Australia has spent the past few years learning to shop by collectable. Labubus arrived sealed in blind boxes, Kmart sells Kuma Paw characters with seven designs and an ultra-rare glow-in-the-dark variant, and this winter Woolworths revived Disney Ooshies with 40 characters to find. Now beauty wants in. Adam and Sally Minto have built the idea into Trouble Maker, their new cosmetics brand aimed at “Gen Zalpha”. But importing the thrill of the hunt into the beauty aisle also imports a sales m
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Australia has spent the past few years learning to shop by collectable. Labubus arrived sealed in blind boxes, Kmart sells Kuma Paw characters with seven designs and an ultra-rare glow-in-the-dark variant, and this winter Woolworths revived Disney Ooshies with 40 characters to find. Now beauty wants in. Adam and Sally Minto have built the idea into Trouble Maker, their new cosmetics brand aimed at “Gen Zalpha”. But importing the thrill of the hunt into the beauty aisle also imports a sales model built around repetition, uncertainty and the desire to keep buying – along with the waste produced when the hunt is over. Trouble Maker’s Feral Teddy lip gloss costs $7, comes in nine possible shades and withholds the identity of each one until the bag is opened. Target’s product page calls the experience a “game of chance”, inviting customers to collect the set or trade. In Kmart, the merchandising has gone further. “The stands in Kmart are the first globally to have a full wall of Feral Teddy mystery bag lip glosses,” Adam Minto, co-founder of Trouble Maker, told Inside Retail. Adam and his wife, Sally Minto, are seasoned operators in mass-market beauty. Adam co-founded Revolution Beauty in 2014, building an accessible cosmetics company that reached 75 markets, while the pair launched Trouble Maker in Britain in August last year, and now in Australia last month. Their timing intersects with the larger retail phenomenon of collecting. Dubbed “blind boxes”, the lucky-dip style packages work because shoppers never quite know what they’re getting. One sealed box contains one design from a larger set, with duplicates, rare finds and missing characters turning a simple purchase into a hunt. Pop Mart has built an empire around the format. The Monsters, the family home to Labubu, generated over $800 million in revenue during the first half of 2026 alone.Viral TikTok make up brand P. Louise’s Australian website currently devotes an entire category to makeup mystery boxes. The brand explicitly sells the “thrill of a blind box”. Kmart’s Dr. PawPaw’s banana and cherry balms arrive with what the retailer describes as “collectable charms.” Prestige beauty has reached a similar destination, albeit by a more expensive route. Marc Jacobs Beauty returned this year with packaging designed by Jacobs around oversized daisies, stars and hearts. Coty, which relaunched the line in partnership with Marc Jacobs, describes the products themselves as “collectable objects”. In Korean beauty, Laneige has paired its Glaze Craze lip serums with doughnut keychains.Collectables manufacture reasons to browse and the psychology gets interesting because collecting is rarely just about having the thing. A good part of the pleasure comes from the hunt and the anticipation, and blind boxes bottle that feeling particularly well. As University of Sydney consumer psychologist Dr Christina Anthony has put it, “It’s an emotional lottery similar to what gamblers experience when they’re chasing the next win.” The environmental cost Blind boxes are designed around repetition, the thrill of the unknown, the hope of finding the missing character and the irritation of another duplicate. That can mean buying ten objects to get the one you want, at exactly the moment social media is compressing trend cycles and encouraging brands to manufacture quickly. Around 80 per cent of all box toys are eventually estimated to end up in landfill or incineration, and in 2023, Funko recorded a US$30.3 million inventory write-down under a stock-reduction program that included physically destroying excess products. For the Mintos, the first measure will be whether that appetite survives beyond novelty. “We know this is a category defining a new brand for a generation so we are excited to see how much viral Trouble we can cause in Australia,” Adam said. “Everyone will be talking about our mystery bags, packaging and amazing formulas!” The bravado fits a brand built around “troublemaking”, and the retail experiment is worth watching. Collectables have already persuaded shoppers to chase monsters, figurines and miniature Disney characters. If beauty can persuade shoppers to buy another lip gloss before the first is finished, the blind-box boom may have found a lucrative new market, and another reason to ask what all that wanting ultimately costs.
