It's time to lay some crazy reject theories to rest! YOU HAVE A FUFU NOT A BUBU (and I do too).

It’s time to lay to rest many theories about Lafufus and “OEMs” or “factory rejects/seconds.”  This is a widely spread theory here and does have truth to it, but there are many theories surrounding this that need to be tackled.  The last thing any of us should do is use the factory reject theory to legitimize fakes.  If you think you have a reject, just call it a Fufu because that’s what it is, made in the same factory as Pop Mart or not. If Pop Mart rejected it, they did so for a reason.  Pop Mart said “this one is not the standard we sell, it’s wrong.”  If Pop Mart says that about your plush pendant, I’m sorry, it is not an officially accepted Labubu.  Further, Labubu pendants are officially defined by Pop Mart, and rejects fall outside of that definition, making them FUFUs.

If you were a painter who took pride in your work, and you made major mistakes on a portrait (paint drips, tears in canvas, etc…) are you going to an art show and selling that?  No! You don’t want that representing you and your buyers!  Your buyers especially don’t want that crummy work representing them.  In the same way, Labubu collectors are fine with folks enjoying Fufus, many of us do.  But we DO NOT want defective stuff representing what we spend our time looking for and collecting (Pop Mart is under pressure because of this right now as their own QC drops).  Us Labubu collectors already have plenty of haters, we don’t need to feed them by suddenly accepting crappy products. 

First, this post operates under the factual condition that some rejects of Pop Mart products exist outside of whatever industrial shredding & incineration equipment Pop Mart uses to destroy what doesn’t meet QC standards.  As others have stated, it is a popular practice for Chinese factories to sell off some rejected but still okay product to other factories and resellers.  With that said, Pop Mart is not a standard brand, it is a major brand with a serious reputation it must uphold (most of you already know how upset we get over QC issues.  Pop Mart hears, even if they’d like to ignore it).  Available data on these practices comes from low-margin OEMs, not from high-IP collectible companies like Pop Mart that keep business practices their life blood. So yeah, some of these rejects do exist, but not that many.  Pop Mart is big, they can incinerate their rejects with a minimal hit.  They make more money keeping the crappy products out of stores than they would selling those crappy products to resellers who will misrepresent their intellectual property.

Here’s where it gets interesting.  That doesn’t mean rejects aren’t out there being resold.  There are, the issue is too many folks here are assuming that is the standard for any good looking counterfeit. 

Now let’s look into independently created rip offs. These are what most of us encounter.   Quality on these has gotten very good.  Scannable tags, realistic faces, and quality stuffing are the norm.  Yes, designers are very capable of creating nearly identical fakes and they exist, likely even moreso than rejects.  For many, codes scanning as legit is a major hurdle that supports the idea there are lots of rejects in circulation.  This is unlikely!  It makes no sense for Pop Mart to sell rejects with real codes.  The tags on fakes are almost always of lower quality with blurry printing.  If these were Pop Mart products, the tags would generally match the quality of genuine ones.  Back in the Windows 98 era, there were certain product key patterns that would validate as “legit” because people figured out the underlying logic the system was checking for. Once enough programmers understood the pattern, counterfeit or non-genuine keys were passing basic validation. Just because a key, or QR code is accepted by the system, does not mean it is authentic.  The same things we look at to verify our stuff is legit, is what scammers look at to make sure their fakes are hard to detect. 

With all of this said, yes, rejects are real.  NO THEY ARE NOT LABUBUS.  They are what we call LAFUFUS.  Doesn’t mean they are bad and you can’t enjoy them, it simply means Pop Mart does not accept them and so we cannot define them by Pop Mart standards.  Second, many of us will try to use the reject theory to valid our purchases of counterfeits, both rejected ones and intentionally made ones.  That is wrong.  Enjoy what you have and get rid of it if you don’t.