Making thousands of yuan a day by "handcrafting from scratch", with orders flooding in nonstop, young people have propped up another hidden 100-billion-yuan market.
Beneath the desk lamp, Bu Bu, a post-90s custom doll artist, rubs her sore and swollen eyes, picks up tweezers again, clips a rhinestone with a diameter of only two millimeters, and embeds it along the doll's eyelid. She is so focused as if she is performing a "minimally invasive surgery".
This high-intensity concentration is the normal state of her work. From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., except for two short breaks, she is often so busy that she forgets to have lunch. "I'm used to it, I don't feel hungry when I'm busy," Bu Bu said. It takes at least one day to finish a full-rhinestone custom doll, and the rhinestone pasting process alone requires hundreds of times of picking, aligning and pressing with tweezers, which fully tests eyesight and patience.
Custom doll artists are a group of emerging artisans that rise with the boom of the trendy toy economy. With certain art skills and professional tools, they help players re-make up and adjust the face shape of dolls, turning the dolls into exclusive appearances that players prefer. This is a new profession born under the wave of the self-pleasure economy.
Recently, the most well-known custom doll artist online is no other than Abdullah Amirilha from Urumqi, Xinjiang. His "Xinjiang Little Lamb" works integrate rich ethnic elements such as Atlas silk and embroidered hats, which are highly recognizable and snapped up by tourists, so he is also affectionately called "Little Lamb Brother".
The Xinjiang Little Lamb works made by Abdullah, source from social platforms
"Buying a doll is just getting an admission ticket, and customizing the doll can endow it with real unique fate." In the trendy toy circle of Generation Z, many young people hold this view. They are not satisfied with mass-produced standard products, but pursue to inject unique souls into trendy toys through "secondary creation". On Xiaohongshu, the views of topics related to "doll customization" are close to 500 million, with more than 2 million discussions.
From ethnic style dolls in scenic spots to heavy customized dolls priced at thousands of yuan, this doll customization boom has never cooled down, and has gradually evolved into a hidden business with mature supply chain, high premium and high repurchase rate. It forms a complete closed business loop covering upstream special pigments and 3D printed accessories, midstream manual transformation, and high-value circulation in downstream. In this mature supply chain, doll customization is no longer a simple niche hobby, but a popular track with strong commercial realization potential.
Custom doll artists earn over 10,000 yuan per month
At 9 a.m., Bu Bu turns on her exclusive work phone, with dozens of unread messages in the message list, including order reminders from old customers and price inquiries from new customers. After replying to all of them one by one, she washes her hands, sits down and starts a new day of work.
There are tweezers of different head shapes, rhinestones in various colors and all kinds of glues on the workbench. She picks up the Crybaby doll to be customized that day, selects a suitable pair of scissors, and starts to trim the irregular fluff little by little. This kind of fluff trimming is part of the ordinary customization service.
It is reported that the charging standard for doll customization is not only based on the difficulty level, but also takes into account the skills of the custom doll artist and the time spent.
For example, Bu Bu, who switched to this career from zero foundation and has mastered the technology proficiently after early exploration, has a quite representative price list. The ordinary re-makeup doll customization starts from 300 yuan, which mainly includes fluff trimming, makeup changing and simple patchwork; original design doll customization ranges from 600 to 800 yuan, focusing on original design and manual customization; high-end customized models range from thousands of yuan to several thousand yuan, for example, the full-body Swarovski rhinestone pasting service starts at more than 1,000 yuan.
Even though the price of doll customization is not low, orders still come like snowflakes, and Bu Bu can't arrange time to take new orders at all. "I really can't take more orders." In the three years since she entered this industry, Bu Bu has built a stable customer base with excellent skills. At present, her doll customization orders have been scheduled for three months later.
We also calculated the profit of this business.
Take the unicorn Hello Kitty released by Sanrio as an example, the original price of the bare doll is about 210 yuan, the cost of ordinary rhinestone pasting material package is 30 to 40 yuan, the total cost is about 250 yuan, and the selling price after transformation is 580 yuan, with a net profit of 330 yuan. If the customer specifies to use Swarovski rhinestones, the material cost rises to 350 to 400 yuan, the total cost is about 550 yuan, but the finished product can be sold at 1588 yuan, with a net profit of 1038 yuan per doll.
The transformed unicorn Hello Kitty
Calculated at the speed of transforming one doll a day, if it is a regular rhinestone-pasted model, the monthly profit is about 10,000 yuan; if it is a Swarovski rhinestone-pasted model, the monthly profit can reach about 30,000 yuan.
But the money is not that easy to earn. Bu Bu said that the full-rhinestone model takes the most time, which requires pasting rhinestones one by one with tweezers, and there is no way to cut corners. It takes a whole day to paste rhinestones all over the doll. Plus trimming the fluff of the doll, wiping off the factory glue marks, and cleaning the overflowing glue, a day is even a little tight.
At present, Bu Bu's monthly income is stable at about 20,000 yuan, and can reach more than 30,000 yuan in peak periods. The higher the technical level of the custom doll artist, the stronger the premium ability, and the higher the income.
