Can You Sell Labubu-Style Elf & Monster Figures on Etsy? The 'It's Just a Nordic Folk Monster, So It's Public Domain' Myth

Labubu is the most-searched collectible on the planet right now, and Etsy knows it. Search the platform and you get thousands of results: crocheted Labubu, 3D-printed Labubu, "Labubu-inspired" clay figures, custom outfits, and a whole shadow economy of listings that spell it "lafufu" to dodge the filters. Almost all of them lean on the same one-line justification, passed around in seller groups like a password: Labubu is just a Nordic elf, a folk monster from old mythology, and folklore is public domain — so the design is fair game, especially if I made it myself.

It is a genuinely clever-sounding argument, and it is wrong in a way that costs sellers their listings and, increasingly, their accounts. The folklore part is even true. That is exactly what makes it dangerous, because being half-right is what convinces people to list.

The short answer

You cannot sell a figure that reproduces Labubu's specific look — the wide serrated grin with its nine pointed teeth, the pointed ears, the particular face and body — no matter what medium you make it in and no matter what you call it. That design is an original copyrighted character owned by its creator and exclusively licensed to Pop Mart, and it is backed by registered trademarks that never expire. "I crocheted it myself" or "I modeled it myself" describes how you made the copy; it is not a defense to making the copy. What you can do is make genuinely original elf, troll and forest-monster art that draws on the same folklore Labubu's creator drew on — as long as it doesn't reproduce his expression of it — and you can resell a single authentic Labubu you actually bought, unaltered, under first sale.

The line to hold in your head: the mythology is free, but one artist's specific drawing of that mythology is not. You are allowed to be inspired by the same source. You are not allowed to copy the character he built from it.

Why the folklore part is true — and why it doesn't help you

Here is the accurate history, because it matters. Labubu was created by Kasing Lung, a Hong Kong-born illustrator who grew up in the Netherlands and fell in love with Nordic folktales — elves, trolls, and the forest spirits of Scandinavian legend. In 2015 he turned that fascination into a picture-book universe called The Monsters, and Labubu was one of its characters. In 2019 he signed an exclusive licensing deal with Pop Mart, and the blind-box figures did the rest.

So yes: the raw ingredients — a mischievous elf, a toothy woodland sprite — come from a mythological tradition that is centuries old and owned by nobody. If that were the whole story, sellers would be right.

But copyright has always drawn a hard line between an idea and the expression of it. The idea of "a pointy-eared forest monster with a big grin" is free; anyone can draw one. The specific way Kasing Lung drew his — the exact toothy smile, the proportions, the face, the silhouette that makes you instantly think "that's a Labubu" — is a new, original work of authorship, and that expression is his property. Nordic folklore is the well he drew from. The figure he pulled out of it is a copyrighted character.

This is the identical mistake sellers make with dozens of characters that trace back to old stories, and we mapped the general pattern in the public-domain characters trademark trap. "It's based on a fairy tale" tells you where the artist got the idea. It tells you nothing about who owns the drawing.

The paperwork behind Labubu is not thin

Sometimes the "it's basically folklore" argument survives because sellers assume Pop Mart never bothered to lock anything down. The opposite is true, and it is worth knowing exactly what exists, because each of these bites on its own.

On the copyright side, Pop Mart holds registered copyrights covering the original Labubu artwork and designs — not just the character drawings, but the dolls themselves, the blind boxes, and even the packaging bags. On the trademark side, Pop Mart owns United States trademark registrations for the LABUBU word mark (Reg. No. 7,839,144) and for the THE MONSTERS composite mark (Reg. No. 7,839,156). The word mark is the one that matters most to a small seller, because it means the name is protected regardless of what your figure looks like. A perfectly original crocheted monster titled "Labubu-style plush" is infringing on the strength of that one word, before anyone even examines the sculpt.

And unlike copyright, a trademark does not expire on a 95-year clock. As long as Pop Mart keeps using and defending the LABUBU mark — and at more than 30% of its 2025 sales riding on this one character, it will — the name stays locked up indefinitely. The folklore may be timeless, but so is the trademark.

"But I made it myself" — the derivative-work trap

The most common follow-up is: I didn't buy a fake, I hand-crocheted this, or I sculpted and 3D-printed my own model, so it's my original craft. It feels true because real skill and real hours went into it. Legally it changes nothing.

