Pop Mart Is Turning Labubu Into Dessert, and Singapore Is Losing It
A character-themed bakery lands at Resorts World Sentosa on July 30, and the countdown content is already outrunning everything else in the feed.
Something shifted the day the bakery news dropped. Pop Mart fans in Singapore stopped just collecting the toys and started counting down to eating them.
On July 30, 2026, Pop Mart opens Southeast Asia's first Pop Bakery at Resorts World Sentosa, and the mood online is pure first-to-market euphoria. This is the brand walking off the shelf and onto a plate: Pucky Xiao Long Bao Dessert, Labubu Butter Cookies, meet-and-greets with Twinkle Twinkle. The characters people usually unbox are now the menu.
That is the real story here. Fans aren't reacting to another blind box drop. They're reacting to the idea that their favourite IPs are becoming an experience you queue for, photograph, and taste. The sentiment reads like local pride mixed with FOMO: Singapore got this first, and nobody wants to be the one who missed opening week.
The mood: exclusivity as emotion
Dig into the videos and the feeling underneath is anticipation, not just hype. The top cluster of content leans on countdowns to official opening dates, immersive event showcases, and "now available" callouts for new series. Creators aren't selling products so much as selling the feeling of being early.
The agent's read backs this up bluntly: location-specific announcements and experiential events create exclusivity and FOMO, driving significant local hype and first-to-market engagement. Translated into human terms, people love feeling like insiders, and a themed bakery at Sentosa is the ultimate insider flex.
There's a second emotional current running through the collector side of things: nostalgia and the thrill of discovery. The unboxing and reveal content thrives on personal, almost childhood-level connection to the characters. When a dessert is shaped like the toy you already love, those two feelings collide, and that is a powerful combination for a food launch.
The data behind the buzz
The numbers make the divide clear. The Pop Mart Singapore & SEA Market Launches micro-trend ranks number one with 12 videos, 3,013,623 total views, and a 0.95 confidence score. That is the launch-and-countdown format doing the heavy lifting, and it dwarfs everything else in reach.
The biggest single engine in that cluster is the official account popmartsg, whose single post pulled 1,940,726 total views off a base of just 26,143 followers. That is a textbook outlier: one video reaching far beyond its usual audience.
Creator novita.lam added 496,112 total views from one video, while the dedicated account popmartunboxing.sg1 stacked 353,078 total views across 4 videos. The launch cluster as a whole also logged 32,579 total likes and 7,835 total shares.
Collector content proves the emotional angle. The Pop Mart Unboxing & Collection Reveals trend sits at rank two with 5 videos and 317,824 total views, but it carries the highest average virality score at 0.6564 and a stacked 532 total comments. Fewer views, more conversation: that is people arguing, speculating, and bonding.
Store-experience content ranks third with 3 videos and 284,729 total views, brand strategy and collaborations fourth with 2 videos and 63,151 total views, and a single live-sale clip rounds things out with 114,897 total views from creator poplabubble. Across the whole topic, velocity today sits at 72 videos with a velocity median of 1,842 views.
How we know
A Virlo content research agent collected and analysed 29 videos across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube for this topic, clustered them into five micro-trends, and surfaced the outliers, meaning posts far outperforming their creator's usual reach. It also filtered out off-topic noise, including videos about an indie game called Shark Mart and an unrelated Cardiff market, so the signal here is clean.
The desk's take
Pop Mart just proved its IP travels beyond plastic, and a bakery is the smartest possible test: low commitment, high shareability, endlessly photogenic. Expect opening week to flood feeds and expect other collectible brands to chase the same immersive, eat-your-fandom playbook fast. Singapore was the pilot, not the finish line.
Founder of Virlo. Writes about what is breaking out across short-form video and why it matters.
