Source: Radio New Zealand
Amid anemic consumer spending, some businesses are turning to novel ways of selling goods in mystery packages to boost sales.
Colloquially called “blind boxes”, the packages hide the contents so that consumers don’t know exactly what they’re buying.
It’s a concept with origins that can be traced back to Asia, with businesses stocking Asian goods among the adopters.
Chinese toy store Pop Mart immediately springs to mind, having made waves this year by stocking blind boxes of celebrity “ugly-cute” characters Labubu and, more recently, Twinkle Twinkle.
On social media, consumers have been sharing images of blind box meals they ordered from a couple of leftover-saving apps that launched in New Zealand last month.
Businesses have been selling clothes, jewellery and desserts in blind boxes, with one Auckland restaurant also providing mystery menus.
Eva Lian showcases her blind box desserts. RNZ / Yiting Lin
Auckland’s Fluffy Monsta Cakery has been selling blind box desserts for more than two years.
Their blind box sale every two weeks was so popular that many customers missed out if they failed to put their names down fast enough when orders were placed in the bakery’s WeChat group.
“We opened the orders on Monday at 8pm and closed them at 8:50pm,” said Eva Lian, the cakery’s founder.
“We got 400 orders in just 50 minutes,” she said.
“Had we left the queue open for longer, there would have been more orders, but we simply couldn’t handle any more than that.”
Auckland’s Fluffy Monsta Cakery in Burswood, East Auckland RNZ / Yiting Lin
The cakery typically offered a few flavour categories for consumers to choose from, including fresh fruit, durian, pork floss, taro and chocolate, but customers wouldn’t know what was inside the dessert box.
For example, a durian-themed blind box would contain four different pieces of dessert, all containing durian, but people won’t know what the specific items were, Lian said.
“Our goal is for customers to feel genuinely surprised when they open a blind box, with everything fresh and delicious,” she said.
“The thrill that comes from uncertainty” also prompted the purchase, she said.
“For families with children, there’s the added joy of wondering what type of blind box will arrive. This element of unpredictability makes the experience even more exciting.”
Gone Good allows people to grab mystery bags of unsold food at a low price. Supplied
Gone Good is one of the two apps available in New Zealand that allow consumers to grab mystery bags of unsold food at low prices.
General Manager Quinn Davis said the business had been “blown away by the response” after its launch in Auckland.
“The Auckland community embraced the concept immediately,” Davis said.
“We sold out on our second day of operations, reached number one in the App Store for Food & Drink and have had strong interest from other regions eager for us to launch there,” he said.
The idea wasn’t new, with a conceptually similar app named Too Good To Go proving popular internationally after starting in Denmark in 2015.
“The mystery box concept makes food rescue fun and effortless,” Davis said.
“Customers get the thrill of a surprise meal at a great price, while stores save time by not having to list or set aside exact items,” he said.
“It also ensures the platform stays true to its purpose – reducing real surplus rather than curating menus.”
Auckland woman Tiki Jiang and part of her Labubu and Twinkle Twinkle collections. Supplied
Auckland woman Tiki Jiang was among many who fell in love with blind box toys when Pop Mart’s Labubu went viral earlier this year.
Jiang now owns more than 20 of the “ugly-cute” plushy toys.
“Sometimes the official website would release new products without any notice, so back then I’d check Pop Mart’s official website every day on my phone, constantly refreshing it,” she said.
“Sometimes you’d get lucky and catch a new release.”
One of Tiki Jiang’s Twinkle Twinkle collections. Supplied
Several months later, Jiang discovered a new favourite Pop Mart character – the unconventional Twinkle Twinkle toy.
“I would always buy a whole tray of them,” Jiang said, explaining that a full set contained nine or 12 different designs depending on which generation of the toy people were getting.
Enthusiasts typically buy whole trays to increase the chance of collecting all the designs.
It’s common for a tray to include repeated designs, but Jiang managed to collect almost a full set of the first four generations of Twinkle Twinkle – spending more than $1000 in the process.
Jiang said she didn’t care enough to try to secure the only design in the series that was missing from one of the sets as she was not as frantic as she used to be.
“I think these [blind box toys] aren’t as popular as they used to be,” she said.
“Looking back, I honestly don’t know what I was thinking,” she said.
“I felt silly. Why was I refreshing the page all the time for that? Such a waste of time … I have passed that phase now.”
Dishes served as part of a $68 blind box menu at Auckland’s 81st Floor Restaurant. Supplied / Vivian Peng
Chinese diners have been sharing their experience at Auckland’s 81st Floor Restaurant, which offers mystery menus for a set price, on social media platform RedNote.
For $68 or $88, customers can order an assortment of Chinese dishes without knowing beforehand what they will receive.
RedNote user Pang Pang Da said they would visit the restaurant again after being impressed by the taste of the dishes served as part of the $88 package.
However, diner Vivian Peng was disappointed with the restaurant’s $68 package, which is designed for two or three people.
Although she felt the portions were large enough, Peng expected the dishes to be better in quality.
“If it was before, I would have thought it was good value for money,” she said.
“But the hospitality industry is tough now – competition is intense – so my expectations for something to be both affordable and high quality have gone up. That’s why I felt a little disappointed,” she said.
“People naturally come with a sense of anticipation with blind boxes. It’s different from regular products, where you know exactly what you’re getting and what the price is.
“With blind boxes, businesses can easily end up putting in a lot of effort without getting much appreciation in return.
“If a customer has high expectations, or if that day’s blind box isn’t as good as the items they have seen in other people’s social media posts – since the dishes change every day – they might feel a bit disappointed.”
The restaurant did not respond to RNZ’s request for comment.
Michael Lee, director of MBA in Marketing at the University of Auckland Supplied
Michael Lee, director of MBA in Marketing at the University of Auckland, said blind box experiences were believed to have started in Japan in the 1960s as a way for retailers to sell unsold products.
Retailers in Japan traditionally sell such sealed “lucky bags” of mystery products at a significant discount over the new year period.
“But the idea of a surprise has been around since humans started giving each other surprise gifts,” Lee said.
He said any product where customers buy a package without knowing exactly what they’ll get but were motivated by the excitement of the surprise fell into the category of a blind box.
Collectible sports cards, Kinder Surprise eggs or the small toys tucked inside cereal boxes were some examples, he said.
“The main driver is the element of surprise,” Lee said. “People love to be surprised, provided the surprise is a good one.”
He said another aspect of consumer psychology that would affect the success or failure of blind boxes was “expectation disconfirmation theory”, which turns on whether people’s expectations are confirmed or not.
If people received worse than they expected, it would lead to dissatisfaction, and vice versa, he said.
Lee believed blind box sales would be rare as New Zealand was a low-wage economy, and consumers would most likely want to know what they were buying.
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand