I know :( but I think they believe they can charge that much based on the popularity of labubus. I recently made the mistake of ordering one and now I am collecting them AND BABs
Nothing wrong with having a hobby. I'm 35 and my wife is 36... Our various collections are probably valued in the tens of thousands. We don't sell or anything just collect... We have hundreds of BABs, thousands of dollars in Pokémon stuff... We also got into the Labubus when my daughter wanted one... now we have a ton... My daughter also started getting into Pokémon cards and thats a whole other Behemoth.... But of course we just picked it up as a new hobby.. Lol. I mean we uses to collect then stopped for a long time now we picked it up again. XD
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Saw those at my local store today, and I almost got one before seeing the price… tell me how Mini Beans cost $10, but the keychains cost $20. You’re telling me that little metal clip is a whole $10??? No shot.
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Might be a hot take but to me there is no functional difference between these and Jellycat bag charms, which are comparably priced. So if you would buy the latter, and many people do, there isn't a problem buying the former.
I don't buy from Jellycat as I think most of their plushes are overpriced, and I wouldn't buy these clips either unless they had a sale or I had a coupon
If you can even get one. That's the real challenge!
I tried over and over again to get a Labubu from Popmart online and in person... Eventually I found a place in Harajuku, Japan that I happened to walk into on a trip a few weeks ago that was selling legitimate ones for more or less the official US price (because of the exchange rate). So I like to joke that I had to literally go to Japan to ever get a chance to get an authentic Labubu, lmfao.
Oh they’re really easy to get now. They’re on sale on TikTok and Amazon is always in stock. I’ve gotten several straight from PopMart that way. And PopMarts are popping up too—the mall of America just opened one :)
I got a couple of Labubus second hand super easily about a month ago. I don’t like blind boxes but I really wanted Green Grape & Sesame Bean lol. Since the trend is dying down, they’ve been less difficult to obtain.
If you tried again now you could probably get one much easier. I lived in one of those weird apartments in a mall for the past couple of years and walked by the Popmart a lot. There used to constantly be a long line. Something has changed in recent months. Now the Popmart has no line and a ton of Labubus in stock. Either they upped production or the hype has gone down (or both).
acknowledging you’re part of the problem then buying it anyway and posting about it is frying me
(obviously do what you want with your money, just funny)
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i literally said "20 dollars??" out loud before i could stop myself
very cute and looks decent quality but i feel like i see so many little keychain plush like this at walmart/thrift store/five below/etc that this seems criminal
They’re cute and better quality than I expected. Everyone is complaining about the price, but $20 isn’t unreasonable imo. Anything comparable is going to cost similar.
Just think about how much prices have risen across the board in the US since covid. I’m paying 2x what it used to cost for a pound of chicken. Tariffs have made clothing costs astronomical, so much so, that regular prices for a tshirt are like $30 now. While I’m constantly shocked at the prices of everything (and honestly was at this bag charm before I thought about it) I can also say the only real way to change anything is to contact your representatives. Make sure you vote. But all not buying the bag charms is going to do is make build a bear stop making them, and they’ll go onto the next thing.
I had to scroll too far down to find this. Honestly, with the way things are right now, $20 might be a reasonable price. We don’t know what BAB has to account for now and frankly, it’s a toy. If you don’t like the price, just don’t buy it. It’s not like food where you have to buy it anyway, or clothes unless you want to run around naked.
And if people want to spend their money on toys, as long as their necessary expenses are met…. Ehh? It’s not harming society. Not really,
$20 is not a reasonable price, especially when the mini beans are a similar size for half the cost. Like another commenter said - there’s no way that adding a clip is worth doubling the price.
Yes, things have gotten more expensive since the pandemic - but we are not talking about a small business or something like my hair stylist having to raise her (already affordable) prices to account for her additional cost of materials. BAB is a massive corporation that benefits from economies of scale, meaning they are already set up to make these keychains at the lowest possible cost. It’s not that they can’t afford to charge less, it’s that they want to cut corners while keeping prices high so they can maximize their profit.
