TITLE:
Bandages, Cardboard, and the Weight of Feeling: Reading Hirono and Inosoul as Emotional Objects in Pop Mart’s Blind Box Culture
AUTHORS:
Devika Menon, Melanie Fernandes
KEYWORDS:
Emotional Branding, Blind Box Collectibles, Pop Mart Hirono, Transitional Object, Brand Relationship Theory, Comparative Case Analysis
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.14 No.10,
October
29,
2026
ABSTRACT: Blind boxes have moved, in the space of a few years, from a novelty item to one of the defining shapes of contemporary collectible culture, and the small vinyl figures sealed inside them have started to carry an emotional weight that their production cost alone cannot explain. This article examines how Pop Mart’s designer figure Hirono functions as an instrument of emotional branding within blind box collectible culture, and asks the question existing research has mostly left alone: why does a mass-produced object feel less like a purchase and more like a companion to the people who own it? Using Hirono as the central case and Pop Mart’s Inosoul as a contrasting counterpart, the study combines a comparative design analysis with a small set of semi-structured interviews with Hirono collectors. It is organised around six emotional themes the two IPs share: solitude, masking, seeking, fragility, protection, and identity. Drawing on Donald Winnicott’s account of transitional phenomena (applied here as a cautious analogy for adult collecting) and Susan Fournier’s brand relationship theory, this article argues that Hirono’s outward-facing aesthetic of bandages, cardboard, and visible damage gives collectors a legible surface onto which private feelings of concealment and endurance can be projected, while Inosoul, built around internal stillness rather than external wounds, resolves the same six themes inward and throws Hirono’s outward orientation into relief. Read across all six themes rather than one or two, the comparison suggests that emotional branding does not operate on a single register even within a single brand: two IPs can share an almost identical emotional vocabulary and still invite very different kinds of attachment, because the way a feeling is allowed to be expressed shapes how it can be taken up, not only which feeling is being expressed. The interview material further indicates that emotional identification is not the only route into collecting; a socially motivated route, driven by visibility, scarcity, and trend participation, runs alongside it. The findings extend blind box scholarship beyond purchase-driven uncertainty by suggesting that a figurine’s emotional character may shape how collectors relate to it once the box has been opened, a possibility that future work with long-term collectors of both IPs should test.