When you make a new physical object that reproduces a copyrighted character, you have created a derivative work — and the exclusive right to make derivatives belongs to the copyright owner, not to whoever did the labor. Your crochet pattern and your STL file are your own expression of someone else's character, which is precisely the thing the owner controls. The craftsmanship is real; the authorization is missing.

If you think the 3D-printing route is safer because you're "just sharing a model," look at what actually happened in 2026. Pop Mart sued Bambu Lab — one of the biggest consumer 3D-printer makers — over Labubu models hosted on its MakerWorld sharing platform. The case was headed for a Shanghai court on April 2, 2026, and in mid-March the parties settled, with all the infringing Labubu content pulled from the platform entirely. If a major manufacturer chose to remove every model and settle rather than defend "they're just user-uploaded files," a solo Etsy seller uploading the printed result is not standing on firmer ground. We walk through the licensing reality for print sellers in selling 3D prints from STL files you bought, and the same logic applies to a pattern you wrote yourself: making the object is the regulated act, not buying the file. The broader "I drew or built every line myself" defense fails for the same reason across every medium, which we covered in the fan art and derivative works guide.

This is being actively enforced — in US courts, right now

Labubu is not a case of a distant overseas company that will never notice a small American shop. Pop Mart is enforcing in the United States, aggressively, this year.

In July 2025 Pop Mart filed a trademark suit in the Central District of California — Pop Mart, Inc. v. 7-Eleven, Inc., No. 2:25-cv-6555 — against 7-Eleven and several California franchisees selling counterfeit Labubu figures. On September 15, 2025, the court granted a temporary restraining order, ruling in Pop Mart's favor on all four injunctive-relief factors, holding its intellectual property valid and protectable, and rejecting the defendants' argument that their goods were non-infringing "gray market" products. The complaint asserted seventeen causes of action, including trademark counterfeiting, trade dress infringement and unfair competition. If Pop Mart will take a convenience-store chain to federal court over shelf figures, an Etsy listing is a far easier target.

The scale of the problem tells you how motivated they are: roughly 1.83 million counterfeit Labubu products — the knockoffs collectors nickname "Lafufu" — were seized in 2025 alone. Pop Mart has a dedicated brand-protection operation, and Etsy, like every marketplace, removes listings on a rights-holder complaint rather than waiting for a court to rule on the merits. That means your listing can be pulled within hours of a report, and repeated strikes escalate to account suspension. This is the same mass-enforcement machinery — including the frozen-funds "Schedule A" lawsuits that can name hundreds of anonymous sellers at once — that we broke down in the Schedule A mass-lawsuit explainer.

The "Lafufu" spelling is the tell, not the shield

The single most common workaround on Etsy is to misspell the name — "lafufu," "la bubu," "labu" — on the theory that the automated filters only catch the exact word. This backfires twice.

First, deliberately misspelling a brand name to evade detection is not a legal defense; if anything it is evidence that you knew the real product was protected and tried to trade on it anyway. Second, enforcement does not stop at your title. It reads the entire listing. A figure titled "Cute Woodland Elf Plush" with labubu, lafufu, pop mart, the monsters, blind box stuffed into the back-end tags and the description is a clearer infringement signal than a clean listing, because those hidden words prove you are fishing for the brand's search traffic. A checker that only looks at titles would clear that listing; the point of a full-listing scan is that it reads the tags and the description too, which is where sellers hide the very words that get them reported. If you would not want Pop Mart's legal team reading your tags, rewrite your tags.

The safe lane

There is real, sellable room here, and it is the same room Kasing Lung himself started in.

You can design your own elf, troll or toothy forest-monster from scratch — go back to the actual folklore and build a character that is unmistakably yours, not a recolor or a near-copy of Labubu's face and grin. Give it different teeth, different proportions, a different silhouette. Keep the brand's vocabulary out of the listing entirely: no "labubu," no "lafufu," no "the monsters," no "pop mart" in the title, the tags, or the description. Market it on its own terms — "hand-crocheted woodland sprite," "original blind-box-style monster" — and let it stand on its own charm rather than on borrowed search traffic.

You can also resell a single genuine Labubu you actually purchased, in its original condition, under the first-sale doctrine — the same rule that lets you resell any authentic item you bought, which we cover in the first-sale doctrine guide. But the moment you customize it, repaint it, re-dress it into a new product, or make your own copies, first sale is gone and you are back to manufacturing.

For the full breakdown of what Pop Mart owns and how it enforces, see our Labubu trademark guide and the broader Pop Mart guide. The mythology is yours to draw on. The monster somebody already drew from it is not.