Many people think that Pop Mart is just a company that makes quick money from young people through a few blind boxes, and it’s an extremely lucky internet-famous brand.

If you think that way too, then you’re wrong.
When you scroll to an interview with Wang Ning, the founder of Pop Mart, someone asks him: What exactly is your company’s moat? Is it just the team and IP?
Wang Ning’s answer is very interesting. He didn’t talk about any grand strategy, nor did he hype how powerful his IP matrix is; instead, he said something very down-to-earth.
He said that every company’s barriers are nothing more than two types: hard barriers and soft barriers.
Let’s first talk about this “hard barrier.”
Many people envy Pop Mart’s extremely high gross margins and think: I’ll just go find a few illustrators, have a contract manufacturer make a batch of blind boxes, spend some money to buy traffic—won’t that let me replicate Pop Mart?
Totally wrong.
In the interview, Wang Ning used a brilliant analogy. He said that when other people look at Pop Mart, it’s like the battle angel Alita from a movie: on the outside, she’s an extremely beautiful, refined little girl. But if you peel away that layer of beautiful skin, you’ll find that underneath are all precision interlocking mechanical parts—cold, complex, and extremely hardcore.
This is the truth of Pop Mart. At its core, it’s a “heavy-asset retail and supply chain company” wearing a trendy collectible/toy shell.
Wang Ning said that their company has actually been operating for 13 years. What does 13 years mean? In a business world that’s always changing, this is a moat built by time.
Opening a physical store looks shiny and impressive, but behind it are hard, dirty, exhausting tasks. Every day, who goes to open the door? Who closes it? How do they collect the money? How are the goods allocated? How are the service standards set? Even who cleans and who supervises the hygiene dead spots in the store? These seemingly insignificant little things require countless iterations and the accumulation of countless small details.
Capital can smash hundreds of millions overnight for you, but capital can’t buy the compound returns of time.
This is what I often call first principles. The underlying tone of business is always those boring operations, complex supply chains, and the daily grind over details.
Pop Mart has worked these “solid” things through to the end—that’s an extremely strong hard barrier. If you want to copy it, sure, go back and spend 10 years or 8 years simmering it, stepping on every one of those pitfalls first.
After talking about the hard barrier, let’s look at the soft barrier.
With a supply chain and channels, can you just sit there and count money? Of course not. You still need a soul.
Wang Ning said that what they do is about art, and an artist isn’t someone you can recreate just by spending some money.
This is exactly where it goes against common sense. We’re used to understanding everything with industrialized thinking—we think that as long as production capacity is big enough, everything can be replicated. But art won’t work, and neither will emotional value.
The birth of a top-tier IP is, in fact, a very delicate kind of consensus. Why are young people willing to pay for Molly? Because that little girl with the pursed lips hits some kind of emotion in their hearts. Capturing that emotion requires extremely high sensitivity and the natural talent of an artist.
Big companies can use algorithms to calculate 10,000 product combinations, but algorithms can’t calculate the next “soul” that makes young people go crazy with love. Money can buy out the production line, but it can never buy top-tier creativity.
So, understanding Pop Mart is really understanding two core rules for making money in the next 10 years:
1. Do difficult things—and do them correctly. In the supply chain and offline operations that everyone else is unwilling to touch, build your Alita mechanical body shell. Use time to build a high wall that capital can’t cross.
2. Protect the soul that can’t be standardized. In your products and services, inject emotional value and an artistic sense that machines and algorithms can’t replace.
A truly great company must have both the cold precision of a factory and the romantic sensibility of an artist.
Don’t fall for fantasies of overnight wealth, and don’t think that other people’s success is all down to luck. Go take a look at the mechanical gears beneath those beautiful skins—that’s the real wealth code worth our awe and learning.
What do you think?