My first designer toy was a 5-inch Labbit. I spotted him from across the MoMA gift shop, and something about his marshmallowy body and guileless eyes had me hooked. It was love at first sight and the beginning of a designer toy collection that seems to keep expanding no matter how many times I swear, “This is the last one.”
That’s the problem—and the appeal—of collecting designer toys, or art toys. These limited edition collectibles are an affordable and accessible entry point to art collecting for fans of lowbrow art, pop surrealism, street art, and the often-intertwined worlds of hip hop and fashion. Add in factors like blind boxing, chase figures, and high-profile collaborations, and it’s easy to see how the industry has produced such a passionate community of collectors.
A Quick History of the Designer Toy Movement
Toys have been around for about as long as humans have, from the first cave baby to pick up a stick and play with it. Even fine artists creating toys is nothing new—after all, Picasso, Calder, and Klee have all been there, done that. However, the art toy movement as it exists today dates back to the 1990s, when designers in Tokyo and Hong Kong started creating limited-edition toys inspired by pop culture. It didn’t take long before western artists caught on to the trend and started producing their own designer toys.
Some of the first successful designer toys in the U.S. were based on characters by big names in the pop surrealist art movement: Gary Baseman, Kathie Olivas, Mark Ryden, Tara McPherson, et al. The whimsical, humorous, pop-culture-rooted art that came out of that movement in the early 2000s established an attitude and aesthetic for the designer toy world that still exists today— a little bit weird, a little bit punk rock, with a hefty dash of creepy-cute thrown in for good measure.
Types of Designer Toys
Vinyl Toys
When most people hear “designer toys,” they think of vinyl toys. There are two types:
- Hard vinyl is made from PVC and is the most common material used by western toy designers. It starts out as hard pellets and is heated until it’s a pourable liquid. The figure is then created through rotocasting.
- Soft vinyl (sofubi) comes in liquid form, made by suspending a finely-grained PVC powder in a liquid matrix. The figure is then cast through a slush molding process. It is most popular in Japan, though more and more western artists have embraced the medium, outsourcing production of their toys to Japanese fabricators.
There are several companies that have released iconic vinyl toys over the years, but if there’s one you should definitely know, it’s Kidrobot. Founded in 2002, the company has produced hundreds of designer toys in collaboration with contemporary artists, including the popular Labbit, Dunny, and Munny toys.
Another major player in the art toy scene is KAWS, the designer behind the popular COMPANION character. From 1999 to today, KAWS has collaborated with major Japanese toy companies to produce various iterations of his Mickey Mouse-inspired COMPANION.
Resin Toys
Of course, vinyl is not the only material designers have used to bring their quirky characters to life. Resin is another, less-commonly used material for designer toys. Resin is more brittle and delicate than vinyl; however, it preserves a higher level of detail, making it ideal for intricately sculpted pieces.
Other Mediums
Artists being artists, there was no way designer toys would ever be constrained by just a few types of materials. You can find designer toys made from wood, metal, glass, and even in plush, stuffed animal form. Some of these alternative material designer toys are spinoff projects from their original vinyl counterparts (Like Kidrobot’s Labbit), while other designers envision their characters in plush, wood, etc., from the beginning of the design process.
How Valuable are Designer Toys?
There are several factors at play in the valuation of designer toys, including:
Rarity
Some designer toys are released as blind-boxed series, meaning that the packaging obscures the toy, and the customer will not know which design they’ve purchased until they have opened the package. Usually, a couple of the designs in the series will be produced in lower quantities, making them harder to find. These “chase” figures can fetch much higher prices than the others in the series, like these rare Tokidoki Unicornos that sold for $1,100 in 2020.
Hype
The value of a designer toy is also determined by the fame and popularity of the designer and collaborators. For instance, the highly sought-after BE@RBRICK series from Medicom Toy is a longstanding star of the designer toy world, with heavy competition from collectors for new releases. Collaborations with companies like Baccarat and Swarovski have ensured that BE@RBRICK is firmly entrenched in the luxury market.
Customs
While the value of some designer toys is rooted in limited production runs and big name collaborations, there’s also a whole segment of the industry based on customization. One of the most well-known examples is the Kidrobot Munny, a monkey-shaped vinyl toy that is sold completely blank, allowing one to paint, draw, sculpt, and otherwise alter the figure to create a one-of-a-kind work of art.
Galleries around the world have hosted shows composed entirely of various artists’ takes on the same blank toy, like Kidrobot’s SHOW ME THE MUNNY, or the 1000% BE@RBRICK show in Beijing, China showcasing the work of some of China’s foremost contemporary artists. These custom designer toys can sell for top dollar, like a Chris Riggs custom that sold for nearly half a million in 2013. That’s a toy you definitely don’t want your kids to get their hands on!
Carolyn Horne is a freelance writer, artist, and professional nerd living in Atlanta, Georgia. She graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design with a B.F.A. in Illustration before spending over a decade in the digital marketing industry. These days, she lives in an apartment full of art, books, vintage finds–and just enough cat hair to make her regret her mostly-black wardrobe–with her partner and their “hairy daughter.”
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