NZ Visual Diary - entry 380

collectibles - the PopMart crowd

As a kid, I collected baseball cards, stamps and coins. The latter two categories I pursued casually; I was a passionate baseball card collector.

There is a curious difference among those collectibles. With stamps and coins I knew upfront what I was getting. The hunt was hard, but the reward was self-evident. I would be surprised, and indeed delighted, when I found an item in an elusive series of coin or stamp, but success was mostly a consequence of focused attention in pursuit of naked prey, as it were.

Baseball card collecting introduced a heightened element of chance. Each packet of cards presented the challenge of a ‘blind’ purchase. The cards were wrapped, the contents concealed. The only certainty was that the most valuable cards — of the totemic heroes in major league baseball within any period of time — would be in deliberate short supply. One expected to accrue hordes of duplicates whose only value would be in trades with mates. Luck, more than skill, prevailed.

And so it is with the company PopMart that among other retail endeavours specialises in designer toys for sale in its retail shops, like the one featured in today’s image. The toys are collectible dolls on PopMart-branded themes like DIMOO and SkullPanda, but also dolls that reflect enduring trends of adolescent and young adult popular cultures (think imagination and fantasy; friendship and magic; adventure; and, of course, Disney cross-marketing characters).

The link to my days of baseball card collecting and trading is the blind box element. Most dolls in the DIMOO series, and perhaps also of other themes, are sold in sealed boxes to consumers who are unwitting as to specific content at the point of sale. The ploy blends the charm of surprise with the rapacity of serial consumption driven by peaked expectation and disappoint.

My photograph, of people queueing for entry to the Pop Mart store on Queen Street (with a mix of pedestrians in transit), may illustrate the power of story-telling and myth-making within popular culture combined with the consumer marketing genius of the blind box concept.