Designer Art Toys Blind Boxes Made in China

Many famous designer art toys blind boxes, this is not strictly a toy, they are collectible artwork, and most of their boxes are printed “Made in China”. Pop Mart’s collectible figures are made in Dongguang and Shenzhen art toy factories.

Many of the first generations of art toys are produced in China, Chinese toy factories will also accept orders from European and American customers, according to the customer’s design. With the quality, the production price will be different, and Chinese toy factories can only earn a meager profit in the production process.

Art toys, also known as designer toys, and urban vinyl toys, are called 潮玩 in China, meaning popular toys. Now the situation has changed, with the Chinese cultural background of art toys, get more and more young people’s favorite.

The First Art Toys in China

In 1997, Michael Lau was preparing for the first exhibition of his life in Hong Kong. His work was influenced mainly by American graffiti and Japanese manga but was not taken attention in the art market. That was also the year he was invited by Hong Kong metal band Yalongda to design the cover of their third album, Action Figures. Michael Lau created five 12-inch figures based on the album title and the images of the band members, and from then on his work with these small figures was unstoppable.

At the 1998 Hong Kong Toy Fair, Michael Lau materialized the characters from his four-panel comic strip “Gardener” into 12-inch figures, which became a milestone in the art toy market. In addition, Japanese art toy brands also launched the same type of toys in this period and quickly sold out. This phenomenon has driven many designers in Hong Kong. Since then, designers have been designing, producing, and selling art toys.

Pop Mart’s Molly and Monsters

There was an illustrator named Kenny Wong, an artist from Hong Kong, China, and the designer of the well-known art toy character Molly. Kenny wong saw a little girl with watercolor brushes and a palette in both hands and was impressed by her cute and stubbornness. The little girl even greeted him and said her name was Molly. In 2006, Kenny created an art toy “Molly”, a sweet little girl with big eyes and a pouty mouth, who is persistent and confident.

10 years later, in 2016, Wang Ning, CEO of Beijing Pop Mart, who was caught in a toy retail dilemma, saw Molly and he came to Hong Kong to find Kenny Wong and bought out the rights to Molly. Molly began to receive the attention of many art toy designers and fans, and then become popular!

KASING LUNG, a Hong Kong-born artist. In 2015, he created the “Monsters” series’ story and launched the Vinyl figure series of “The Monsters” by How2work.

The Popularity  of Blind Boxes

When asked about the art purchase experience, Wang Ning talked in great detail about his experience of buying paintings in some foreign markets and was more concerned about the purchase process than the result. This obsession with the art buying experience has directly influenced Pop Mart’s experiential marketing approach, such as blind boxes.

The IP of artists’ work, and the popularity of blind boxes, are all part of the rise of the art toy industry as a whole. What has prepared Chinese toy manufacturers for the rise of art toys is the rich experience in producing toys for well-known toy brands in Europe and the United States, as Chinese so many workers and low production costs, which is why many art toys and blind boxes have made in china label printed on them.

Art toy blind boxes in these years in the global quick growth. Some data show that the global art toys market size from 2015-2019 from $8.7 billion to $19.8 billion, and is expected to reach $44.8 billion in 2024. The most popular art toys are the works of Chinese Hong Kong, Japanese, as well as European and American designers. Freshness, beauty, and quality are the reasons they buy their works.

Although they all come from designers and artists, like the art industry, the aesthetics, culture, production process, and the number of pieces produced are different, and the stratification of art toys in terms of price and marketing is extremely evident.

On the art toy trading platform, the prices of art toys go up and down, and when popular artists release new art toys, you queuing in front of the store is the same as those who waited to buy stamps at the post office in the last century. Even the expression you get when you get a designer to sign a blind box at an art toy fair is exactly the same as the stamp collector who gets a designer’s autograph at the last century stamp show.

Art Toys Blind Boxes Manufacturing

Since the blind box market is so popular, what kind of production process does a blind box need to go from design to a real art toy, now we will show you the production process of blind boxes. After the sample or prototype is approved, the mass production goes with the following 8 process steps.
① Mold Making
② Blank Figure Making
③ Dustless Painting
④ Pad Printing
⑤ Assembly Figure
⑥ Quality Control (QC)
⑦ Packing Figure
⑧ Containerized and Shipped

It is a wise decision to manufacture your art toy in the SZRDDM toy factory. Whether you want to custom vinyl toys,  art toys, designer toys, or collectible figures, we can make it for you with a lower MOQ and shorter production time. Otherwise, we have a strong QC engineer team with 15 staff, who can help inspect your production strictly according to interaction standards to ensure quality issues.

With your 2d art design or 3d file (OBJ, STL, STP, IGS format), we can help you to make your own design into a real prototype within 7-9 working days, We had been worked with over tens of thousands of clients to create their design and work with much well-know art toy brand clients such as Youtooz, Hasbro, Kidrobot, and Martian Toys.