A small vinyl figure with sharp teeth and a mischievous grin accumulated over 1.3 million TikTok posts under a single hashtag, without a single traditional advertisement. Labubu's rise is not just a product story but a design story.
Pop Mart's packaging for Labubu was deliberately engineered for social amplification. Hashtags printed on boxes. Blind-box formats are designed to produce the exact emotional response of surprise, delight, or disappointment that subsequently drives filming. The unboxing itself was the ad. By June 2025, TikTok alone housed over 1.9 million clips engaging with Labubu products (Brand Aid, 2025), contributing to Pop Mart's market capitalisation surpassing $40 billion (ListenFirst, 2025). This is social-first design executed at its most deliberate.
The underlying principle has a theoretical precedent. Berger (2013) identifies social currency, the sense that sharing something makes you look good or interesting, as one of the primary drivers of content transmission. Products and brand assets that offer a built-in social performance, whether through surprise, aesthetic beauty, or cultural reference, are designed to be shared as much as purchased. It is imperative that brands recognise that at the briefing stage and not just the post-production stage.
What does ‘Social-First’ mean?
It means designing assets, packaging, logos, campaign visuals, and in-store environments with the phone camera in mind as the primary viewing frame. The Stanley Cup craze of 2022–23 was a precursor of pastel colourways and visible lid geometry, making it instantly identifiable. Labubu extended this logic into product storytelling, scarcity, and community. The Le Creuset mystery box marketing did it with kitchen goods. The product becomes the content itself. Gentle Monster reinforces this same principle through its immersive retail spaces in locations like South Korea, where stores are designed as experiential, highly photogenic environments intended to be shared as much as shopped. The product becomes the content itself.
Keller (2021) notes that brand-building in digital environments requires distinctive brand assets to function consistently across contexts that vary in size, format, and resolution. A logo designed for a billboard will not necessarily function well as a TikTok thumbnail overlay. A campaign visual built just for print may lose all legibility and meaning when translated into the compressed, fast-scrolling environment of mobile. The design system must travel across platforms, formats, and contexts, without losing its core recognisability.
The brands earning disproportionate attention in the feed are those treating algorithm fluency as a design constraint from the start, not an afterthought.
REFERENCES
Berger, J. (2013) Contagious: Why Things Catch On. New York: Simon & Schuster.
