Longgang’s Billion-Dollar Anime Merch Empire

Longgang in Zhejiang started as a small fishing village with fewer than 5,000 residents and now has a permanent population of 480,000. Its turnaround has been driven entirely by the printing and packaging industry, which supports a market valued at tens of billions. About one in three people here makes a living from printing, and the blind boxes, badges, milk tea cups, and anime merchandise you see everywhere are very likely printed right there.

To go from a coastal village surviving on the sea to a national hub for packaging and printing is no small feat. Clearly, the cost advantage of a concentrated supply chain is striking—only by moving large volumes can you squeeze out profits. On a related note, this kind of industrial cluster model also shows up in Yiwu’s small commodities sector, though Longgang has bet specifically on the more niche figures-and-merchandise track.

To extend the point: Longgang’s success is fundamentally the result of its packaging and printing industry moving up the value chain from traditional gift boxes into high-margin cultural and creative peripherals. The city boasts a complete industrial chain, with design, printing, and post-processing steps such as hot stamping and die-cutting all completed within an extremely short radius—a cost advantage that single-point factories simply can’t match. This model is highly replicable, but it depends heavily on fluctuations in downstream consumer markets, especially shifts in Gen Z aesthetics and IP licensing.

Original article: From a small fishing village of fewer than 5,000 people to a city leveraging anime printing to tap a multi-billion market, what did it get right?