My local Walmart has a Labubu lock-up case now, the kind with a clerk you have to flag down and an unspoken expectation that you'll buy in cash. The plush figures arrived in May, sold out in three weeks, came back in late June, and sold out again. NPR ran an explainer earlier this month that ended with the line that has stuck with me: It is not exactly cute, but it is exactly cute enough. Most coverage has filed Labubu under collectibles, or Gen Z disposable income, or Pop Mart's marketing. I want to file it somewhere else. I think Labubu is the most important pet-naming signal of 2025, and almost nobody is reading it that way.
What ugly-cute means in a pet-name context
For at least fifteen years, U.S. pet naming has been governed by a soft consensus: the dog or cat should have a name that is small, melodic, two syllables, and reads as adorable to strangers. Bella, Charlie, Luna, Daisy, Milo, Lucy, Max. The name should announce that you are a person who loves your animal, that you are in on the cultural joke that pets have human names now, and that the animal in question is a pleasant addition to your apartment. This is the Bella consensus, and it is so strong that it survived the entire decade of Instagram, the rise of pet influencers, the pandemic adoption boom, and the post-pandemic recalibration. NYC's dog licensing data and Seattle's pet license data, which I work with regularly, show Bella, Luna, and Charlie in the top five every single year from 2017 through 2024.
What I've noticed in the 2025 partial-year data is small but, I think, real. Goblin appears in Seattle's licensing data 31 times in the first quarter of 2025 — up from 8 in all of 2023. Gremlin shows up 19 times. Mochi, which is not new but had been holding steady in the 200s of the most-popular list, jumps into the top 80. Dumpling appears 24 times. Snorlax — yes, Snorlax — shows up 11 times. None of these are anywhere near Bella's volume, and they will not be for years if ever. But they are not random. They share an aesthetic register, and that register is what Labubu is also selling.
Labubu is not cute. It is the rejection of cute.
The Labubu plushies, for anyone who hasn't seen them, are small forest creatures with too many teeth, off-symmetrical faces, and an expression that lands somewhere between a smile and the moment before a smile collapses. They were designed by Hong Kong-based artist Kasing Lung and licensed by Pop Mart. The whole point of the design is that it is not pleasant in the way Hello Kitty is pleasant or in the way a Squishmallow is pleasant. It has friction. The friction is the point. Owning a Labubu is, in a small way, a refusal of the symmetric, big-eyed, frictionless aesthetic that has dominated cute commerce for thirty years.
And what I think is happening in pet names is the same refusal, six months later. The first wave of millennials who built the Bella consensus are now in their late 30s and early 40s, and they have been picking that name for fifteen years. The second wave — Gen Z, who are adopting their first apartment pets right now — are not interested in the names their older sisters used. They have grown up with a sense that the perfectly engineered cute is suspicious, that algorithmic optimization has flattened a generation of design, and that the only honest aesthetic is one with something off about it. Goblin is honest in a way that Bella no longer is.
The pet-naming pipeline
I've written before about how pet names lag baby names by about six years and then overshoot. What I'm watching now is a slightly different pipeline: pet names lag aesthetic shifts in pop culture by about six months, and they overshoot in the direction of the new aesthetic. The Labubu wave hit retail in February and peaked in June. The names that share its register — small, weird, food-coded, slightly menacing-but-cute — are showing up in licensing data from June onward. By the time AKC publishes its 2025 numbers in October, I expect to see Mochi inside the top 20 dog names, possibly higher.
The food-coded names deserve a separate note. Mochi, Dumpling, Tofu, Bao, Mango, Pickle, and Olive have been climbing for years, but they were climbing in a different register — they read as cute in the same way Bella reads as cute. What's different in 2025 is that the food names being adopted are the ones with texture in them. Mochi works because mochi is squishy and slightly resistant. Dumpling works because dumplings are heavy and fold over themselves. Pickle works because pickles are sour. The food-name trend is migrating from sweet to umami, and that's an ugly-cute migration.
What this is not
I should be careful here. Pet-naming data is much messier than baby-naming data. Licensing rates vary by city — NYC requires licensing under the Health Code, Seattle requires it for dogs, but many cities don't enforce it at all, which means our public datasets are heavily skewed toward owners who comply with municipal rules. The Goblin dogs I'm counting may not be representative of all American dogs named in 2025. They are representative of the kind of person who licenses a dog in NYC or Seattle in 2025, which is a specific population. I would not bet a meaningful sum that Goblin will appear in AKC's top 50 by 2027. I would bet that Mochi and Dumpling will.
I'm also aware that aesthetic trends move faster than this analysis can keep up with. Labubu may be over by Christmas. The ugly-cute register may shift again into something more chaotic, or back toward symmetric cute, or sideways into something I haven't seen coming. The data I have is from the first half of 2025, and the inferences I'm drawing are inferences, not predictions.
Why this matters for naming culture
The reason I find this interesting, beyond the data, is that pet naming has historically been a leading indicator for cultural shifts that show up in human naming five to ten years later. The Bella consensus in pets, which solidified around 2010, predicted the Bella, Mia, and Luna wave in babies that arrived in 2015 through 2022. If the ugly-cute register holds, we should expect to see the first wave of slightly-off, slightly-textured human baby names by the early 2030s. They will not be Goblin. But they will share a sensibility — names that have a little resistance in them, names that don't read as algorithmically optimized, names that feel like they could have been chosen by a real person rather than an aesthetic trend report.
Which is, I suppose, the bigger story. The Bella consensus is ending. It will not end all at once, and it will not end for everyone. Bella will still be in the top five next year. But the next thing is already visible, and you can see it in the licensing records of two American cities and on the shelf of a Walmart that locks up small plush creatures with too many teeth.
Data source: NYC Dog Licensing Dataset + Seattle Pet Licenses. Analysis by NamesPop.
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