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Every few weeks in the mid-aughts, a “crazy, crazy” car—a 2006 Bentley Flying Spur, to be precise—would pull up to Mobius, Wonhee Lee’s half-gallery half-streetwear store in Los Angeles. Lee knew the driver well, not just because he was the famed celebrity jeweler Ben Yang, better known as Ben Baller, but because the two had developed a predictable routine. A half-dozen roughly two-foot-high boxes would come in the mail. Lee would give his loyal customer a call, and Yang would speed over in his Bentley. In the boxes? Bearbricks (formally Be@rbrick), the massive Japanese toy company Medicom signature item, and one that’s had its paw fully in the honeypots of streetwear, art, and design over the past 18 years.
Lee’s Mobius was one of only a couple of stores importing Bearbricks to Los Angeles, so Yang would purchase as many as he could. Then, he would gingerly strap his prizes into children’s car seats. “These are his babies,” Lee says, by way of context. Then Ben Yang would drive off with all the merriment of a car clacking with Just-Married cans.
Today, Yang is likely the best-known Bearbrick collector on the planet. Eddie Cruz, the former owner of Union Los Angeles and another early importer of the toys, first introduced Yang to the Kaws 1000% Bearbrick in 2002, and it was love at first sight. (The figures range in size from keychain-sized 50% toys to the toddler-height 1000%.) “Yo,” Yang recalls saying at the time, “I gotta have this thing.”
“I just collected them,” Yang says now. “I don't know what possessed me. I just thought they were cool.” The Kaws Bearbrick was his first, but soon Yang was in the vice grip of an obsession. “I was like, ‘I'm not going to have five or six, bro. I need to have fucking 50 of them motherfuckers in the house.’ It makes no sense to do anything else.”
Yang eventually accumulated so many Bearbricks—ones designed by famous artists like Kaws or made in collaboration with labels like Chanel and Fendi—that he had to convert a wall into a display area for his toys. But Yang wasn’t the only one after the toys. Mobius’s tiny allotment of Bearbricks was coveted by people like the comedian Bobby Lee and members of “Fly Like a G6” performers The Far East Movement. When Joe Hahn wasn’t working his job as the DJ for Linkin Park, he was running the art and apparel store Suru, and says that the Bearbricks he imported attracted customers like Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen, whose collection of the toys is on display in the opening scenes of This Is the End. (Hill and Rogen declined to comment.)
Despite the competition, Yang managed to amass a collection of stupefying value. In early 2012, in anticipation of the birth of his son, he moved to sell a collection of 40 Bearbricks and displayed them at the Guy Hepner gallery, a venue typically reserved for blue-chip art, in Los Angeles. The collection sold for “about a hundred grand,” Yang says. But it took an emotional toll: “I sold all the Kaws 1000%, and I'm like sick about it,” Yang says. “Like, that makes me want to fucking vomit.”
The success of the Bearbrick might be the most bizarre phenomenon in streetwear’s uniquely bizarre history. This is a fickle world that constantly trades out hot brands and trends like goldfish—and its longest-running, most surefire hit is...a plastic bear? Somehow, it is now de rigueur for brands new and established to create their own Bearbricks design and streetwear mainstays like Bape, Stussy, Fragment Design, and Staple flock to the toy. If you’re left scratching your head, you’re not alone.
“I don't want to name drop,” Jeff Staple, founder of the streetwear brand Staple Pigeon, says slyly, “but I was having lunch with James Jebbia of Supreme and he was like, ‘Oh, what's new?’” So Staple started to tell Jebbia, only the founder of the most successful streetwear brand in history, about an exciting new project he was working on.
“We have this Bearbrick coming out—” Staple started.
“‘Man,’” Jebbia jumped in, according to Staple, “‘those things are just fucking bullshit to me.’ He's like, ‘Me, Supreme, we'll never do a Bearbrick...Those things that just sit on your desk? It doesn't do anything. It's not heavy enough to be a paperweight, it's not luxurious—it's cheap plastic.’” Staple assures me Jebbia said this with good British humor.
Jebbia’s protestation makes sense. The Bearbrick represents everything most embarrassing about streetwear: it wholly embraces the genre’s childlike obsession with collecting and sometimes thoughtless branding. It’s literally a toy. Among non-collectors, Jebbia’s refrain is common: what the hell are these things? And crucially, why in the world are they so valuable?
And yet the Bearbrick has been remade by brands like Chanel, Hermès, Comme Des Garçons, Bape, Undercover, Sacai, and Fragment as well as artists like Kaws, Futura, and Hebru Brantley. It’s not heavy enough to be a paperweight, but people display them in their house with the pride reserved for Oscar statues. They’re not luxurious but people pay tens of thousands of dollars for sought-after editions.
The success of the Bearbrick, it turns out, is a deliriously happy accident—and one that explains better than anything else the random, hype-driven, and slapstick world of streetwear.
