Fashion Trendsetter Laura
Last weekend, some friends invited me out to get dim sum a part of Los Angeles I rarely visit: Rowland Heights, which is much further east than we usually go for dim sum. We have family in San Gabriel, which is a shorter drive from our home.
(New Capital Seafood is a fantastic place to go, though. Highly recommend it. They still serve the dim sum on carts!!)
In the same strip mall, there's a new imported Chinese snack food store called Duo Duo Snacks. It's a massive, poorly-lit, warehouse-like space absolutely stuffed with every possible snack category you could imagine... and also a tremendous, shocking, offputting number of blind box toys.
I was kind of alarmed to see this many blind boxes. I was also surprised that so many had my name on them.
It appears that there's a Chinese toy and collectible company, ToyCity, which has a blind box brand focused on a purse-lipped doll character named Laura. Each Laura blind box series has 12 named characters and 1 secret character. There are a huge number of Laura series, with very few common themes or vibes:
- Laura Pajamas Series
- Laura Cyberpunk Series
- Laura Wood Elves, which is Laura in fantasy/nature outfits
- Laura Floral Fashion, floral themed dresses
- Laura The Charm of Faded Hues, all black and white outfits
- Laura Sweet Monster Series, which has two sets of 13 characters each-- one set of cute but unsettling dessert-themed clowns, and another set of vaguely goth dessert clowns. The secret figure for the happy clowns is "Souffle Puppet" Laura. The goth clown secret figure is called "Rotten Strawberry Pie."
- Laura Mood Hues Collection, which seems to be... vaguely fantastical sleepy Lauras? not sure
- Laura The Werewolves Tea Party, Laura in vaguely "fairytale" themed outfits
- Laura No Fairy Tales, which is... traditional western fairy tale characters, just straight up
- Fashion Trendsetter Laura, where Laura wears outfits with a fashion/youth culture theme. The boxes all say "U POOL OVERLORD" on them and the secret figure is a gravity biker???
- Laura Pool Fight, which is pool-themed but does NOT say "U POOL OVERLORD"
- Laura Chinese Style, where Laura wears outfits themed after Chinese fantasy character archetypes. The English names for these outfits are not very helpful. One is called "The Golden Retriever", but she's not a golden retriever
- Various Lauras have a series II which imprisons the Lauras in "space capsules," which I first interpreted as some kind of cryofreeze hibernation thing but just seems to be a general Laura Brand Thing that the second series gets--a plastic prison to trap your Laura in. So there's a Laura Cyberpunk Space Capsule, Laura Fashion Trendsetter Space Capsule Series, etc
The Fashion Trendsetter ones were funniest to me, because the phrase "U POOL OVERLORD" fascinated me, and the box also said "SAD CLOWN." on it in very, very tiny print. Is Laura meant to be a sad clown? I liked the idea of buying the sad clown version of myself, so I did.
I got exactly the one I wanted--LONGBOARD QUEEN Laura. It says "LAURA" on her in three different places!
She's also, like, a complete fucking mystery to me. I cannot find a single thing about her online. The box is 50% in English, so I expected to be able to go online and see some story or context for Laura. Who is she? Is she actually a clown? Or just a doll? Toycity's website actually went down while I was researching Laura, so I haven't been able to explore it very thoroughly. Laura blind boxes are all over various collector store websites, like this one, but I have not been able to find a single fansite for these creatures. Does anyone actually like them?
Almost every English-language mention I'm finding online is for a blind-box-specific reseller serving the US. There are truly a staggering number of these stores, and their SEO completely drowns out the smaller number of people actually talking about these toys and why they like them, like this extremely small subreddit. (It contains only one post about Laura.) The vinyl toys subreddit also has few posts about her. There are plenty of tiktoks about these Lauras, but they mostly look like promotional material. I genuinely do not think these toys have many English-language fans.
I cannot imagine why they would. Most people who know about these toys are probably discussing them in the main languages they're sold in. But ToyCity was at one point definitely trying to Make Laura Happen, with an entire English-language instagram account where people were expressing fandom for Laura.
...Okay, so the people commenting on that particular post are almost 100% just blind box/toy content creators. Hmm. All right.
Is Laura's English-language presence some weird, astroturfed ~creator economy phenomenon?~ A hallucination of the world Instagram has created? Just a bunch of people trying to get their hands on another $9 USD hunk of vinyl to make a 15 second video about, no matter how few people in their market care?
Well, Duo Duo Snacks had a very large number of collectible childlike girl blind box brands with single-word English names. There was one called "Molly" which is manufactured by (much larger, I think) toy manufacturer Pop Mart. Molly has been around for almost 2 decades, apparently. Laura seems to have a lot in common with her. And Pop Mart seems to have been influential in creating the market for "designer" blind box figurines in China in the first place. There is a reason that Duo Duo had the monumental wall of toys--this is a growing fad over there, and it's probably got a local audience which gets better context for that online in Chinese. The content creators yearning for Laura in English are probably hoping the fad catches on here too.
At Duo Duo there was also a girl called Nanci. And an Emma-- all by different manufacturers. I think Laura is just one of a zillion completely soupy and unremarkable blind box girls in a weird corner of the toy industry I didn't know existed. Toy companies that work in the blind box market probably just all have at least one doll-like, sleepy girl with a pout and a single English name for a brand identity, so they can compete with Molly and Pop Mart.
I suppose a telltale first sign of something "catching on" might not be genuine interest from real people, but exploratory interest from short form video content creators.
Longboard Queen Laura is now on my desk at home. And this post may become the first English-language "fansite" about Laura.
I love that Los Angeles is constantly offering me these surreal visions into various subculture hustles I'd never heard of before. I can't say that I wish the desperate blind box content creators well--this is just all a mountain of useless plastic, it's just vinyl gambling for teens--but I've been glad for this one brief look into a corner of social media content creator bullshit I've never seen before. It's good for me to keep my expectations for the internet low.
Rowland Heights is so far away from me that I doubt I'll ever head back to Duo Duo Snacks, but I had a great time there and bought some unusual flavors of potato chip as well. I may just take Longboard Queen Laura into work and put her on my desk so that visitors know whose desk it is. Laura, three times! On one figurine!! Laura! Laura! Laura!!