How Kickomi began

Sonny Angel in Thailand

I was in Bangkok. A friend messaged me with a request:

“You're in Japan, buy me a Sonny Angel.”

First of all, I wasn't in Japan any more — I was in Thailand. Second, I had no idea what a Sonny Angel was.

I googled it. Up came photos of tiny naked figures in little hats: a strawberry, a carrot, a little fruit on the head. Pastel, odd, sweet in a way that didn't fit anything I knew. “Okay,” I thought, “if someone wants this, I'll try to find it.”

Three days of searching. Sold out everywhere.

Finally I found a little shop in one of Bangkok's malls with a strange rule: you had to spend at least PLN 50 on other things before you were allowed to buy one Sonny Angel. A classic scarcity mechanic, which of course I didn't have a name for back then — I just knew it was absurd and that I had to do it, because I'd promised.

I walked into that shop. And I saw a whole shelf of sweet, strange little creatures I'd never seen in my life. Sonny Angels, some Smiski, other brands I didn't know at all.

I bought a Sonny Angel for my friend. I bought a few for myself too. I didn't understand why — I just wanted to.

I didn't know yet that this was called art toys. I didn't know it was a global market worth tens of billions of dollars a year. I didn't know that a year later I'd be running a shop in Poland.

Labubu and my English teacher from Malaysia

Five months later. All I had left from Thailand were pastel creatures on a shelf and the memory of an absurd shop. Life went back to normal — I was working, living in Wrocław, and twice a week I had English lessons with a teacher from Malaysia.

One day, mid-conversation, she says to me:

“You know, those Labubu are so ugly. I don't understand why people carry them around.”

I didn't know Labubu. I googled it. I look: little creatures with nine sharp teeth, fur, huge eyes. Ugly? Maybe. Hypnotic? Yes. “If people in Malaysia don't get it but carry them anyway,” I thought, “that means there's demand. I'll bring a few to Poland. Maybe they'll sell.”

I listed the first ones on Vinted. They sold in a day.

I restocked on Allegro. They sold there too.

I looked at it and thought: wait, what's going on here. Because it wasn't that I'd sold one figure and been proven right. It was that every piece I listed found a buyer within a few hours.

I started driving to the Netherlands for morning drops. Leaving in the evening, sleeping in the car in the middle of the night and hitting the drop in the morning. A tight schedule, because I was finishing my master's degree at the same time. I started importing more IPs — not just Labubu, but Skullpanda, Hirono, Crybaby. I tested what worked, what sold, what stayed on the shelf.

It was classic reselling. Arbitrage: buy where it's cheaper; sell where it's pricier. Work, but work that was suddenly bringing in decent money.

I still wasn't a collector. I still didn't look at these things as art. To me they were a product.

On a plane to Asia again

I pack a backpack for four months. The plan was simple: I travel around Asia, run the business remotely, and my sister ships the parcels in Poland.

The first weeks went by the book. Sales keep coming in, Ksenia prints the labels, customers receive their orders within 24–48h. I hop from café to café and answer messages from my phone.

Until at some point sales drop off.

It hurt. Everyone in Poland who wanted a Labubu already had one — the hype had passed, the first wave had evaporated, and there was no second one. A classic reseller bubble: you jump on a hot product, have some good weeks, then the market saturates and you're left with stock.

I should have been stressed. But I noticed something strange then: the interest in the subject itself was still there. People messaged me with questions, scrolled the range, added things to their watchlists. It wasn't about Labubu specifically. It was about collecting.

And that was the first crack in my reseller mindset.

River City

One day in Bangkok I ended up at River City — a multi-storey art gallery in the old part of the city. I went there for antiques, because back then I collected old objects; I like poking my fingers into the past.

I found the antiques. But next to the antiques, in the same gallery, on the same floors, stood things you'll never see in Polish galleries.

Pokémon cards in display cases like exhibits. Illustrations that looked like a child's drawings — deliberately, consciously, as part of a solo exhibition. Art toys next to classical sculptures. Local artists whose first works hung next to works by masters. Everything side by side, everything treated as equally valid art.

There was no “high / low” hierarchy. No gallery for “serious art” and a separate shop for “trinkets”. Everything lived in one space.

I stood there and thought: f*ck, why don't we have this in Poland?

Small art for everyone

I graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts. All my life I'd thought about high art — gallery art, institutional, out of reach. Art you look at in museums, buy at auctions, read about in catalogues.

But in Bangkok, in River City, in the little shops on Sukhumvit, I saw a completely different model. Art that costs PLN 80, 150, 300. Art that people buy for their own homes, for a shelf, for a desk. Not for a museum. Not for a gallery. For their own lives.

It wasn't an aesthetic discovery — aesthetically, I'd liked these figures for a long time — but a structural one. I saw that there's a whole category of art that the Polish market barely knows as art. It knows it as “toys for adults”, “TikTok weirdness”, “a craze for Chinese figurines”. But not as an artistic category.

And these are artists. Kasing Lung, who created Labubu — an independent illustrator from Hong Kong who grew up on Nordic fairy tales; his art has its own philosophy. Xiong Miao, the creator of Skullpanda — narrative series, visually powerful, each collection like a separate exhibition. Hirono — the figure of a child working through his emotions, each series a different chapter of the story.

All of this is art. Just on a different scale, in a different medium, distributed differently.

And that's when, in Malaysia, I decided: to hell with being a reseller. I want to build a brand. I want to bring this small art for everyone to Poland. I want to talk about it, write about it, explain it — so that people know that what they're buying has an author, has context, has meaning.

It wasn't meant to be a shop. It was meant to be a medium.

The name: Kickomi

I came up with it that same day in Malaysia, sitting over my laptop.

Kick — because before I sold figures, I sold shoes. Kicks is slang for sneakers; I sold them online for a few years. It was my first “business”. I put the word in out of nostalgia, so that something of the Kejt who was just starting out would stay with me.

Omi — an Asian softening. Something that adds warmth and sweetness to the sound. It fitted what I do now.

Kickomi — my two lives in one word. The Polish sneaker market and Asian art toys. The first and second parts of my career, joined phonetically.

That same evening I bought the domain.

The shop launches

The shop went live in December 2025, while I was still in Asia. Shopify setup, the first products, packaging, terms and conditions, returns policy — all from a phone and a laptop in a rented room. Ksenia packed the first parcels in Poland. I signed off the first orders from Bangkok. I answered the first customer messages on Polish time, six or seven time zones away.

It felt completely different from Vinted. Vinted was selling. Kickomi was building something with its own identity. Every product I listed had its own description. Every artist got their own page. Every parcel had its own signed card.

In January 2026 I came back to Poland. I opened the door to my flat, saw the boxes Ksenia had kept for me for four months, and understood there was no turning back.

What now

It's June 2026. Kickomi has been running for six months. It sells every day — Pop Mart, Labubu, Skullpanda, Hirono, Fugglers, Smiski, BE@RBRICK, Sonny Angel and a dozen or so other brands. I have ambassadors, a regular newsletter, a blog with artist profiles, and a TikTok where I talk about art toys as art — because that's what they are.

I say it often, but I want to say it here, in full, once and for all:

That's the whole story. From one message from a friend in 2024 to Kickomi in 2026. Unplanned. Not buried in a vision. Just — one step, then the next, then a decision in Malaysia.

If this story resonates with you — whether you have a collection of anything, or you wonder whether it's “silly” for a grown-up to buy figures, or you're looking for a place where these things are taken seriously — stay a while.