RMS USA's Mystery Dumpling bet: $1 squishy blind boxes, 40M sold, licensing next

Mystery Squishy Dumplings are the collectible craze RMS USA turned into a mass-market phenomenon: slow-rise squishy toys sealed in miniature bamboo-steamer blind boxes, roughly $1 for mini versions and $4.99 for the standard size, with rare golden dumplings and limited editions inside. The product is built to be filmed — every open is a surprise and every squeeze makes the ASMR sound that powered the trend on TikTok and YouTube.

The videos came first: The Toy Book reported more than 500M TikTok viewers in the first phase of influencer unboxings in 2025, and CNBC began calling the toy the successor to Labubu. Demand then hit mass retail, where stock sold out within about an hour at Five Below, Target, Walmart and Amazon and Five Below limited customers to three dumplings per day in spring 2026. RMS kept the chase alive with drops like the Golden Ticket Edition, launched at Five Below on 2026-05-16, whose one ultra-rare gold dumpling hid a ticket for a $1,000 shopping spree.

By August 2026 RMS reported more than 40 million units sold worldwide and billions of social-media views. The company, a North Andover, Massachusetts toy maker with 40+ years in the business, responded by treating the toy as a brand rather than a fad: on 2026-08-04 it signed Earthbound Brands as exclusive licensing agency to expand into apparel, home, food, entertainment and publishing. Whether a toy craze converts into an evergreen franchise is the open question of its next phase.