Who Is Baby Three? Why Are Its Eyes So Weird—and Is It Spying on Me?
discover the blind-box stealing Asia's heart and making its U.S. debut at SDCC 2025.
A Baby Three, dressed as a bunny wearing an avocado sweater.
A Baby Three, dressed as a mushroom with a “LOVE” face fattoo.
⏰ FRI, Jun 27, 2025 @ 5:30 PM PST
🐟 Published from Seattle, WA, USA
🔨 Built by Chase Burns Broderick
Vietnam’s toy scene has swapped Labubu’s fangs for Baby Three’s wobbling eyes. Now, the googly-eyed bunny is hopping stateside for its first American outing at San Diego Comic-Con 2025.
In a single month last fall, Vietnamese shoppers snapped up nearly 38,000 blind-bags—about 8.8 billion VND on Shopee and TikTok—catapulting the pastel mischief-bunny past Pop Mart’s Labubu to become 2024’s most-searched toy in Vietnam. Celebrity unboxings fanned the craze, and fans nicknamed the newcomer “bé ba” and “tiểu tam,” joking that it literally stole Labubu’s spotlight.
Here’s a primer on the rising “trendy toy”: when it was first created, who designed it, and why it could have a little bit in common with the movie M3gan.
Quick Facts
Signature gimmick: Every plush face is machine-stitched from mix-and-match eye, mouth and blush parts, so no two pulls look identical. Collectors treat “weird” combos as chase pieces. (Notably, one eye variant allows you to make the eyes look 😵💫 in different directions.)
IP owner: Cureplaneta, a Shenzhen-based brand under Da Piaoliang (Dongguan) Toy Co., which is the parent company and manufacturer based in Dongguan. “Da Piaoliang” translates to “大” (dà) = “big / great” + “漂亮” (piàoliang) = “pretty / beautiful,” so it’s basically “Big Beautiful (Dongguan) Toy Company.”
New product: 800% “AI Baby Three” lucky-bag plush (≈ 22″ tall) with a Wi-Fi mic that connects to a cloud LLM (large language model) for chat; 7 variants total—6 regular designs plus 1 secret. Yes. Big Beautiful AI Baby Three.
U.S. launch: SDCC 2025 (July 24-27, 2025), UCC Booth #5613; lottery opens July 7.
SDCC exclusives: Five blind-box plush (limited to 2,000) + five chase variants (20 each) — smallest Baby Three run yet.
Official promo art for the Baby Three × UCC collaboration, teasing the character’s splashy SDCC 2025 debut. | UCC Distributing
A giant Baby Three mascot, complete with gold crown and bunny-eared hood, set to headline the SDCC 2025 photo-op display. | UCC Distributing
Meet Baby Three
Baby Three (娃三岁) tumbled onto the scene in April 2023: a candy-coloured plush “aged three” who, according to creator Zhang Ting, “feels every emotion at full blast.” Cureplaneta pushed the character through marathon TikTok/Douyin livestreams and now claims over a million overseas followers—and the sales velocity is hard to miss in Southeast Asia. The uniqueness? Every doll feels one-of-a-kind, as the faces and eyes are randomized as much as the skins.
The Brown “Forest Beast” variant of the Baby Three 800% Artificial Intelligence Plush.
Fast-forward to early 2025 and Baby Three unveiled Baby Three 800% “AI”—a 20-inch giant that hides a mic, speaker and Wi-Fi board beneath the fluff. Squeeze its paw and the bunny streams your words to Cureplaneta’s cloud LLM, then replies in a sing-song toddler voice while logging the chat for parents to review in an optional phone app. The debut units priced at $400 USD (now on sale for $199) and packed blind-bag style (six standard skins plus one secret).
Who’s Steering the Ship?
First comes Zhang Ting. A rural-Anhui dropout who once livestreamed hair clips (his backstory reads like a film script), Zhang Ting pivoted to blind boxes in late 2019. He spotted oncoming blind-box mania and spent three years grinding—doing ten-hour Douyin streams to build capital and commissioning freelance sculptors and testing prototypes. Eventually, he relocated to Dongguan for plush manufacturing and registered Da Piaoliang Toy Co. After years of illustrating and freelance sculpting, Zhang Ting unveiled Baby Three in April 2023.
Next is Xu Shaosheng—“Xiaobai” in every caption and clip. Cureplaneta’s own “About Us” page lists him as CEO, and he’s featured in factory walk-throughs and launch teasers in media across Asia. Southeast-Asia appears to be his main focus at the moment: When Vietnam’s state paper Lao Động reported an inspection into Baby Three packaging this March, Xu—credited as “CEO Xu Tieu Bach”—issued a statement promising full cooperation, calming resellers and keeping the flow of stock intact.
CEO Xu Shaosheng discusses the brand’s growing popularity in Southeast Asia during a Vietnamese industry media interview.
Rounding out the trio is Yang Kaixuan—“Xuanxuan” in the company credits—Cureplaneta’s chief designer. Her name appears on the brand’s official team page directly under Zhang and Xu, with the plain title “Chief Designer.” Public interviews are almost nonexistent, but internal job ads hint at the scale of her studio: in April 2025 Da Piaoliang offered 50 junior “trendy-toy designer” internships in Dongguan, describing the roles as supporting Yang’s concept and colour-finish pipeline. Colleagues credit her with the signature “random-expression” stitching system that turns tiny misalignments into chase-piece gold, and with curating the pastel-to-neon palettes that distinguish Baby Three from copy-bunny knock-offs.
A Baby Three, dressed as a potted cactus with a sticker on it that reads “Happy.” Every Baby Three hang-tag reads “Yiwu: First | Rigorous.”
Why Does Every Baby Three Strap Say “Yiwu: First | Rigorous”?
Every Baby Three plush with a keyring carries a fabric loop “hang-tag” that reads “Yiwu: First | rigorous.” Yiwu is the market city where founder Zhang Ting first bought and livestream-sold blind-box toys in 2019; First rigorous is a pared-down English rendering of the company motto 品质第一·严谨 (“Quality First, Be Rigorous”). The phrase is not a hidden brand name—the maker remains Da Piaoliang Toy Co. and its consumer label Cureplaneta.
A Note on Dongguan, the “Plush Corridor”
Hong Kong’s export boom turned it into the West’s toy capital in the 1950-70s, when local plants churned out plastics, radios and watches for pennies. That factory know-how seeded the designer-toy movement: Hong Kong artists Michael Lau and Eric So began hand-painting short-run vinyl figures in the late 1990s, pioneering what collectors now call “urban vinyl.”
Across the border, Shenzhen became China’s first Special Economic Zone in 1980, then evolved into Huaqiangbei—the “Silicon Valley of Hardware,” a neighborhood where creatives can prototype a toy in hours. A high-speed train now covers the Hong Kong–Shenzhen leg in about 15 minutes.
Head a bit farther and you reach Dongguan, the city business writers once dubbed the “world’s workshop.” It hosts an estimated 100+ “trendy toy companies,” but overall around 4,000 toy manufacturers and about 1,500 supporting companies. At the start of this year, more than 70% of Pop Mart’s production happened in Dongguan. The place, in this case, matters greatly.
