As Taipei prepares to host Creative Expo Taiwan next week, we are taking a closer look at how the island’s character IPs are developed, why they resonate so deeply with local audiences, and what international buyers need to understand before engaging.

On the eve of Creative Expo Taiwan, which opens in Taipei next week, we are turning our attention to an IP ecosystem that plays by a different set of rules than its regional neighbors in Asia.

Unlike many character IPs that have traveled outside Asia in the past, the majority of Taiwan’s most commercially successful characters were never built around anime, manga, or fully engineered fictional universes. Instead, they were born on social media, in messaging stickers, in illustrations shared on personal blogs, and in the direct, informal connection between independent creators and their audiences.

The analysis below draws on insights shared by Joseph Hung of APEX Creators Agency, a Taiwan-based agency at the center of this ecosystem, whose reading of the market offers international buyers and licensing professionals a working map of an industry often misunderstood from the outside.

The Peculiarities of Taiwanese IP

The first thing international buyers need to recalibrate is the definition of “IP” itself. In the Taiwanese context, it encompasses any distinct visual asset with strong audience recognition that can be commercialized, monetized, and licensed across platforms, regardless of whether a storyline backs it.

The scale of this recognition is not marginal. According to consumer research by TAICCA, seven in ten people in Taiwan can name at least one local character IP unprompted, more than nine in ten recognize one when shown it, and over half have purchased a Taiwanese character product within the past year. Those figures point to a market with genuine brand loyalty and purchasing behavior behind it, not a subculture running on novelty.

Three broad routes to IP identity dominate the landscape. Character-led IP centers on a well-defined personality, as seen in names like LAIMO or LAN LAN CAT.

Creator-led visual IP grows in tandem with the creator’s own persona and artistic voice, exemplified by figures such as i’m mark and DUNCAN, where the line between the artist’s brand and the character’s brand is porous by design. A third path, which might be called product-first IP, builds value through tangible goods, pop-up markets, street art, and premium collaborations rather than through content consumption at all — the DUMPLING CAT FAMILY and BOUNCE are cited as examples.

What unites these routes is that very few of them start with a long-form story. Most grow instead from an image, an emotional register, or a specific context of daily use — and only later, once the visual language becomes recognizable in its own right, does the character become a scalable, licensable commercial asset. Moreover, there is no hierarchy among them, or what performs better than another. They are simply different ways Taiwanese IPs are developed.

How Taiwanese IPs Rise: A Platform-by-Platform Evolution

The trajectory of a Taiwanese character IP tends to trace the evolution of the platforms Taiwanese consumers have used to communicate over the past two decades, which Hung frames as five successive waves of growth.

• Early internet emoticons and MSN-era expressions, in which characters first functioned as tools for articulating emotion rather than as vehicles for narrative.
• Blog-native comics, which introduced serialized readership and turned characters into dynamic narrators of workplace humor, campus life, and social observation.
• Facebook and social amplification, which scaled both character-led and creator-led IP to mass recognition — often converting a creator’s personal following into a standalone visual brand.
• The LINE sticker boom, which shifted characters from something audiences watched to something they actively used to communicate. Success here is measured less by charm than by a character’s ability to speak on the user’s behalf.
• Market-born, product-first IP, which bypasses content exposure altogether and builds recognition through pop-ups, retail touchpoints, and collectible goods before expanding into a wider ecosystem.

One case history stands out as a reference point for the sector’s ceiling. Bugcat Capoo has evolved from a digital sticker character into a mature, cross-wave retail brand, spanning content, merchandise, standalone retail, experiential exhibitions, and international brand collaborations. Taken together, these dynamics give Taiwanese IP a distinctive profile: agile development, cultural responsiveness, aesthetic diversity that ranges from cute to quirky, flexible collaboration structures, and a strong sense of approachability.

How International Buyers and Professionals Should Approach Them

For international licensing executives and buyers entering the Taiwanese market, there are some aspects to take into mind. As mentioned in other articles focused on the Asian market, it is crucial also for the IPs coming from this region the willingness to co-build and scale the market together; a preference for sustainable brand equity over short-term profit; deep and localized insight into channels and consumers and project how they could perform in other regions; last but not least a focus on building trust through realistic, actionable milestones.

Trust itself is earned through specific behaviours: demonstrating a genuine understanding of a character’s emotional core, presenting a full growth roadmap rather than a single transactional offer, clearly outlining local distribution and marketing assets, proactively bridging language and communication gaps, and respecting the creator’s artistic integrity while still working within commercial timelines — an approach that according to us applies broadly across Asian IP relationships, not only in Taiwan.