A day before MINISO dropped its cool May the 4th online ad featuring members of the Chinese Garrison of the 501st Legion, teasing its Star Wars collection and pop up, I was at the mall doing a little scouting of my own. At MINISO and nearby collectible lifestyle store Pop Mart, I of course ended up picking up some of their current Star Wars items.
BLIND BOX BOOM
These stores have exploded into the mainstream in recent years. Pop Mart was already a major force in China by around 2019 and 2020, but the brand seemed to hit a whole new level of global visibility in 2024, when Labubu moved from collectible curiosity to full blown pop culture phenomenon.
Collectible crazes are nothing new. Different generations had their Cabbage Patch Kids, Beanie Babies, and Funko phases. But the recent Labubu wave has felt like something else entirely. Fueled by social media, celebrity visibility, and the irresistible suspense built into the blind box format, it turned the simple act of opening a package into a mini event. BLACKPINK’s Lisa is often cited as one of the stars who helped ignite the craze, while Rihanna and Dua Lipa have also been linked to Labubu’s rise in visibility.
Pop Mart smartly capitalized on that momentum. It did not stop with Labubu. The company quickly rolled out more original lines and high profile licensed collections, but kept building around the same irresistible formula: the blind box, where suspense is part of the product.
Much has been written about the allure of blind boxes and why they are so hard to resist. Part of it is collector psychology. You are not just buying the item itself. You are buying the suspense of not knowing what is inside. That uncertainty creates a real emotional lift, the brief high of anticipation followed by either satisfaction or the urge to try again. It is a sensation not entirely unlike gambling, where chance and reward work hand in hand. The comparison is not exact, of course, but the pull feels familiar. You are not simply paying for a product. You are chasing the possibility of getting the one you really want.
Guilty as charged.
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
It has become an almost bi-weekly trek for me and the wife (Payday Friday only, okay?). She checks out her character lines, especially the plush pendants and bag charms, while I head straight for the galactic figures.
The Star Wars line, displayed openly to whet your appetite (and yes, my collector brain was already getting hungry), features twelve characters in all.
What immediately stands out about Pop Mart’s Star Wars line is its strong anime and chibi inspired design language. These are not screen accurate miniatures so much as stylized reinterpretations, with oversized heads, huge expressive eyes, tiny bodies, and poses that push attitude over realism. That approach gives familiar characters a fresh kind of charm. Luke’s bright blue eyes and soft features make him look almost disarmingly youthful, while Vader, despite the helmet and armor, still carries that same exaggerated cuteness without losing his menace. The result is a line that feels playful, polished, and very much in step with the designer toy aesthetic Pop Mart has built its name on.
By now, I have my own little blind box ritual down. I weigh the box in my hand, give it a careful shake, and listen to the tiny rattle inside as though it might somehow reveal the character within. I have noticed plenty of other buyers doing the exact same thing, each of us pretending we have developed some secret method for outsmarting the blind box. We have not.
So far, I am eight characters in out of the full twelve, though two of those purchases turned out to be duplicates. Such is the blind box life. Which means that every new box now comes with its own little odds game: on paper, I have a 4 in 12 shot, or roughly a 33 percent chance, of pulling one of the four I still need. Not terrible, not comforting either. The math says I still have a fighting chance. The duplicate pile says otherwise.
In the end, I solved the odds conundrum in the least subtle way possible: I bought the complete box. That should wrap up the full set of twelve in one fell swoop, unless Pop Mart decides to have a little fun with me and slips in a secret character somewhere in the mix. So yes, after all the weighing, shaking, guessing, and duplicate dodging, the Force apparently led me to the simplest answer of all: just buy the case.
I also took the opportunity to sample a couple of adjacent lines, just to see what else was out there. At MINISO, I pulled an Ahsoka from Hot Toys’ Cosbi bobble head collection (set of eight). Its design lives in the same general neighborhood as Pop Mart, leaning hard into cuteness and instant recognizability.
On the softer side, I had a friend grab one of Hot Toys’ Ewok bag charms (set of eight) from Downtown Disney, and out came Teebo, fuzzy, wide eyed, and clutching a baby Ewok with all the charm that line is clearly built around.
Then there is one Pop Mart Grogu figure (set of twelve), gifted by a colleague, that still sits in a corner, unopened.
So yes, while I zeroed in on a set I obsessed on completing, it was fun to sample the neighboring lanes.
REFUSING TO BE BOXED IN
I think I am done with blind boxes. With a complete Pop Mart Star Wars set finally in hand, the mission feels complete, and satisfying precisely because it has an ending. That may be the real trick to collecting without letting it consume you. A collector has to set boundaries. You have to decide what is worth completing and what is better left appreciated from a distance. Otherwise, you end up trapped in the oldest mantra of modern collectibility: “gotta catch them all.”
Then again, there is that MINISO clicker character line still waiting in the wings. Hmmm.
