How a Korean Plush Toy Crosses a Border

If a Korean character shelf has appeared in your local shopping mall, there was a negotiating table before it.

That table is the Character Licensing Fair, held annually at COEX in Seoul. The 2026 edition hosted 186 companies across 443 booths. Last year's edition drew 388 overseas buyers from 16 countries, producing 1,178 business meetings, about 66 billion won in discussions and roughly 37 billion won in expected contracts.

What a plush toy needs to cross an ocean is not popularity. It is this paperwork.

At a glance

Nothing in that table is a fan number. Booths, buyer counts, meeting counts, deal values — this is a wholesale trade floor, and the characters standing on it are inventory. Which is why the question worth asking is not who is cute but who bought the licence for your country.

Why this is not a fan event

The name suggests an exhibition for character fans. The function is trade.

Licensing is a company that owns a character selling the right to put that drawing on a product. Plush toys, stationery, clothing, food packaging, cosmetics cases, even bank card designs. The character company does not manufacture; it collects royalties.

Some vocabulary makes the coverage readable. The side holding the character is the licensor; the side buying the right to make things is the licensee. Contracts usually specify a royalty rate (what percentage of sales comes back), a minimum guarantee (a floor paid whether or not the product sells), and a scope — which countries, which product categories, for how many years. Because scope is sliced by both territory and category, the plush sold in Korea and the plush sold in your country are frequently made by different companies entirely.

So what happens in front of the booths is negotiation, not photography. Which distributor in which country will sell which character's products is settled here. That is what 1,178 meetings and 37 billion won in expected contracts measures.

One qualification: expected contract value is not confirmed revenue. It sums the scale of deals discussed on site, and the conversion rate to signed contracts is a separate matter. It is a figure published to promote the event's performance, and should be read accordingly. What is genuinely useful to a traveller is the plainer fact that buyers come from 16 countries — the distribution routes are already open.

Zanmang Loopy — a character that was not consumed as designed

The name on the exhibitor list that needs the most explanation is Zanmang Loopy.

Loopy is a pink beaver from Pororo the Little Penguin, a long-running Korean preschool animation. Not the lead, and unambiguously made for small children. That is why the rights holder is Iconix.

Then the character became famous in a direction unrelated to the original. Internet users began cropping Loopy's expressions for reaction images, and the nickname zanmang — roughly "impishly annoying" — attached itself. A supporting character from a preschool cartoon became an adult meme, and the company later formalised the meme into an official product line.

Zanmang Loopy now sits near the top of Korean character preference surveys and is stocked as a product for people in their twenties and thirties rather than children. Its natural habitat is office desks, laptop stickers and workplace-humour goods.

But it is worth setting this against the model most readers already know. Sanrio built Hello Kitty as a designed property and licensed it outward from the start; the character arrived fully formed and the merchandise followed the design. The Korean pattern inverts that order more often than not — the property exists, the audience repurposes it, and the licensing programme is built afterwards around a meaning the rights holder did not author. That is why Korean character catalogues can look strange from outside: a preschool beaver sold as office humour is not a marketing misstep, it is the market working as it normally does here.

This route is worth knowing to understand the Korean character market at all. Characters here are routinely not consumed as designed. The personality fans assign overwrites the original, and the company ratifies it afterwards. The same sequence repeats in convenience store collaboration goods — fans invent a way of consuming something and companies commercialise it later.

Character merchandise and K-pop merchandise are different markets

Both get called "goods", but the money moves differently.

That last row is what actually gets used when packing. Character merchandise arrives in your local shops once the licence is placed; the limited editions in K-pop merchandise have no such route.

What this means where you are

One line for readers in Southeast Asia. Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines are major licensing markets for Korean character IP, so base lines arrive comparatively fast. Conversely, characters like Shinhan Friends — built by a Korean company for its own service — often have no overseas distribution plan at all. The faces you can only see in Korea cluster in that category.

Read next

• Southeast Asia is the biggest market for K-pop merchandise — same word, different distribution
• The cost structure behind a 40,000 won lightstick — pricing on the direct-sale side
• How convenience stores became a comeback stage — where characters and idols share a shelf

Sources

• Herald Business — From Ganadi to Zanmang Loopy: the Character Licensing Fair opens
• Newspim — Character Licensing Fair 2026 opens on the 16th
• Newspim — Beyond characters to K-pop, games and webtoons: K-content IP grows 20% in North American licensing
• Etoday — Character Licensing Fair 2026 opens, driving expansion of the content IP market