The thing we sold more of than anything else this fall is a $2.99 pack of My Little Pony cards. Not a Nendoroid. Not a Demon Slayer prize figure. Not the $260 scale we keep writing love letters to. Ninety-odd packs of Kayou's Fantasy Wonderlands went out the door between October 1 and this week, and the runner-up was a $1.99 pack of KPop Demon Hunters cards. We run an anime figure shop, and we got out-sold on our own shelf by cardboard.
That stung a little, so we pulled the full six-week sales report and read it properly: every product, units sold, orders placed, October 1 to November 12. This is the Friday arrivals post, and we will get to the arrivals (there are finally some, after seven quiet weeks), but the more useful thing we can give you is what actually moved while nothing new was landing. The surprises taught us more than the hits did.
The cards ate the figure case
Three of our top five sellers by unit were Kayou products. Fantasy Wonderlands ($2.99 a pack) led everything, the Friendships Begin starter deck ($19.99, three left as we write) was fourth, and the Friendship Eternal Star Edition ($7.99) made the top twenty. KPop Demon Hunters Classic Edition ($1.99) was second by units, with the Energy Edition ($4.49) further down.
Here is the honest read on that. The KPDH number is a handful of people buying whole boxes, not a hundred different customers: eighty-odd packs across six orders. The Pony numbers are different. Fantasy Wonderlands went out in nineteen separate orders and the starter deck in twelve, which means a real, repeat audience is buying a few packs at a time and coming back. We wrote about Kayou's Labubu-era rise on this blog in October and still underestimated it. If you only know Pokémon TCG, Kayou is the Chinese card maker whose packs cost a third as much and whose pull rates are built for kids who want a shiny card every time rather than once a box. That is exactly why they move at a con table, and apparently from a website too. Everything we carry from them is in one collection.
The other card story is quieter: hololive Blooming Radiance boosters ($7.99, down to 24 packs) and Weiss Schwarz NIKKE boosters ($5.99) both out-sold most of our figures, and the NIKKE Vol. 2 set sold through completely in a month. Weiss Schwarz being the most fun anime TCG nobody plays is a post for another day, but the sales report agrees with us.
Kayou MLP Fantasy Wonderlands · $2.99
Kayou MLP Friendship Eternal (Star) · $7.99
Kayou KPop Demon Hunters (Classic) · $1.99
The figure that beat every other figure is from 2023 and costs $26.99
Strip the cards and plush out of the report and the best-selling figure in the shop this fall was FuRyu's BiCute Bunnies Hatsune Miku White Rabbit. Forty-four of them, in seventeen orders, which means people are buying two and three at a time. It is a 2023 prize figure. It is the most reliable thing we stock, and it proves the point we keep making: Miku is our best-selling character by a distance, and the White Rabbit is the cheapest good Miku on the Miku shelf. The Baby Blue and Pearl Color versions are both gone, so this is the one you can still get.
Second was SEGA's Jujutsu Kaisen 0 Gojo Super Premium ($29.99), twenty-four separate orders, almost all single units, which is what a figure people actually want for their own shelf looks like in the data. The whole JJK shelf is Gojo-heavy and this is why. Then came the Hashira Meeting perching figures, which we have been quietly telling people about for two years: Mitsuri, Shinobu and Tengen, all $28.99, each in twenty-plus orders. They sit on the edge of a shelf or a monitor, they are the right size to buy a set of, and Giyu, Obanai and Muichiro from the same line are already sold out. Buy the three that are left before the set is unfinishable; the rest of the Demon Slayer shelf is not going anywhere.
The last one in the figure top five is the one we would not have guessed: Taito's Rem Winter Maid ($26.99), listed in March 2022, twenty-three orders this fall. Nothing happened to Re:Zero in October. Rem just sells, every month, forever, and the Re:Zero collection is 134 products deep because of her. Notice that every figure in this paragraph and the two before it costs under $30. Our scale figures sold too, but in ones and twos. We wrote the prize-figure manifesto last week and the report had already written it for us.
