The short answer: Fridays. Pop Mart's new series overwhelmingly launch on Fridays, both on its own regional webstores and on its official AliExpress store. The longer answer — the one that decides whether you actually get the figure — is that a "Friday drop" is not one moment. It's a sequence of regional releases spread across the day, and knowing your slot matters more than knowing the date.
The Friday stagger, hour by hour
Pop Mart's official AliExpress store lists the same new series as separate regional listings, and our drop radar watches them go live every week. The pattern is consistent:
| Regional listing | Typical go-live (UK time) | Who it serves |
|---|---|---|
| EU-Excluded | ~3am | Ships to most of the world except the EU |
| EU | ~11am | EU delivery addresses |
| UK | ~1pm | UK delivery addresses |
Those are UK clock times (currently BST), and "Friday" is doing UK-centric work in that table: the 3am UK wave is still Thursday evening in the US (around 10pm Eastern), while in Singapore it lands at about 10am on Friday — and the UK wave reaches Singapore in the evening. Depending on where you live, "Friday drop" can mean Thursday night or Friday night. Individual launches can and do deviate, which is exactly why the release calendar exists — it shows the actual listings for each week's wave, per region, updated automatically.
Three practical consequences of the stagger:
- "It's sold out" and "it hasn't dropped yet" look identical at 9am. If you're in the UK and the series isn't there on Friday morning, your listing probably just hasn't gone live yet. Check the calendar before panicking.
- The regional listings are separate stock pools. The EU-Excluded listing selling out overnight says nothing about the UK listing at 1pm.
- Night owls have an edge they probably shouldn't use. The EU-Excluded listing goes live first, but check it actually ships to your address before celebrating — that's what the "excluded" means.
Pop Mart's own webstore
popmart.com regional stores (including popmart.com/uk) also release new series on Fridays, and popular IPs routinely sell out within hours there. The official webstore and the official AliExpress store are separate channels with separate stock — a sellout on one is not a sellout on the other, and prices differ once shipping is counted. Serious drop-day chasers watch both.
One more wrinkle: not every release appears on every regional Pop Mart webstore. If a new series you were expecting is nowhere on your region's popmart.com, it hasn't necessarily passed you by — check the official AliExpress store, which regularly carries drops that skip a regional webstore. The release calendar lists which listings actually exist for each wave.
Restocks: the schedule that doesn't exist
Launches follow the Friday pattern. Restocks don't follow any pattern at all — they appear when they appear, at any hour, any day. In one sample month (the 30 days to early July 2026) our radar logged 44 restocks across the hottest tracked items, and most sold out again within about half a day; the fastest was gone in under a minute.
That's not a rhythm you can watch for manually, which is the reason we built free drop and restock alerts — the radar does the watching, you get the ping.
So, when should you actually show up?
If you want a specific new series: know your region's Friday slot, be there a few minutes early, and have the calendar open for the real listing links. If you missed the drop: set an alert and let the radar catch the restock — 44 in a month means missing the launch is rarely the end of the story.
Drop times on this page are observed by Shelfd's automated radar, which polls Pop Mart's official AliExpress listings around the clock. Patterns described are current as of July 2026 and can change — the calendar always reflects what's actually listed.