I'm currently training for the Marathon des Sables - six days running through the Sahara, roughly 50km a day, widely considered one of the more absurd things a person can voluntarily sign up for.

I'm not doing it to win. I'm doing it because when you commit to something genuinely difficult in a completely different domain - physical, spiritual, whatever - it recalibrates your entire sense of what's hard. 

Suddenly a tough quarter at work doesn't feel quite as existential when you've spent the morning questioning whether blisters on top of blisters is normal or a medical emergency.

Life isn't just work and economic gain, as much as social media would like us to believe otherwise.

Raising capital hinges on a similar principle. People tend to chase fast validation - investors who'll write a check based on a deck and some traction, then expect hockey-stick growth by next quarter. 

That's fine. It works for some businesses. 

But very few founders are playing the long game that requires patient capital. The kind that shows up, understands the timeline and isn't checking in every month asking where the growth is.

POP MART is one of those rare cases. And the story didn't start with a funding round or some perfectly crafted pitch in a boardroom. 

It started with a queue outside a toy shop in Beijing - actual people, in real life, waiting to buy blind box collectibles before anyone thought to involve investors at all.

If your attention span expired three paragraphs ago, here's the digestible version:

1/ POP MART raised $676M at IPO, hitting a $7B valuation. But the real story happened earlier - smart investors were buying shares from early backers who were bailing out. That's a secondary, and it means one thing: the startup phase is done, now we're just printing money.

2/ By mid-2025, revenue jumped 204% and profits 397%. Turns out all that cultural buzz actually converted into cash. Brand hype is worthless if people don't keep buying and you don't make profit.

3/ While Cartier and Van Cleef bled sales across Asia for three straight quarters, POP MART exploded. Centuries of heritage and bottomless marketing budgets got destroyed by toys with creepy smiles and local cultural relevance.

4/ BA Capital bought POP MART shares four separate times between 2016 and 2020 - while everyone else was heading for the exits. They weren't riding a trend. They bet cultural authenticity would compound over years. And it did.

February 2016. David He from BA Capital walks into a POP MART store in Beijing and sees something you absolutely cannot manufacture in a pitch - actual young people queuing up to buy blind box toys.

Quick definition because I had to Google this myself: they're sealed boxes with collectible figures inside that you can't see before buying. The entire appeal is that you don't know what you're getting.

These weren't influencer-driven crowds or some viral campaign. This was 2016, before TikTok existed and before brands figured out how to manufacture hype at scale. It was demand happening organically, without anyone burning piles of cash to create it.

David wanted in immediately.

One problem: founder Wang Ning  wasn't raising money. Between 2016 and the December 2020 IPO, POP MART barely took fresh capital. The company wasn't interested in new investors. So the only way to get shares was through secondaries - which means buying from early investors who'd decided they were done and wanted to cash out.

While those early backers were sprinting for the exit, BA Capital was walking in the opposite direction. They bought shares four separate times between 2016 and 2020, steadily building their stake while everyone else was reducing theirs. Bold move, honestly.

Around the same time, private markets became borderline obsessed with secondaries. What used to be a niche transaction suddenly turned fashionable. Then someone got creative and invented "tertiaries" - funds buying shares in other funds that are themselves buying secondaries.

So now you've got funds buying funds buying funds.

It sounds a bit ridiculous at this point, but there’s some logic behind it.

Secondaries typically happen once the genuinely terrifying early-stage risk has dropped significantly. They show up when a business has real operating history, proven traction, and looks like it'll actually survive beyond the hype cycle. When there's evidence instead of just hopeful projections.

That's what BA Capital spotted. When customers are physically lining up outside stores without millions in ad spend pushing them there, it completely changes how you think about risk. Real, tangible demand beats manufactured hype every single time - because you can fake a marketing campaign, but you can't fake people voluntarily queuing to give you money.

With all this in mind, BA Capital saw a business that had already proven itself, cultural connection that wasn't going anywhere and something durable that would compound over years. 

So they just kept buying shares every single time they got the chance.

December 2020. POP MART goes public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and raises $676M at a $7B valuation. For a company selling toys you literally can't see before buying them, that's the kind of number that makes people do a double-take.

At its peak, the market cap briefly topped HKD $100B - putting it higher than most traditional consumer brands will ever reach. And those brands are selling actual luxury goods, not plastic figurines with questionable expressions.

Leading up to the IPO, POP MART had raised roughly $100M total, including a $100M Series C in April 2020. Compared to venture-backed consumer startups burning through cash like there's a prize for spending fastest, this was relatively restrained. 

The real conviction buying happened behind the scenes through those secondary purchases before the IPO became headline news.

Here's what BA Capital actually bet on in 2016: infrastructure. Their thesis was that attention was fragmenting everywhere, traditional media gatekeepers were losing control, and the old playbook for building content IP - owning every character, controlling distribution - was effectively dead. POP MART built a platform that attracted top creators instead of trying to own everything themselves. 

Clever move.

By mid-2025, the numbers proved this wasn't just a passing cultural moment. Revenue jumped 204% to 13.88B yuan. Net income exploded by 397%. Stock climbed 213%. All that cultural buzz people were dismissing as hype? It converted directly into measurable financial performance.

Meanwhile, legacy luxury brands in Asia were having an absolutely terrible time. Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels - names that scream prestige and generational wealth - reported three straight quarters of declining sales. 

