China Online Fuse-Bead Sales Hit CN¥ 1.57 Billion in a Year
By Jotham Lim
10 min read
China's online fuse-bead sales rose from CN¥ 81 million in the year to August 2025 to CN¥ 1.57 billion in the year to August 2026 across three of China's largest marketplaces, according to Moojing Market Intelligence, and the craze sits inside a wider craft and hobby economy whose five measured products grew +116% like for like while toys as a whole fell 7%.
This article covers the second chapter of the full report, China's Analogue Economy, which looks at the craft and hobby products that grew while toys fell, at the fuse-bead boom and the bead cafés it produced, and at five explanations for why the boom happened.
Key figures
- CN¥ 1.57 billion: online fuse-bead sales, September 2025 to August 2026, from CN¥ 81 million the year before
- 94.0 million: fuse-bead units sold in the same twelve months, from 4.9 million
- +116%: like-for-like sales growth of five craft and hobby products, against −7% for toys as a whole
- About 230,000: posts about bead cafés (拼豆店) in the latest year, from about 4,000
Method and scope: observed online sales across three of China's largest marketplaces, September 2023 to August 2026, from Moojing Market Intelligence; not the total market, because physical stores and several minor marketplaces are not included. Growth rates are like for like.
Which craft and hobby products are growing in China?#
Fuse beads, yarn and jigsaw puzzles all grew far faster online than the categories that hold them in the year to August 2026, according to Moojing Market Intelligence, while two older crafts, cross-stitch and paint-by-numbers, declined, which we read as consumers moving towards particular hobbies, with no sign of a general revival of craft.
Exhibit 4. Source: Moojing Market Intelligence, observed marketplace data across three online marketplaces, September 2025 to August 2026 against September 2024 to August 2025, like for like. * Jigsaw puzzles on two marketplaces, because the third has no comparable category. The fuse-bead bar is cut at the axis edge. Not the total market.
The five craft and hobby products (fuse beads, yarn, jigsaw puzzles, cross-stitch and paint-by-numbers) came to about CN¥ 3.9 billion in the latest year, against about CN¥ 70 billion for toys across the three marketplaces, so crafts and hobbies are still a small part of the shelf, although they are the part that is growing. Fuse beads account for most of the growth, but yarn grew +65% and jigsaw puzzles +40%, and the other four products together grew +36%, while paint-by-numbers fell 23% and cross-stitch 9%.
How big are fuse-bead sales in China?#
Online fuse-bead sales across the three marketplaces were CN¥ 22 million in the year to August 2024, CN¥ 81 million in the year to August 2025 and CN¥ 1.57 billion in the year to August 2026, about nineteenfold on the annual totals and about sixteenfold like for like, according to Moojing Market Intelligence.
Fuse beads (拼豆) are small plastic beads arranged on a pegboard into a pixel picture and then fused with an iron, a craft that began in Sweden in the 1960s as occupational therapy and spent four decades as a children's toy. The number of units sold went from 4.9 million to 94.0 million, while the annual average price was between CN¥ 16 and CN¥ 17 a unit in both of the last two years, so the growth came from volume, with beads bought cheaply and often. Moojing's figure for calendar 2025, about CN¥ 290 million, was reported by China Daily and others in 2026, and our online figure for the latest year exceeds the Yiwu Index estimate of about CN¥ 1 billion for the whole domestic market, online and offline, although the two cover different periods and use different methods.
Exhibit 5. Source: Moojing Market Intelligence, observed marketplace data across three online marketplaces (top), sales of products whose titles mention 拼豆 within the toy and stationery categories; social listening on three social platforms (bottom), from September 2024. The dip in March and April 2026 reflects one marketplace moving part of its toy range into a new category, and the May 2026 peak in posts is inflated by a one-off surge on one platform. Not the total market.
Sales took off in the autumn of 2025, reached a first peak in January and February 2026, during the winter school holiday, and climbed to a new high of CN¥ 237 million in July 2026. Content-led commerce, the marketplaces where demand is generated by creator content, sold almost no fuse beads two years ago and carried 36% of the latest year's sales, 46% of the July peak and more than half of August's.
Where do people bead in China?#
The sharpest change in the fuse-bead conversation is in where the beading happens, since posts mentioning 拼豆店, the bead café or beading studio where customers pay by the hour for a table, a pegboard and an iron, went from about 4,000 in the year to August 2025 to about 230,000 in the year to August 2026.