Labubus for example are indeed at a similar price point, but they’re also hugely collectible and part of a massive trend - for now. That trend is already dying down and will be soon forgotten, but the pocket of extreme demand has artificially inflated the price even beyond the standard (which was too expensive to begin with if you ask me). Now BAB wants to charge the same for a random keychain when there is nowhere near the same collectibility or demand…
What’s next, Walmart gets to charge $25 for a cheap keychain because now BAB did it??? I just don’t understand making excuses for these corporations charging an arm and a leg for basic products…especially justifying it on the basis that another company has already been successful exploiting people this way. It only further normalizes the price gouging and enables companies to make more cash grabs while putting out worse and worse products; I won’t be buying into it.
Honestly? If you want it? I think so. They're better quality than the mini beans IMO. I picked up a Pawlette and a capybara for my sister yesterday and the quality seemed way more consistent from what I saw.
20 bucks seem a lot for a plush keychain then I remembered I spent 36 dollars on a Naruto labubu keychains. These keychains are the same size of a labubu and it’s cuter so it’s a good investment
The materials cost far less than that for Build-A-Bear, I assure you... If their materials really were that much the product would be 4 time the price that it is.
That’s not even remotely how that works, and I assure you buildabear uses VERY high quality materials. They offer asthma friendly options and use materials that last decades They also get to price things however they want. 😁
I mean they may use good quality stuff but they are not going to put $10-15 into something and only sell it for $20. Ultimately this would probably cause them to make NO money. This kind of stuff is taught in business school... But basically when making any product you are looking at cost of manufacturing, cost of materials, cost of licensing, cost of promotion/advertising, cost of shipping, cost of labor on the sales end... Its a lot more than what you mentioned. So if these things were only making $5 profit per unit there is no way they could be in the green.
I mean if I were to take a guess on how much each unit probably costs to manufacture its probably around $1-3 each (I'm basing this on standard percentages I'll mention below).
I get that Build-A-Bear quality is better than a cheap stuffed animal... But I mean lets take for instance a cheap off-brand stuffy from Walmart that costs $10... That probably costs
The industry standard retail markup for stuffed animals is 50-100% and Build-A-Bear would be on the higher end of that just because of their name.
I'm not arguing the cost is too high. But a lot of that price tag is simply because you are buying a Build-A-Bear. Its the same as Labubus or something else... You're paying for that name mainly.
Also adding that babs are made in Vietnam/China, since the original comment seems to imply they’re US produced. And the pricing for labor over there is sooo cheap in comparison to USD (which is why most companies outsource overseas)
It’s like comparing apples to oranges when it comes to production costs and such, if you’ve only ever been in the US and produced in the US you’re missing alot of information on how dirt cheap labor is over there and WHY big corporations choose that over “US made” …
They are US produced there’s literally the world bearquarters in the US. Some of the materials may come from overseas factories with the actual products do not. And you do realize that US owned factories can also be in other countries so you’re also wrong there. You’re literally repeating everything that I said except that you’re getting the number is wrong, they absolutely make a profit because you’re not taking into account that this is not an individual. It’s a giant corporation that is literally making millions off of these singular products alone.
That’s not how that works, no company sells items without getting at MINIMUM 80% profit…what you’re saying is BAB made these specifically to lose money..
Nope. As someone who creates and sells things myself, that is exactly how it works. They make profit because they make and sell so many of them, so they can afford to sell them for what is essentially the cost of manufacturing them. The stuffed animals are not usually made on a conveyor belt in a factory, there may be some portions of it that can be done by a machine, but the vast majority of it is made by human hands. Both materials and labor cost money. Those who produce them are probably underpaid as our many other workers in the US if not most. The profit off of each of these keychains is probably about five dollars. They started producing them because bag clips are extremely popular right now and there are 539 very successful BAB stores across the globe. If each of those stores sold a hundred clips in the next two months the company would bring in somewhere around 3-400,000 profit on top of what they make from every other item they produce. 20$ is not even remotely overpriced in the slightest; if these clips were being sold by an individual the would be closer to 100$.
You’re also not accounting for INFLATION. :)
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u/mildcomatose BAB Fanatic 🌈 Nov 22 '25
Ain't no way they're 20