer could not see into. He asked his customers what else they collected, and the answer that kept coming back was a big-eyed character called Molly.¹

Wang is the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Pop Mart, a Chinese consumer company that turned blind box designer toys into a global collectibles business built on characters it owns rather than licenses. Founded in Beijing in 2010 and listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in December 2020, Pop Mart grew from a single variety store into one of the most valuable consumer brands to come out of China, carried in the mid-2020s by the worldwide popularity of its Labubu figures.

Background

Wang was born in 1987 in Henan province, in central China, where his parents ran small retail and wholesale businesses. That early exposure to shopkeeping shaped his instinct for what sells and how a store is run. He studied advertising at Zhengzhou University, graduating around 2009, and entered adulthood with a retailer's eye rather than an engineer's or a designer's. He did not train as an artist, and Pop Mart's later strength in character design came from partnerships with outside illustrators rather than from Wang's own drawing.

Getting started

In 2010, at 23, Wang opened the first Pop Mart store in a Beijing shopping mall, a lifestyle and variety concept loosely modeled on Hong Kong trend shops, selling gadgets, stationery, cosmetics, snacks, and toys. For several years the store struggled to stand out from other variety retailers, and the company came close to running short of money. The turn came from a piece of data Wang noticed in his own sales figures: one category, Japanese designer toys sold in sealed blind boxes such as the Sonny Angel line, consistently outsold everything else on the shelves. When he surveyed customers about what else they collected, the answer that kept surfacing was a big-eyed character called Molly. Rather than treat blind boxes as one shelf among many, Wang recognized the format itself as the business and reorganized the company around it.¹

What he built

In 2016 Wang licensed Molly from the Hong Kong artist Kenny Wong and released Pop Mart's first Molly blind box series, which sold out quickly and established the template.¹ From there he built a vertically integrated collectibles machine: sign artists and commission or acquire original characters, own the intellectual property outright, control manufacturing, and sell through a mix of physical stores, unmanned vending machines the company calls roboshops, e-commerce, and a collector community app. The blind box mechanic, where buyers cannot see which figure is inside until they open it, and where each series hides a rare secret variant, sat at the center of the model.

Pop Mart listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in December 2020, raising roughly $676 million at a valuation near $7 billion.² Its roster widened beyond Molly to Dimoo, Skullpanda, and the Nordic-folklore monster Labubu, part of the Monsters series by artist Kasing Lung, whom Pop Mart partnered with beginning in 2019. Labubu turned into a global phenomenon in 2024 after the K-pop star Lisa was photographed with one, drawing in celebrity fans and long queues worldwide.² Pop Mart revenue roughly doubled in 2024 to about 13 billion yuan, and in the first half of 2025 the Monsters line alone accounted for roughly a third of revenue.³ On the back of that surge, wealth trackers estimated Wang's net worth at more than $20 billion by 2025, ranking him among China's wealthiest people.²

How he operates

Wang runs Pop Mart as an intellectual property company that happens to sell toys, and has said he wants it to become something like a Chinese Disney.² The operating pattern is consistent: own the characters instead of licensing someone else's, spread bets across a stable of distinct characters so no single one is a point of failure, and engineer scarcity through limited drops and hidden variants. He leans on direct observation over market research, having found the original opportunity by reading his own store's sales data rather than commissioning a study. He pairs that with vertical control of design, manufacturing, and retail, and with a distribution network of stores and roboshops that doubles as a way to seed new markets cheaply. Much of the brand's reach comes from collectors posting unboxing videos, so marketing runs largely on community content rather than traditional advertising.

Where things stand

As of 2026, Wang remains chairman and CEO of the publicly traded Pop Mart, whose share price and profits have been lifted sharply by the Labubu wave. The company has pushed beyond figures into a Beijing theme park, animation and games, and jewelry and accessories, extending its characters onto new surfaces.³ The open questions are the ones that attach to any hit-driven collectibles business: whether Labubu's popularity is durable or a fad, how the company sustains attention as trends rotate, and how it manages counterfeiting and the secondary resale market it depends on but does not fully control.

Key facts

• Founded Pop Mart in Beijing in 2010 at age 23, starting as a variety and lifestyle store before pivoting to blind box toys.
• Spotted the opportunity by noticing that Japanese blind box designer toys outsold other categories in his own store, then surveyed customers about what they collected.
• Licensed the Molly character from Hong Kong artist Kenny Wong in 2016, the release that set the blind box template.
• Took Pop Mart public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in December 2020, raising about $676 million.
• Labubu, from artist Kasing Lung's Monsters series, went globally viral in 2024 and drove roughly a third of Pop Mart revenue by the first half of 2025.
• Estimated net worth surpassed $20 billion in 2025, placing him among China's richest people.