🌱 Singing Grass Insights | The Reverse Cultural Flow

Reverse Cultural Flow is Reshaping Global Consumer Culture

Recent coverage by the BBC points to a broader shift we’ve been tracking closely at Singing Grass: brands such as Labubu, Jellycat and Pokémon are no longer niche collectibles, but indicators of how Asian-origin creativity is increasingly shaping global consumer taste, emotional behaviour and purchasing decisions.

A telling example is UK plush brand Jellycat, which reportedly sold around $117 million worth of products to Chinese consumers in 2024 — a clear signal of how cultural influence and emotional attachment now travel in both directions.

We see this as part of a wider Emotional Economy, where Gen Z and Gen Alpha engage with IP through comfort, identity, humour and emotional resonance. What once predominantly flowed West → East is now increasingly moving East → West, reshaping retail, storytelling, licensing and brand strategy across markets.

At Singing Grass, we’re exploring how this reverse cultural flow will impact publishing, character IP, brand building and cross-market collaboration — and what organisations need to understand in order to respond with cultural intelligence rather than surface-level adaptation.

What This Means for Brands

• Emotion drives value. Products and IP succeed not through novelty alone, but through emotional clarity, comfort and symbolic meaning.

• Cultural influence is bidirectional. Asia is no longer just a growth market — it is increasingly a source of global cultural taste and aesthetics.

• IP travels faster than products. Characters, narratives and visual language scale across borders more effectively than functional offerings.

• Local insight is essential. Brands that rely on surface-level localisation risk missing the emotional logic that makes IP resonate across markets.