"Wealth creation myths" are constantly emerging in the doll customization circle. In 2021, a custom doll work made by the well-known custom doll artist "Ranran" was auctioned at a high price of 500,000 yuan on Xianyu. Last year, Ranran's Blythe custom doll work was auctioned again at a price of 300,000 yuan.
The custom doll works sold by Ranran, source from Ranran's Xianyu account
A hidden but clear industrial chain
Bu Bu is just a microcosm of the huge group of custom doll artists. Now there are a large number of post-95s and post-00s custom doll artists active on major social platforms. Most of them grow from hobbyists to artisans. Some of them take this as a part-time sideline or full-time career, and some players even set up studios directly, turning personal hobbies into a mature closed business loop.
Nowadays, the forms of doll customization have become varied. Some are for makeup changing, which requires using acrylic paint to reshape the expression and adjust the skin color, which is equivalent to changing a face for the doll; some are for inlaying rhinestones, pasting the doll with rhinestones of different colors, which is exactly the form of doll customization that Bu Bu is good at; there are also hair transplanting, hip plumping, doll clothes changing, structure reorganization, and even some people install skeletons for dolls and replace cotton filling to reshape the body shape.
"There is nothing that can't be customized, only what you can't think of. Everyone is looking forward to having a unique doll that meets their own aesthetic standards," Bu Bu said.
Behind the doll customization business, an industrial chain with clear logic has been formed.
In the upstream, a group of keen suppliers have carried out large-scale production combined with niche demands, including micro buttons sold by weight, 3D printing accessories for trendy toy mold opening, as well as special pigments and makeup remover solvents. It can be said that basic materials have achieved standardized supply. Entering the midstream, custom doll artists transform standardized dolls into high-premium non-standard products through manual transformation. In the downstream second-hand transaction and community circulation, these customized models endowed with special meanings can be sold at a price several times higher than the original body, completing commercial realization.
Global E-Commerce learned that at present, trendy toys such as Crybaby under Pop Mart, Hello Kitty and Kuromi under Sanrio, LinaBell under Disney are the most popular IP carriers for trendy toy customization.
Trendy toy customization IP, source from Tmall platform
In the doll customization circle, the core of maintaining high premium is not legal contracts, but a set of unwritten circle order. The doll customization industry attaches great importance to originality, so the creativity and aesthetic taste of custom doll artists are the core competitiveness. Once someone is found copying others' creativity for commercial use, they will be publicly warned to avoid in mild cases, or even resisted and banned by the whole industry in severe cases.
However, most doll customization businesses take private orders through social platforms, without formal contracts or copyright registration, so the difficulty of rights protection and evidence collection is a common pain point. However, it is this moral self-discipline and circle purification mechanism that builds the cornerstone of trust, thus supporting the operation of the whole industrial chain.
The hundred-billion-yuan derivative market of trendy toy customization
The boom of DIY transformation of dolls is just the tip of the iceberg of the secondary consumption of trendy toys. As a derivative category of dolls, the market growth rate of doll clothes is also quite remarkable.
In order to endow dolls with unique images, many players will buy doll clothes, glasses, hats, accessories and other decorations after buying dolls. The cost of these transformations may far exceed the price of the doll itself. Some players admitted: "I spent 59 yuan buying the doll, and spent 300 yuan just buying clothes for the doll."
Nowadays, "high-end custom doll clothes" are also popular in the doll circle, which refers to the costumes customized by designers and brands. Earlier, EVALAB, a domestic trendy toy derivative collection store brand, opened a new store in Shanghai, and many trendy toy enthusiasts came to snap up a set of 38cm limited Labubu Great Sage Equal to Heaven doll clothes priced at 1088 yuan. At present, the price of this set of doll clothes on second-hand platforms has reached 1888 yuan.
"The most exaggerated customer bought a plain doll for 100 yuan, spent 1000 yuan buying customized Western-style dress for the doll, and even specially customized mini leather shoes because he was not satisfied with the shoes that fit the dress," said a doll clothes seller.
According to the 2026 China Doll Clothing Industry Market Dynamic Analysis Report, the market size of China's doll clothing industry is expected to reach 5.32 billion yuan in 2026, with a growth rate significantly higher than the total retail sales of toys. Moreover, the repurchase rate of non-IP customized doll clothes can reach 2.8 times a year, which means that "raising dolls" is a continuous emotional and consumption investment.
It is worth noting that in trendy toy consumption, "raising dolls" and "Three Sub-cultures" (Lolita, JK, Chinese style costumes) are the composite battlefield of non-standard supply chain and circle culture, with highly overlapping crowd. Many Lolita consumers are also "doll moms". After buying new dresses, they always match the dolls with doll clothes of the same style.
At present, the young consumer groups represented by Generation Z are becoming the main force of the market. They are no longer satisfied with standardized products, but pursue trendy toys that can express themselves and highlight their personalities.
The transformation of this consumption preference continues to promote market expansion. Public data shows that in 2025, the global trendy toy industry market size reached 52 billion US dollars (about 353 billion yuan), with an average annual growth rate of more than 20%.
For trendy toy enthusiasts, what they buy is not the cloth or the rhinestone pasting, but their own "personality sovereignty" and "emotional sustenance" obtained through secondary creation.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Global E-Commerce", author: Global E-Commerce, published with authorization from 36Kr.