“I've had three of [the Chanel Bearbricks] pass through my hands,” Yang says reverentially. It’s one of the toys he eagerly bought again after selling his first at auction. After moving to a downtown Los Angeles loft, where he says he “had nothing but space,” Yang relapsed and started completely rebuilding his Bearbricks collection. Today, he keeps all his Bearbricks in a room that never gets hotter than 71° and is outfitted with fluorescent lights that won’t yellow the toys.
Yang was one of the first people to start seriously collecting Bearbricks, and he’ll tell you he’s the reason everyone else is interested in them, too. “I have thousands of people say, ‘I know it because of you.’ Or [I hear], ‘I saw this person [with Bearbricks].’ Oh, you saw it from that person? You saw it from Jeff [Staple]? Alright, well, cool. Guess what? I'm the one who put Jeff on it.”
Early on, the toys cultivated an air of scarcity—as important an ingredient to streetwear success as peanut butter is to a PB&J. Some eager collectors would come from other countries to shop at Suru for Bearbricks—they were that desirable, that difficult to find. Lee remembers asking for as many Kaws Bearbricks as Medicom would send—a request that was met with a delivery of six or so from Tokyo. Staple would sell the smaller 100% versions in his New York shop Reed Space, but was only able to get his supply because he would fill a suitcase with them during trips to Tokyo.
Suru’s Hahn was motivated to import the toys because, well, he wanted access to them himself. “I just liked the way they look,” he says, “the word in Japanese is otaku: adults who like childish things.” If Bearbricks are proof of anything, it’s that the Venn diagram charting otaku and streetwear fans has a massive overlap.
But Hahn is careful to clarify: “It's not a kid's toy. It's an adult collectible toy.” And adult toys, it turns out, represent a hugely lucrative business in the streetwear community. Earlier this month StockX launched an entire Collectibles vertical on its site, after leading with Bearbricks in April of this year. Already, Collectibles is the third most-popular category on StockX—ahead of watches and handbags, and behind the site’s bread and butter sneakers and streetwear categories.
Other artists and designers have followed in the Bearbricks’ pawprints. Most notably, after helping build up Medicom’s reputation in the early 2000s, Kaws launched his own line of “Companion” and “BFF” toys. Artists like Hebru Brantley, Takashi Murikami, and Futura followed Kaws’s lead and created their own figures after making a Bearbrick early in their career. (“If they can get to one, we can help them get to 10,” Akashi told Japan Times of collaborators.) Meanwhile, toy company Unbox has started to work with streetwear brands like Brain Dead. Daniel Arsham, who designs stores for retailers like Kith, put out his own “Cracked Bear” sculpture. and Billionaire Boys Club is now making collectible pieces in the form of an astronaut. You’re not a streetwear brand—you’re not a brand-brand—unless you’re making toys.
StockX co-founder Josh Luber says launching collectibles was an easy decision: it’s the category the platform’s audience of streetwear and sneaker sellers and buyers were demanding. Luber chalks the demand for collectibles up to the fact that it makes the work of gallery artists available to a customer without auction-house money. “Kaws has works of art that sell for millions of dollars,” says Luber. “I can't afford his real art, but I can afford a Companion or BFF. It's just a way to make like really high art accessible and affordable.”
But Bearbricks remain the gold standard, doing what Companions and BFFs did for Kaws for hundreds of disparate artists. “That idea of a huge franchise and creating a canvas is brilliant, right?” Luber says. “Like, we're going to create something that's unique on its own, but it allows everybody to play with it. Kaws created unique figures, but they're his figures.” Bearbricks, he doesn’t have to say, are for everyone.
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