Medicom Toys was founded in 1996 by Tatsuhiko Akashi, who left his job at a computer manufacturing company “that paid really well,” he told Otaku Mode, after wandering into a toy store called ZAAP! and realizing that a life without toys was no life at all. (After months of back and forth, Medicom declined to comment.) Medicom has launched a handful of different toys over the years, including a Lego-like figure named the “Kubrick.” Yes: after the legendary director Stanley Kubrick—“I love all of his works,” Akashi said. Akashi also found a way to build hype and mystery by selling “blind box” toys, packaged such that customers couldn’t see what they were buying until they paid and opened up their purchases.
The Kubricks became so popular that organizers from the World Character Convention in Tokyo asked Akashi if he could make toys to give to attendees of its 2001 festival. “But they wanted tens of thousands of toys in months,” he told Japan Times. “We wanted something that we didn’t need new parts for and could just change (the art).” So Medicom popped a bear head on top of the Kubrick figure. The logic: “The teddy bear was celebrating its 100th anniversary,” Akashi said, “so I thought, ‘We’ll make it a bear!’” The result was streetwear nirvana.
The Bearbrick—half-bear, half-pot-belled-Kubrick, 100% one of the most confounding creations ever—launched on May 27th, 2001. Akashi fully embraced the toy’s undeniable strangeness. In response to a question about whether or not Medicom does market research, Akashi told Otaku Mode: “If I did, this wouldn’t have come out [points to Bearbrick]. There’s no way we would have put this out.” But the simplicity the toymaker sought with the Bearbrick design is its key to success. “I think of Bearbrick as a canvas,” he explained.
That idea resonates strongly with the designers who have taken to it over the years.
“It doesn't have anything to do with street culture,” Staple says. “This sounds rough, but it almost doesn't contribute anything to street culture other than this blank canvas. I think that's why it's remained relevant for so long.” Sarah Andelman, the former owner of the now-defunct Paris shop Colette, and one of the people credited with elevating the Bearbrick into the realm of high fashion, says she was drawn to it for the same reason. “I loved how each Bearbrick can be a free platform, a white canvas for creativity: same shape, but always different depending on the art on it,” she tells me over email.
Things moved quickly—an adult grizzly bear can reach speeds of 35 miles per hour—after the World Character Convention in May. The first Bearbrick series came out in August of that year, and the very first collaboration, with Tokyo-based record shop HMV, came out a month after that. For the first year of the Bearbrick’s existence it did mostly toy things: Toys“R”Us made one; Medicom released Halloween- and Christmas-themed editions; and a Bearbrick resembling another bear, Winnie the Pooh, came out. Then, in May 2002, like a line of code that corrupts the whole system, Stussy created a navy Bearbrick, its cursive logo written out across the toy’s chest, and gave it as a gift to customers who spent a certain amount in its stores. Kaws, Futura, and Nike all released Bearbricks that year, too, establishing the toy’s roots in streetwear. (Kaws as well as Nike CEO and avid Medicom collector Mark Parker declined to comment through representatives.)
The Bearbrick quickly established itself as the streetwear toy. “There has to be one,” Staple says, not entirely convincingly. Brands started using the Bearbricks as commemorative objects. On anniversaries and for major drops, Staple would put one out; Colette designed one to celebrate its 10th year in business; and during the 2000s, Nike would release a corresponding Bearbrick alongside every big sneaker release. Staple refers to them lovingly as “trophies.” And because Bearbricks almost always arrived in tandem with big moments, they took on an air of specialness—and quickly acquired cachet among streetwear designers.
“The Bearbrick is still sought after thanks to the numerous co-signs made at the beginning of streetwear by the forefathers of this scene,” says Alife co-founder Rob Cristofaro, who started working with Medicom in 2000. “Fast forward to now and it feels like the cookie-cutter recipe for most of these younger brands: make a Bearbrick, make a G-Shock, etcetera. It is a staple product at this point.”
For other brands, just working with Medicom has taken on bucket-list status. “Everybody that has a brand has that list of certain partnerships you want to do at some point,” says Jamie Cormack, the co-founder of Herschel Supply, which put out a collaborative Bearbrick earlier this year. “And Bearbrick is on the top of that list.”
The power of the Bearbrick is that it doesn’t align with any single brand, or really any point of view. Blankness enables the Bearbrick to adapt to any new brand or any new trend. Without allegiances, the Bearbrick drifts along a lazy river, constantly pushed forward by a gentle stream of new tastemakers. It has no history. Every new collaboration introduces the toy to a new generation of collectors. “I would guess Kith's true customer base isn't totally familiar with Bearbrick but [designer Ronnie Fieg] releases one and now his whole demographic of kids are introduced to it for the first time,” Staple says. “They're so quiet—they move quietly in the background,” Staple conitunes. “That’s part of their success.”
