The seizure
Beilun Customs, a district of Ningbo Customs in Zhejiang Province, intercepted three shipments containing counterfeit Pop Mart blind boxes, plush toys and accessories imitating the LABUBU series.
The counts, from the customs announcement:
- 2,350 blind boxes
- 4,410 plush toys
- 9,400 keychains
- 495 raincoats
- 1,200 combs
Verification with Pop Mart, the rights holder, established that the items violated trademark and copyright law.
Read the mix again
The headline number is around 18,000 items, which is not remarkable on its own. But look at what the seizure is actually made of.
The plush toys are the brand. LABUBU is a plush character, and a counterfeit plush is the obvious version of this problem - it is what a shopper might find on a marketplace, it is what a screenshot of a listing looks like.
The keychains are the supply chain. 9,400 keychains out of roughly 18,000 items. More than half the seizure was not the hero product at all. It was small, cheap, low-ceremony accessories that ride along with the licensing deal. A keychain is a fraction of the price of a blind box, which means it is a fraction of the risk, which means it is exactly the thing that gets made in volume by a factory that already knows how to make the plush.
A counterfeit operation that gets through on a 9,400-unit keychain run has already solved the harder problem: it has solved how to copy the artwork, find the mould, and get the packaging right. The plush is the visible consequence. The keychain is the intelligence.
Why the customs route matters for a brand owner
Chinese customs enforce on declaration, not on inspection quality. Importers and exporters are required to accurately declare the intellectual property status of goods and provide legal authorisation for any protected IP.
That gives a brand two levers that do not exist in the consumer channel:
1. The authorisation trail. If a brand does not license its IP properly in the destination market, there is no authorisation for the importer to present, and the declaration fails. This is the single most common failure point for brands scaling into new markets, and it is invisible until a shipment is held.
2. The importer as the party to sue. When counterfeit goods are found at the border, the offending party is the importer, not a marketplace seller who may be anonymous. A brand with a documented licensing structure can act on that party. A brand without one cannot.
The precedent is not isolated
Ningbo Customs made a comparable detention on April 23 - nearly 200,000 items suspected of infringing LABUBU intellectual property.
Two seizures at the same customs office, seven months apart, one on an order of magnitude scale, both involving the same character. The April case was the headline; this one is the steady state underneath it.
What this means if you are a brand owner
The practical takeaway is not "LABUBU has a counterfeiting problem". Plenty of brands have that problem and most of them treat it as a customer-trust issue.
This is a supply-chain and licensing-design issue:
- If your accessories are licensed separately from your hero product, the accessories are where a copy operation starts. Price them and police them accordingly.
- If you are entering a new market, confirm that your licensing structure lets your importer present authorisation. A missing document is a held container.
- If your brand has a character-driven product line, the volume sits in the cheap merchandise. That is where the enforcement attention and the authentication tooling should be aimed.
The enforcement was not aimed at the plush toy. It was aimed at the paperwork - and the paperwork is the part of the brand that a counterfeiter has to get exactly right, every single time.
Key takeaways
- One customs seizure was roughly 18,000 items, of which more than half were cheap accessories rather than the hero product.
- Chinese customs enforce IP at the border via declaration and authorisation, so a brand's licensing paperwork is the first line of defence.
- Repeat enforcement at the same customs office, months apart, indicates a persistent supply route rather than a one-off.
- The cheapest, highest-volume licensed items are where a counterfeit operation proves it can execute.
- A brand that can name its importer has an actionable counterparty. A brand that cannot is relying on marketplace takedowns.