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Comment by ge96 | Hacker News Reader

The Labubu phenomenon is interesting not even sure where they came from but now they're just everywhere

Guessing you’re younger. Beanie babies and trolls were the same thing for millennials.

I'm a millenial (early 90s) and only barely remember trolls and have no idea what beanie babies are. Homogeneous generations ("millenials, genZ,..") are kind of meaningless, there's too much variation within generations especially as you cross regions. :)

Beanie Babies peaked in maybe 1998 and were at one point 10% of sales on eBay. If you were an American above the age of 5 in 1998 I'm not sure it's possible to be unaware of them.

Agreed…not owning one is understandable. Not hearing about it at all in the US if you’re a millennial is perplexing (I’m an early 90s kid too).

Yup that is my point - OP just mentioned millennial which includes non-US

yeah, and were at tag sales until like 2006

other examples are like Tamagotchi and Furby

They had to ban Tamagotchi from my elementary school. I remember Furby's but never had one. It would be interesting seeing how those phenomenons spread over time

I did a big road trip this year and beanie babies were back in a bunch of truck stops and such

Basically a manufactured China-backed scheme leveraging TikTok

[citation needed]

Why is a national conspiracy to sell toys more plausible than a harmless fad?

"scheme" lol

have you ever heard of Hello Kitty? Sanrio has 13B market cap.

Not following the connection between Popmart (Labubu) and Sanrio (Hello Kitty), other than the fact that they've done some licensing deals together.

> The ~~Labubu~~ Hello Kitty phenomenon is interesting not even sure where they came from but now they're just everywhere

The point is, it's the same sentence for a different time.

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