Pop Mart's POP LAND turns designer toys into a Beijing park — 100K visitors in month one

Pop Mart, the designer-toy company built on blind boxes of characters like MOLLY and LABUBU, opened POP LAND on September 26, 2023 inside Beijing's Chaoyang Park — the first immersive IP theme park in China's designer-toy industry. The project retrofitted roughly 40,000 m² of an existing urban park at a total investment of about ¥300 million, as part of Chaoyang Park's own urban-renewal upgrade.

The deliberate bet was not to imitate Disney: no roller coasters, no blockbuster story worlds. Instead the park was designed as a 'brand pilgrimage site', in the words of its general manager Hu Jian, modeled on Japanese destinations such as the Ghibli Museum and Shiroi Koibito Park. Four zones — Bubble Street, LABUBU's Enchanted Forest, MOLLY's Castle and a lakeside area — packed the characters into shops, restaurants, no-power play areas, costumed performances and AR interactions, so that meeting the IP was the experience.

The model worked commercially from the start: nearly 100,000 visitors in the first month, an average stay of 4.32 hours, and 72% of spending coming from in-park shops and dining — with IP merchandise selling five times better per visitor than a typical Pop Mart store and LABUBU dominating the best-seller list. Disclosure of the figures moved Pop Mart's stock up more than 8% in a day and roughly doubled LABUBU's online discussion, validating the thesis that IP can be deepened without a heavy story or hardware budget.