BiCute Bunnies Miku White Rabbit · $26.99
Mitsuri (Hashira Meeting) perching · $28.99
Shinobu (Hashira Meeting) perching · $28.99
Taito Rem Winter Maid · $26.99
Pokémon does not have slow months
TOMY's Monster Collection figures are the least exciting thing we stock to write about and among the most dependable to sell. Charizard #1 ($19.99) was our ninth best seller overall, eighteen orders, and Pikachu #6 ($19.99) was not far behind. Togepi, Porygon and Mewtwo all sold in the double digits. These are the two-inch painted PVC figures Japanese kids have bought since 1996, the Moncolle line, and they are the right answer to "I want one good Charizard that is not a card and not a $200 statue." The Charizard model kit from the same shelf sold twenty and is now gone, which is the first of our mistakes. The Pokémon collection is 275 products and the Moncolle shelf is where the steady money is.
The $9.99 Hello Kitty dragon, and other things we cannot explain
Fiesta's Hello Kitty Green Dragon plush ($9.99) was our third best seller by unit. Fifty-four dragons. Six orders, so somebody is buying them by the armful, probably for a party or a prize table, and we are not going to ask. The Spandex Unicorn from the same line did forty-nine in three orders. They are small carnival-grade plush, not collector plush, and they are in the plush collection next to the $30 SEGA nesoberi that sell one at a time to people who care deeply. Both kinds of customer are real and the report does not rank them.
Blind boxes did what blind boxes do. MJ Studio's Emma Ocean Bubble Beans ($5.99) sold thirty-eight across nineteen orders and is now sold out, which is mistake number two. HereToy's ZIYULI Ghostly Spiritual Power ($20.99) and POP MART's SKULLPANDA Winter Symphony plush ($29.99) both cleared twenty. And the Nendoroid race was the funniest line in the whole report: Good Smile's Suguru Geto #1768 ($74.99), a 2021 listing, sold eleven, and the Pikmin Bulborb ($53.99) sold ten. A Nendoroid of a round red creature that eats Pikmin nearly out-sold every anime Nendoroid on a 577-product Nendoroid shelf. We think it is the best-sculpted thing Good Smile shipped this year and apparently ten of you agree.
Hello Kitty Green Dragon plush · $9.99
ZIYULI Ghostly Spiritual Power blind box · $20.99
Nendoroid Bulborb · $53.99
What we got wrong
Three things. First, the sell-outs: the Charizard model kit, the Emma Ocean Bubble Beans and the NIKKE Vol. 2 boosters all went to zero in October and none of them has a reorder landing before December. We bought them like side items and they sold like headliners. Second, and this is the one that bothers us: the Back Room has been 30% off at checkout since October, 566 products, and not one of our thirty best sellers came from it. Every item above was full price. The discount is real and runs through November 30, but a 30% sticker does not make somebody want a figure they did not already want. The older pieces that have moved this fall moved when we wrote about them. The lesson for us is that a story sells older stock and a percentage does not, which is inconvenient, because stories take longer.
Third, the arrivals. After seven weeks with nothing new in the system, four HereToy listings went up this week: a Vivistar Everyday Life eye mask ($21.99, ten in stock, the companion to the phone strap we have carried since August), a WAKUKU Whimsy Activated vinyl plush blind box ($25.99) and two ZIYULI series, Charm of Forgotten Dream ($14.99) and Dream Closet ($22.99). We listed the three blind-box series before the cartons were counted in, so as of this morning they show as sold out even though they are the new stuff. That is on us. Check back next week or ask us; the ZIYULI Ghostly series above is from the same studio and is the reason we ordered more.
What we are doing about it
We are going into December buying the way the report says, not the way our hearts say. More Miku. More Hashira Meeting if SEGA ever reruns them. The full Moncolle shelf topped up. A real Kayou restock before the holidays instead of a cautious one. And fewer $200 scale figures bought because we love them, which, for the record, we still do. The $20 to $30 shelf is where this shop actually lives, and the prize figure wall is where most of that shelf comes from.
If you want the short version: buy the White Rabbit Miku before the next reprint gap, finish the Hashira Meeting trio while there are three, and if there is a kid in your life who likes shiny things, a handful of Kayou packs is a better $10 than anything else on the site. Flat $5 shipping in the US, and WELCOME10 takes 10% off a first order.