On the bank of the Dongjiang River, Shipai Town, Dongguan, Guangdong, the blue bricks and black tiles in Lingnan villages and the steel and cement of the modern factory shine here.

This town once had no intersection with trendy culture.

After more than 40 years of accumulation of strength, it has "grown" the trendy toy industry that is now over 10 billion yuan.

The story starts from the 1980s. At that time, toy companies mainly engaged in OEM processing came to Shipai Town one after another to provide OEM processing services to some international brands.

Zheng Bo, founder of ToyCity, remembered that 20 years ago, his company, like many factories, did OEM for foreign brands, and the toy plastic manufacturing industry became a characteristic industry in Shipai Town, and gradually improved the industrial chain and laid the foundation for the industrial cluster.

Around 2015, the domestic trendy toy market gradually emerged, and trendy toys gradually moved from a niche circle to the public. Many stone toy practitioners have begun to think about the path of transformation while keeping a close eye on "whether the plastic components are exquisite enough" and "whether the toys meet customer needs".

"We were doing OEM business at that time, with shipments of more than one billion pieces, and the factory benefits were very good. But I found that if we continued to do it, the company would not have a leap forward." Zheng Bo said that since then, he had the idea of ​​"seeking change".

Selling products and doing OEM can ensure the survival of the company, but what really determines how far a company can go is the brand and IP - this became the consensus of many stone toy practitioners at that time.

So, with the "original dream" and "IP dream", a group of stone toy companies began to establish their own brands. Factory that originally focused on production have transformed into independent research and development, and have begun to explore from toys to trendy toys.

Decades of technical accumulation and inspection and testing of international standards have created Dongguan's excellent manufacturing industry skills and cultivated a group of skilled and skilled talents. These hard powers make the four words "Made in Dongguan" shine.

Based on the advantages of the original industrial chain and the ability to incubate high-quality original IP, the panda man in Shunlin model, the national style mecha hero with the motorcycle core, the "Laura" of ToyCity, and the surrounding "Nezha: The Devil Child's Trouble" by Lang Bowang, and other trendy tales have become popular one after another.

Trendy toys reshape this town.

As trendy toys become the new favorite of mass consumption, Shipai Town's role has also quietly changed, upgrading from a simple production and manufacturing base to a trendy toy cultural experience and communication center.

The town is striving to focus on the trendy toy industry highland. In 2023, Shipai Town made efforts to build the regional brand of "Shipai Trendy Toy", and the Shipai Trendy Toy Industry Cluster was successfully selected as the first batch of "Guangdong Province Small and Medium Enterprises Characteristic Industrial Cluster", with a cluster output value exceeding 10 billion yuan.

In the industrial-style trendy toy theme exhibition hall, the robotic arm accurately demonstrates the precision injection molding process; in the open design workshop, designers sit around to discuss the detailed optimization of the IP image; in the live broadcast base, the anchor displays limited blind boxes in front of the camera; in the trendy toy theme hotels and trendy toy cafes, the tourists are crowded with... Building a "full industrial chain innovation ecosystem", Shipai Town continues to innovate and explore.

Now, Shipai Town is the town and street with the largest number of trendy toy companies and independent brands in Dongguan. In 2023, the "China Trendy Toy Capital·Trendy Toy Center" built with an investment of more than 100 million yuan will be launched. Within 5 square kilometers of its surrounding area, it can efficiently meet the full chain needs of "design-proofing-production-sales".

At present, the local government is making every effort to build a trendy toy AI design and proofing center, making it possible to "complete proofing in 48 hours and enter mass production in 72 hours", with a 20% increase in production efficiency and a 20-day average product production cycle.

It’s not just this small town that has changed.

In Dongguan, trendy toy elements can be seen everywhere in basketball courts, buses, music festival stages, and exhibitions, and a mature cross-industry linkage model is gradually built.

Trendy toy industrial bases with towns such as Shipai, Qingxi, Fenggang, and Chashan as key areas have been formed, and each town has its own characteristics. As of 2024, Dongguan has more than 4,000 toy manufacturers and nearly 1,500 supporting enterprises.

With trendy toys, Eastern culture is "breaking the circle" and going out to sea.

Around the "Nezha" that has been very popular this year, the "bingdundun" of the Beijing Winter Olympics mascot that was "hard to find" in the past few years, the mascot of Chengdu Universiade "Rongbao", the mascot of Hangzhou Asian Games "Jiangnan Yi", and the "Auspicious Dragon" who followed astronauts to board the Chinese space station... These trendy toys "made in Dongguan" have entered the lives of "players" around the world, collided with local culture to create creative sparks, and became a bridge for the exchange of Chinese culture and world culture.

For more than 40 years, from "manufacturing" to "intelligent manufacturing" and then to "creation".

At present, one-quarter of the world's animation derivatives are made in Dongguan, and nearly 85% of my country's trendy toys are produced in Dongguan. In 2024, Dongguan City's toy exports exceeded 23 billion yuan and was sold to more than 110 countries and regions.