Labubu Frenzy, Giving Oura the Finger, and Why Slow Content Feels Like a Luxury
Vinyl toys outselling sneakers, a wellness ring flipping the bird, and understanding my waning attention span.
Issue #11
Hey crew, welcome to Culture Curve, your weekly cheat sheet decoding the trends hijacking your feed, wallet, and group chats.
This week we’re tearing into:
Labubu, the four-inch gremlin flipping the resale market on its head.
Oura’s audacious “Give Us the Finger” ads.
The luxury of thought: a love letter to slow-burn storytelling in an over-scrolled world.
Labubu… who?
I almost typed, “You’ve definitely heard of Labubu unless you’ve been living under a rock,” but honestly, given the news cycle, a rock sounds lovely. So consider this a compliment, not a dig. Let’s run the intro back:
Last Wednesday I walked past Anthropologie, Vuori (my new athleisure obsession), and Uniqlo when I hit a queue reminiscent of a 2017 Supreme drop. The crowd was hunting Labubu, a four-inch vinyl elf that’s half-cute, half-feral.
By the time I finished dinner (XLB at DTF… IYKYK), the blind-box shipment was gone. Two hours later the same toys were listed for $150. That’s a 10× pop before I got to dessert.
A fairy-tale start… with claws
Labubu was born in 2015 in Belgian illustrator Kasing Lung’s sketchbook. Pop Mart licensed the gremlin in 2019 and ran a hype machine rivaling the SNKRS launches I once sweated over at Nike.
How Pop Mart fuels the frenzy
Pop Mart isn’t selling toys; it’s selling adrenaline. If you want the academic angle on why that matters, I broke down “energy marketing”—the art of turning hype into cultural heft—in an earlier piece on Fred Again right here.
Blind-box roulette – You don’t know which Labubu you’ll pull, so collectors keep buying “just one more” like fans chasing a rare Pokémon card.
Surprise drop cadence – No hard calendar; hints leak on Weibo or Discord, forcing hardcore fans into 24/7 watch-mode.
Ultra-rares – One glitter or translucent variant per case ensures a thriving secondary market that, conveniently, doubles as free marketing.
Sounding an awful lot like Willy Wonka’s golden ticket, isn’t it? High-low collabs – Streetwear one month, luxury fashion the next. When Marc Jacobs clips a Labubu charm to a Birkin, it signals to hypebeasts and hypebaes alike that this toy transcends “kid stuff.”
Who’s actually buying them?
Everyone from my 11-year-old niece (SF) to my Mugler-loving bestie (Paris). Gen Z dopamine chasers, millennial sneaker refugees, and Gen X collectors who refused to miss the next Kaws.
Action takeaways
Make it a ritual, not a billboard blast. A 500-unit drop with lore > 50 k-unit launch with billboards.
Collabs are your shortcut up the cool-kid ladder. Mass pricing + luxury sign-offs can widen the hype net.
Mind the saturation cliff. When everyone can cop, nobody cares—reinvent at the 18-24 month mark.
Oura wants you to give it the finger
If you’ve been following Culture Curve for a while, you’ll know that I recently traded in my Apple Watch for an Oura Ring, so I’ve been quietly judging their lab-coat marketing ever since (or maybe not so quietly, if you ask my husband). Oura’s product marketing ads felt criminally nerdy and data-heavy. All charts, no charm. Well, my ring must’ve eavesdropped, because the brand just dropped a campaign with real bite: “Give Us the Finger.”
In four words they flip the universal insult into an invitation. The hero film is full of tango-dancing, cliff-climbing, chess-smirking forty- and fifty-somethings flashing ring-clad index fingers—proof that getting older can be a flex, not a crisis. No data dashboards, no VO2-max graphs, just a wink and a promise: join the club, live long enough to brag about it.
That cast choice surprised me. I assumed Oura was chasing TikTok teens; instead they’re courting Gen Xers and older millennials who suddenly care more about recovery scores than step counts in their Lululemon leggings. Bold move—and it might work.
Will it move rings? Oura’s private, so we’ll have to guess. My bet: the buzz bumps sales, but whether the spike comes from the silver-foxes or the sleep-hacking millennials who follow them on Instagram is still TBD. For now, we know this much: a cheeky hook, grown-up faces, and placements in brunch-belt neighbourhoods (SoHo, Silver Lake, Shoreditch) let TikTok’s algorithm do the heavy lifting for free.
Quick takeaways
Laugh first, sell metrics later. Humor lowers the data wall.
Turn a taboo (aging) into bragging rights; it sticks.
Rotate the story within a year—member wins, limited-edition finishes—so the joke stays fresh.
Anyhoo, my own ring just pinged me: apparently recovery scores tank after a weekend in Vegas.
The luxury of thought in the attention economy
If Labubu converts anticipation into dollars and Oura converts cheek into credibility, both victories hinge on the same scarce resource: attention.
Case in point: I tried three times to get through the pilot of Your Friends & Neighbors. Third time? Hooked. The show ended up being really gripping and thought-provoking, but it left me with a question, “Why did it take me 3 attempts to get into it?” and an epiphany, “Apparently, I will really persevere to watch anything with Jon Hamm.”
I concluded that being chronically online has conditioned me to expect content to get me really hooked in the first couple of minutes and I won’t waste my time if it falls short. Perhaps that’s why the slow burns of the latest Severence and White Lotus seasons had me (and the rest of the internet) ranting.
Social media algorithms crave velocity: short loops, fast hooks. Scroll culture has trained creators to front-load the punchline, often at the expense of nuance; the result is a content buffet that’s calorically dense but nutritionally thin.
We’re wired to swipe past anything that doesn’t thrill us in five seconds, yet the things that stick, from Severance’s slow-drip tension to LEGO’s decade-long story world, demand patience. That gap between instant dopamine and earned depth is the real luxury today: time to think, space to let an idea unspool. When a brand can tempt us to linger, it isn’t just winning eyeballs; it’s winning mindshare we no longer give away lightly.
Even here at Culture Curve, I wrestle with balance. Every instinct says trim, trim, trim, yet the pieces readers save and forward are the ones where I let an idea breathe.
Maybe that’s the real takeaway: in an era of attention deficits, generosity of thought feels luxurious.
🔎 Culture Radar: 3 clicks worth your time
The Gilded Age social media team is killing it - the definition of layered content for fans of the show (🙋🏻♀️)
AI hits Centre court at Wimbledon and the jury’s still out on its efficacy
This interesting breakdown of the bodega & bollywood-inspired branding of Zohran Mamdani’s campaign
Next week on Culture Curve…
Crocs-to-couture: Why does luxury fashion love a $60 dentist shoe?
AI fatigue: A reality check on artificial overkill.
Is good copywriting dead? If bots can crank out taglines in seconds, how do we spot & write the words that still make people stop scrolling?
Stay curious, stay cultured.✌🏼
-Kasvi
Love the ‘Oura’ and how Culture Curve shoots straight from the hip: lightning fast, to the point, and always hitting bull’s eye! Fads and obsessions, good or bad, rule our world. Can’t wait for ‘What’s next’!