Even Medicom’s business plan, the one that’s yielded decades of success, is barely more than a blank sheet of paper, according to the people who have collaborated with the brand. “They really shoot from the hip,” says Staple. The brands I spoke with all reached out themselves, after getting connected through parties who were already in touch with the company. Brian Donnelly (Kaws) introduced Alife, Hiroshi Fujiwara of Fragment Design put Staple in touch, and Lee of the now-shuttered Mobius went through a friend who created some of the blind box designs. Medicom seems to trust its network to grow in the correct way, the artists and designers it works with spreading the Bearbrick message.
Understanding this process helps explain why the item became a streetwear icon: the in-group passed the Bearbrick around among peers and newcomers who were eager to follow in the successful path of designers who came before them. “It's very ad hoc,” Lee explains. When Lee first reached out, “[They were] just like, ‘Okay, we can send you some!’ and that's it. It was very mom and pop—I'm surprised they’ve lasted this long.”
In 2007, Medicom’s growing reputation manifested in a company-changing way. The Bonhams auction house in Hong Kong was holding a gala benefiting the Hong Kong Blood Cancer Foundation and needed an item to auction off. Naturally, it turned to the Bearbrick. The result: an event called “LOVE IS BIG, LOVE IS BEARBRICK,” featuring versions of the toy redesigned by a different class of designers: Chanel, Cartier, Hermes, Coach, Missoni, Moschino, Paul Smith, Salvatore Ferragamo, and Tod's, some of which sold for $10,000. ("I wasn't anywhere near spending $10,000 for a fucking Bearbrick," says Yang, "but I would fucking murder somebody to buy one for $10,000 now.") Years before Louis Vuitton collaborated with Supreme, high-fashion designers were reaching down to into streetwear’s sandbox. “When [Bearbrick] got to do this collaboration, I was like, ‘Wow, they've gone mainstream,’” Lee remembers thinking at the time.
For fashion houses and streetwear brands alike, the allure of the Bearbrick was similar to that of bags, belts, and other small paraphernalia like keychains and phone cases. The toys allowed them to tap into an entirely different, often younger, audience. “It was a great opportunity for luxury brands to do something cool which will resonate with their clients and younger generations,” Andelman says. It was also an introduction to streetwear’s unique economics: through a potion of hype, exclusivity, and scarcity, a plastic toy can reach vaunted leather-bag prices. An iconic Chanel flap bag typically runs for roughly $5,000. Today, Chanel’s Bearbrick is worth up to $30,000 at auction.
“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.
The story of the Bearbrick is not complete without mention of designer Hiroshi Fujiwara. If the Bearbrick is reliant on its artist, the Fragment Design founder is its Picasso. Over the years, he has produced Bearbricks out of red crystal that resemble precious diamond statues, another that is wearing a fuzzy bunny costume that unzips to reveal the face of a snarling wolf, and a recent release is made out of porcelain as a tribute to 18th-century Japanese art. And in the mid-2000s, the designer released a version of the toy wearing a furry bear costume and a button pinned to it with the words “Almost Famous.”
Fujiwara explained the meaning behind that design to Staple, who passed along the grandiose thought process behind the piece. “A Bearbrick is a toy, but he really always wants to be as famous as, like, a grizzly bear, which is the original bear, right? So he puts on this fur suit in order to represent being an animal. And then on the fur suit he's wearing it has a button that says ‘Almost Famous,’ like he's almost a grizzly bear, but he's not there yet. He's just a Bearbrick. He explained the story to me and I'm like, That's fucking genius. And he's like, ‘That's what's great about working with Medicom: they allow me to express the story that I have.’” Of course, Fujiwara’s story is also a handy metaphor for the power of the Bearbrick itself: an object constantly switching out costumes in an attempt to build up its notoriety.
Over the years, Medicom has shown it is willing to do to its toys whatever a designer desires. The British brand Maharishi shaved a few millimeters off the top of the Kubrick's head to make it flat so the figure could stand upside down—an homage to designer Hardy Blechman’s yoga obsession. Karimoku, a Japan-based furniture company known for its wooden designs, builds Bearbricks out of—what else?—gorgeous wood; the most expensive Bearbrick to sell on StockX so far is a $13,000 “Horizon 1000% Wood” edition made in collaboration with the company. For one of his releases, Staple wanted a liquid to swish around inside the toy—a request the company actually tried to fulfill before informing the designer that they couldn’t get the thing fully watertight. “We want to take what [collaborators] want to accomplish or express and amplify it,” Akashi told Japan Times.
Medicom’s willingness to turn its beloved ursine figure into basically anything is, paradoxically, what makes it unique in the copycat world of streetwear. Virtually nothing else could maintain a two-decade-long streak of hype—except, say, an object that easily adapts to whatever is in the air at the time. The Bearbrick has been passed along like a baton from one generation of designers to the next, connecting the beginning of streetwear history to its future, one plastic toy at a time. Today, the Bearbrick stands for a measure of permanence in a world that typically only does fleeting. “I don’t think it will ever die,” says Staple.