Now I’m not saying that POP MART caused that slowdown. But it benefited from the same shift that made luxury’s traditional advantage less reliable.

For decades, luxury brands built demand by controlling where and how people saw them. Magazine covers. Fashion weeks. Airport billboards. Carefully staged store openings. If something appeared in the right places, often enough, it became desirable by association.

That system depended on a small number of gatekeepers deciding what mattered.

That control has weakened.

Consumers now discover brands through creators, communities and each other. Cultural relevance spreads person to person, not top down. People don’t want things simply because they’re told they’re valuable. They want things that feel current, shared and meaningful within their own world.

In that environment, a collectible toy people genuinely connect with (each to their own) can outperform a €10,000 bracelet people are expected to admire.

Pop Mart didn’t rely on massive advertising budgets to convince people to care. Its products resonated first. Demand followed naturally.

For investors, that distinction is everything.

When demand grows organically and turns into repeat purchases and rising profits, it becomes much harder to compete against. Money alone can’t recreate it.

That’s what validated BA Capital’s long-term bet, and why they kept buying shares while others were selling.

Now? POP MART is everywhere, mostly materialising as a LABUBU.

Celebrities promote them for free (Rihanna, Kim Kardashian, David Beckham, etc.). Collectors treat them like assets. Some resell for multiples of retail. Others sit in illuminated display cabinets, which is behaviour previously reserved for watches and jewellery.

The craze has spread to the UK, where people who could easily buy traditional luxury goods are choosing instead to queue for something that fits in their palm.

Your product doesn’t need to be “cute and collectible” to be successful. Here are the lessons I’ve extracted for SMEs raising capital on a smaller scale.

A) De-risk the business before you raise big

The smartest money in POP MART came in through secondaries - after the business had already proven itself. By that point, demand was repeating week after week and the model was working without needing a constant drip-feed of hype or eye-watering marketing budgets.

That's what attracts capital: visible proof that the terrifying early-stage"will this actually work?" phase is over and the business can stand on its own two feet.

So SMEs - before chasing bigger raises, get your house in order first. This looks like consistent revenue, customers who actually come back, margins that don't make your accountant wince and growth that isn't 100% dependent on Meta's ad algorithm.

When operational risk drops, investor confidence rises. And you stop burning energy trying to convince skeptical people that your vision isn't just hopeful delusion.

B) Make the opportunity big enough to wait for

If you want patient, conviction-driven capital, the opportunity has to justify literal years of waiting and watching your P&L stay red.

Take Solana Resources - a company I worked with. It's an AIM-listed mineral exploration business that's been operating since around 2010, never once turned a profit, and holds Western Europe's largest open-pit spodumene lithium deposit in Portugal.

For years, it looked like a tiny, speculative gamble that most sensible people would avoid. Then lithium became strategically critical overnight. EU grants appeared. The Portuguese government decided it cared. US conferences on battery minerals put it on the map. Supply scarcity went from theoretical concern to actual geopolitical issue. The thesis was always that lithium would power batteries at absolutely massive global scale. That scale is what earns patience from investors who'd normally lose interest after quarter two.

Investors will tolerate endless volatility and years of losses when the upside is structurally important and genuinely enormous. If your vision doesn't meaningfully move a market or solve something that matters at scale, it won't justify long-term capital. Simple as that.

C) Build cultural weight, not just a hot product

Cultural relevance can reduce perceived risk, but only if there's actual substance propping it up. Setting a trend - like cargo pants or Ed Hardy skull shirts taking over - creates visibility. Great. But visibility without staying power just means you had a nice run before everyone moved on.

Investors want something way deeper than a fleeting popularity spike. They want repeat behaviour that shows people are genuinely hooked, brand recognition that translates into trust instead of just awareness and product quality solid enough to sustain demand when the novelty wears off.

POP MART built a platform that consistently attracts top IP creators and keeps customers coming back for more. That repeat loop is defensibility. Cultural weight only becomes financially valuable when it drives ongoing purchasing and actually reinforces what your business does, not just what it looks like on Instagram.

D) Understand the risk-time-upside trade-off

Every capital decision is a trade-off between how risky the business feels, how long the money will be tied up, and how large the potential return could be.

Secondaries in POP MART signaled that the nail-biting early-stage risk had dropped significantly and the business model actually worked - which made the remaining upside far more attractive to investors who don't enjoy gambling.

They’re constantly running this mental calculation: is the opportunity large enough to justify the time I'll be waiting and the uncertainty I'll be tolerating?

If you’re a founder raising funds: reduce operational risk, clarify the scale of the opportunity and demonstrate why the business deserves its place beyond the next product cycle. When those elements align, conviction capital follows naturally.

Remember that marathon I mentioned? Six days in the Sahara, 50km a day, questioning whether your feet will survive the experience.

Endurance events and long-term business bets have something in common: the payoff doesn't come from the exciting bits. It comes from the gruelling middle stretch where nothing feels like it's happening and most people quit.

POP MART is that long-term thesis playing out over years. The strongest conviction didn't show up in headline funding rounds; it happened behind-the-scenes through BA Capital buying secondaries while early investors were selling and leaving.

If you’re looking for investors that'll stick around past quarter two - drop me a message. Matching founders with the right long-term lenders is what I set FundOnion up for.

Till next time,

James