From Fidget Spinners to Labubu: The Psychological Power of Useless, Quirky Things

Almost a decade ago, I remember holding a fidget spinner between my thumb and forefinger -a compact, shiny, purple, boomerang-shaped device that looked like it had fallen out of a spaceship. The smoothness with which it spun was pure novelty.

But the excitement faded with every short-lived spin. No matter how much power I threw into it, the laws of thermodynamics (and, fine, friction) eventually brought the little gadget to a dignified halt.

“You’re holding it wrong,” insisted a dexterous friend — effortlessly spinning the thing in both hands — looking like a Transformer showing off its rotating axes.

Apparently, it was a stress buster. In hindsight, it may have been a global psychological distraction we willfully participated in.

Fast forward to 2025: Labubus — don’t even get me started.

The number of people loudly asking “why would anyone buy this?” is generating enough engagement to translate into millions of dollars in sales. And then you see Sir David Beckham casually kidulting with the little monster doll, and you start wondering whether you picked the right heroes.

Fidget spinners, slimes, Pop Its, Stanley cups, Labubus — different products, same psychology. Demand here is driven far more by feelings than logic.

Von Restorff’s “distinctiveness effect” laid down the obvious: in a crowded market, weirdness stands out and gets remembered. But that’s an oversimplification. Human psychology is layered. These products tap into emotional needs we don’t openly recognize -or admit. They fill small, invisible gaps: a need for control, for play, for connection, for meaning — even if only for a few seconds at a time.

That tiny-dopamine hit of unveiling a Labubu blind box isn’t far from tallying numbers on a lottery ticket. The appeal is low-stakes joy in a world that won’t let you switch off. And the shared absurdity of belonging to a collector community becomes a quiet rebellion against the idea that everything we do has to make perfect sense.

Still, the phenomenon doesn’t fully unravel — even for the people marketing it.

We’d like to believe that business understands these crazes well, that trends can be engineered, predicted, and repeated. Pop Mart, the maker of Labubu, cashed in hard through artificial scarcity and “ turned off the tap” when the frenzy was peaking. Now, as the buzz ebbs, they appear to be overproducing -trying to shed the “one-doll wonder” label.

And yet the Labubu phenomenon continues to baffle marketing pundits and finance gurus alike. That psychology has a role in business strategy is well understood. But the depth of that understanding seems limited — reduced to a handful of frameworks applied after the fact. It often feels like we sleepwalk through these cycles until a novelty wakes us up, scrambling to dissect and analyze what just happened.

There is something dynamic and almost mystical about the way these phenomena emerge, peak, and disappear — much like human emotions themselves.

Will another doll capture the imagination quite the way Labubu did? Maybe not. But something will. As long as there are subtle irrationalities in the human psyche, there will be players looking to turn them into strategy.

After a few days with the fidget spinner, I grew out of it as quickly as I’d gotten into it. One day it was an obsession. The next, it was just there -quietly existing on my desk, until it disappeared.

© Nimit Suri, 2026. Originally published on LinkedIn.