Who will staunch the flow of fake Labubus now?

It was an otherwise typical day at The Barras when I heard it. “Get your Labubus! Ten pounds!” shouted a familiar voice. The voice of The Barras itself. It was the cigarettes-tobacco-Viagra man.

Labubus? Ten pounds? All of a sudden, I felt dizzy. Like I was being sucked down a whirlpool of liquid modernity. I let out a giddy laugh and turned to my partner. We chuckled. There was something so incongruous about the bootleg Barras man shouting ‘Labubu’ when my brain was expecting to hear ‘Viagra’.

For the uninitiated, a Labubu is a fluffy grinning monster character created by Hong Kong artist Kasing Lung in 2015 and licensed to Chinese toy retailer Pop Mart in 2019. In 2024, Lisa from the K-pop group Blackpink showed off her love for the furry little beasts to her 107 million Instagram followers and pandemonium erupted. Dua Lipa and Rihanna followed suit, clipping them on designer handbags and taking the fashion world by storm.

Demand soared. Pop Mart, the only official seller of the Labubu, chose to release the dolls in limited drops. Fights broke out at stores in the UK, prompting the retailer to pull the plush toys off the shelf for a few weeks. Resellers were rumoured to be charging upwards of £1,000 for ones that should have cost £18. Winning more than £5 on a scratch card started to seem more likely than getting your hands on one.

Enter the fake Labubu, also known as the Lafufu. These cute little copies looked just like the real thing at first glance. They popped up across online marketplaces, in corner shops and street stalls. They were cheaper, usually a tenner, but you get what you pay for. Those snaggle-toothed little monsters were riddled with hidden horrors.

The professional body for UK Trading Standards officers (the Chartered Trading Standards Institute) painted a horrific picture of what could befall an innocent child if they were handed one of these phoney creatures. The chemicals in their plastic faces could “cause a lifetime of damage to a child’s organs”. Their giant egg-shaped eyes could pop off and cause a “serious choking hazard”.

In July, trading standards officers in Aberdeen seized Lafufus from four city premises. Shortly after, trading standards officers seized hundreds of fake Labubus in North Ayrshire. This week, almost 600 Lafufus were seized by South Lanarkshire authorities, and parents were warned they posed a “serious danger to children”.

“These counterfeit toys can seem like a bargain compared with trying to source the genuine toy, especially when they are a much-sought-after item, but they are potentially dangerous,” they warned.

If fake Labubus have the potential to cause children a lifetime of suffering, why have so few been confiscated in Scotland? And none in Glasgow? I tried to find out if my local corner shop was an authorised retailer, but had no luck. It might have something to do with how grossly underfunded Scotland’s “consumer police” are.

READ MORE:

• Labubu collector describes ‘battlefield’ resale market as toys pulled from shops

• Fake Labubu Dolls seized from Scottish shops after council crackdown

This week, trading standards officers warned the entire operation was in jeopardy after years of cuts and announced they no longer wanted to be drip-fed from local council budgets. The Society of Chief Officers of Trading Standards in Scotland (SCOTSS) are trying to find out if it can be funded directly by the Scottish Government and revealed exclusively to The Herald that staff numbers have been halved since 2002.

Trading Standards officers work within local authorities and are responsible for enforcing consumer protection laws covering product safety, pricing, unfair trading, and consumer rights. They tackle scams, rogue trading, consumer fraud, and age-of-sale compliance.

It works as a bit of a hybrid system at the moment and is funded by councils rather than the Scottish Government directly, which means staffing, resources, and priorities vary between the 32 local authorities. There is, however, national coordination through SCOTSS. Trading Standards Scotland, hosted by COSLA, is funded by the national government, but its remit is tackling cross-boundary issues like scams and illegal money lending.

Trading Standards is the kind of important service that money is siphoned out of to support other departments. Its funding isn’t ring-fenced, and its importance is lower on the totem pole than critical services like education, health, roads, and parks. But losing the local authority trading standards service will have dire consequences for consumer protection and business support.

At the moment, it’s looking like a footless Lafufu with one eye, thanks to the meagre local authority budgets. Scotland’s councils are facing a £647 million budget shortfall this year alone, and they are making cuts, hiking taxes, raising charges and drawing on reserves to plug the gaping holes.

The Scottish Government would do right to take the pleas from SCOTSS seriously for reasons outside of the health of consumers, if that doesn’t do it. Because what point is there in headline-grabbing policies like banning single-use vapes if there is no agency there to enforce them? Keeping kids off the vapes and cigarettes is a trading standards speciality.

I find the relationship between our increasingly performative culture, micro-trend cycles, the proliferation of counterfeit goods and the bottomless leak in both personal and public purses to be fatally intertwined. The crisis in Trading Standards is perhaps just the most obvious iteration of the cycle.

We live in a liquid culture where trends are over faster than you can say TikTok and where we need to buy into said micro-trends to signal to others that we know the current secret password.

The whirlpool. Old objects are routinely flushed away in favour of the next ‘It’ thing. And it is great for the well-heeled influencers who get shipped overflowing boxes of the stuff, whose income depends on endless products to flog, so the fountain of content never runs dry. But the rest of us are chasing the sense of belonging through a giddy cycle of consumption that we can’t keep up with.

In walks the murky market of counterfeit goods. For £10 I can swing a plush Labubu from my bag, and only eagle-eyed fanatics will be able to tell it’s fake (until its hand pops off). I’m currently circling the drain of shelling out for Fall in Wild, organ failure be damned.

Marissa MacWhirter is a columnist and feature writer at The Herald, and the editor of The Glasgow Wrap. The newsletter is curated between 5-7am each morning, bringing the best of local news to your inbox each morning without ads, clickbait, or hyperbole. Oh, and it’s free. She can be found on X @marissaamayy1