Leaving out the platform with a one-month surge in May, the posts on the other two went from about 900 to about 150,000, and they describe people spending whole afternoons in a shop, shop owners documenting their first week and parents treating a bead café as an outing. Meituan, the local-services platform, reported that searches for fuse beads in 2026 were running at more than ten times the previous year's level, and the business registry Tianyancha counted more than 2,500 companies connected to fuse beads by June 2026, nearly nine in ten of them set up in the previous six months, while by August one shop owner in Zhejiang told local reporters that the price of the shop's all-day package had halved within two months. Our marketplace data cover no physical shops, so the bead café is the one part of the report we can see only through conversation, and we believe a growing share of spending on the craft now happens where online sales data cannot see it.
Why did fuse beads boom in China?#
We weighed five explanations against our own data and two years of Chinese reporting, that fuse beads are fan merchandise, a children's holiday toy, a platform push, a cheap treat in a weak economy, or a product of cheap supply, and we believe each explains part of the boom at a different stage, while the evidence for screen fatigue as a motive is real but thinner.
| Explanation | What supports it | What weighs against it | Our reading |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fan merchandise | Searches up more than twentyfold after a drama actor's promotion in November 2024, when content-led sales jumped; 66% of students bead a favourite image | Sales ran at CN¥ 3 million to CN¥ 7 million a month in the fan phase; the mass phase came later, at lower prices | Started the boom |
| Children's holiday toy | Sales peak in the school holidays; shops depend on them; the regulator treats kits as toys | Sales in May and June 2026 matched the winter peak; more than half of posters on one of the large social platforms are under 31 | Shapes the peaks, above all in the shops |
| Platform push | Campaigns, contests and a convention; content-led commerce took a rising share of sales | Searches rose before the campaigns; the established marketplaces grew about thirteenfold on their own | Added to existing demand |
| Cheap treat | A steady price of about CN¥ 16 a unit; the press calls beads an emotional-economy substitute | No trading down within the category; no report tests it | Describes the price point |
| Cheap supply | Factories scaled up; heat presses at about CN¥ 550; cafés open for under CN¥ 50,000 | Orders came before capacity; online sales reached a new high in July 2026 | Behind the shop boom and its price war |
| Screen fatigue | Beaders tell reporters it lets them put the phone down | No survey offers it as a reason; the craft runs on apps and short video | A smaller motive |
Exhibit 7. Source: Moojing Market Intelligence, observed marketplace data across three online marketplaces, September 2023 to August 2026, and social listening, September 2024 to August 2026; Chinese press reporting from December 2024 to September 2026, cited in the full report. Sales are not the total market.
The fan explanation has the best-dated start, since the Ningbo Evening News reported in December 2024 that searches for fuse beads on one large marketplace had risen more than twentyfold after an actor from the fantasy drama 《永夜星河》 showed bead figures of its characters at a promotional event, and in a China Youth Daily survey of 1,669 students in March 2026 the most common reason the beading fans among them gave, at 66%, was turning a favourite image into an object. Fandom cannot account for the scale of what followed, though, because in the drama-merchandise months, from November 2024 to April 2025, sales ran at CN¥ 3 million to CN¥ 7 million a month, and the boom that took off in the autumn of 2025 came at an average price that had fallen from between CN¥ 21 and CN¥ 29 a unit to between CN¥ 13 and CN¥ 19, which looks more like cheap materials bought in bulk than like licensed merchandise.
The two established marketplaces, where demand comes from search, grew about thirteenfold on their own in the latest year, while content-led commerce took a rising share of sales, from 14% in September 2025 to 53% in August 2026, and since the curve was already rising before the platforms' campaigns began, we read those campaigns as adding to a demand that already existed. Shops that were cheap to open multiplied faster than their customers, which is the price war the bead cafés are now in, but online sales of the materials reached a new high in July 2026, so the bust, so far, is in the shops. Screen fatigue plays a smaller part, best understood as a wish for time spent on one thing with the hands, since the only large survey of motives, China Youth Daily's, reported no such reason, and its nearest, focus or relaxation, came a close second at 65%.
Are other crafts growing in China?#
Yarn is the larger and the steadier story, with online sales of products whose titles mention 毛线 (yarn) growing +64% across the three marketplaces in the year to August 2025 and +65% like for like in the year to August 2026, when units rose +46%, according to Moojing Market Intelligence, while jigsaw puzzles grew +40% on two of the three marketplaces.
China News Service has reported crochet cafés and knitting meet-ups in Shanghai, Hangzhou and Chengdu, and diorama sticker sets (造景贴纸), the scene-building sticker books that China Daily reported in May as a stress-relief craft, have no category of their own in the marketplace data, but their conversation more than doubled, to about 330,000 posts. For brands, we believe the lesson of the chapter is that China's analogue turn is a craft and hobby economy, in which the growth is in materials and projects that customers buy again, and the report's fifth chapter, which our article on four moves for brands summarises, sets out what that means in practice. The bead cafés, the journals and the retro devices are all in the full report, with its method and every exhibit, and our earlier China toy industry report gives the wider toy category for context.
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