Bubble Wrapp KC is more than just a midtown destination for the latest blind boxes targeted to discerning toy collectors, its owner shared. The space sits at the intersection of creativity, nostalgia and togetherness, she said, calling it a mission that’s always been bigger than selling novelties.
“We believe toys are art, collecting should be fun, and community is just as important as the toys themselves,” the store-runner known simply as Kitty told Startland News.
Bubble Wrapp, located at 3816 Main St., near the KC Streetcar line, is filled with blind boxes — sealed, limited-edition trinkets where the buyer doesn’t know exactly which design in a series they’re getting until they open it. The store also sells gachapon Japanese capsule toys with pieces dispensed randomly from coin-operated vending machines, designer toys, local art, plus “all things wonderfully weird,” noted Kitty, who initially started the business as an online retailer in early 2021 with her husband, Nate.
Both California natives, the couple also attend local conventions and host artist exhibitions and pop-ups, trading nights, workshops and other creative events.
Nate, an adjunct professor at the Kansas City Art Institute with a class in toy production, shares Kitty’s love of blind boxes and other art toys. They’ve been collecting for nearly 20 years, noted Kitty, which is a nickname given to her because of her love of Hello Kitty.
“In 2008, I wandered into an Urban Outfitters in Los Angeles and bought my very first Tokidoki Unicorno blind box,” she said. “It introduced me to an entirely new world of toys and sparked a passion that’s never left.”
“Neither of us ever outgrew the joy of toys or the creativity and design behind them,” she added. “We have a good knowledge about designers, the industry, price points, all of that.”
Their expertise includes familiarity with industry trends (“People are basically foaming at the mouth for Sonny Angels all the time,” Kitty noted), the life cycles of toy collectors (from blind boxes to larger figures from the same designer), and what draws people to certain collections and characters, especially Pop Mart’s always popular Hirono and SkullPanda.
The couple’s first physical store in Kansas City arrived nearly four years before big box retailer Target rolled out a similar concept this fall — a dedicated space inside their stores that’s separate from the traditional toy section and caters to adults in search of Pokemon, trading cards, Funko Pop! figures, blind boxes and collectible characters.
“What keeps Pop Mart products and characters so strong is that people build a connection with those characters, so they’re no longer just toys,” Kitty said, noting Bubble Wrapp is the only authorized Pop Mart retailer locally (other than the vending machine in Oak Park Mall).
SkullPanda blind boxes — made by Pop Mart — have long been one of Kitty’s favorites, for example, and the tie between her fandom to the character’s storyline keeps her coming back for more.
“She’s a little goth girl; I’m a little goth girl,” Kitty said. “She’s very cool. All of her outfits are cool. Her hair’s cool. I would say SkullPanda doesn’t have as strong of a storyline as, say, Hirono or Peach Riot or Crybaby. But for those of us girls who love fashion and beauty, it kind of doesn’t matter.”
And in an uncertain economy and political climate, buying one of these toys as an adult might be more about a little treat than just character connection. Blind boxes — and the rest of Bubble Wrapp’s offerings — are the epitome of treat culture, Kitty said.
“It doesn’t matter if the economy looks great or if it’s in the toilet, people are human and they’re still going to need something to lift their spirits,” she said. “So that’s when blind boxes and cups of coffee and lipstick come into play.”
Barbie links to fashion, skin care
Kitty’s love of collecting toys started early with her obsession with Barbie, then Hello Kitty. For Nate, it was G.I. Joes, she said.
“My mom loves to tell the story of me ‘neglecting my baby dolls’ from a young age to play dress-up with my Barbies instead,” Kitty said. “I got my first Barbie (Totally Hair Barbie), I believe, when I was 4, and I was obsessed from that day on. It was only Barbies, only Barbie clothes, Barbie house, everything Barbie.”
She got hooked on Hello Kitty thanks to day trips to the mall with her aunt, she said.
“We’d go to Nordstrom and try on all the perfumes,” Kitty said. “And we would always go to Sanrio stores that they used to have, and she’d get me one of those little surprise bags. So my love of Hello Kitty grew because of her.”
Kitty’s love of Barbies led to her love of fashion magazines and styling, eventually leading her to attend the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in San Diego and to pursue a career in the fashion industry, she said.
She tried styling, visual merchandising and retail, but the “toxic” industry was too much for her.
“I’m a very soft emotional person as it is, but that was a lot for me,” Kitty said. “There was a lot of coming home and crying at the end of the day and all that. So it was just not healthy. It was my dream and my passion, but what I loved about it was just slowly being stripped away.”
Kitty felt lost at office jobs — along with a side hustle nannying for military families while Nate was stationed at Fort Riley — so she leaned into her love of esthetics and decided to become an esthetician, she said.
“I have always also had a passion for skincare and the science behind different products,” she said. “I had always been buying and trying different products on myself, even in my early 20s, which I shouldn’t have been because I was destroying my skin barrier. But it was fun.”
“I’ve always loved the intimate, person-to-person, relationship building of any job,” she added. “If you treat someone well and you build that relationship, they’re going to continue to come back to you and trust their skin with you.”
Listen to the universe
After working for a year as an esthetician and a move to Massachusetts for Nate’s job, life threw some surprise bags of its own at the couple, Kitty said. Their condo burned down and she suffered a stroke.
The stroke — a congenital heart defect, which they learned was caused by her patent foramen ovale, wherein a small flap between the upper chambers of the heart fails to close after birth — and the procedure to fix the heart defect left her unable to drive or work outside the house for a while.
“It was a double-whammy in terms of stress, life events, all of that,” Kitty said. “We had no family there, no friends, no one to lean on dealing with this.”
“My business and job as an esthetician just fell flat,” she added, “because it’s one of those skills where you need to be constantly using it and practicing it and building it. And it just wasn’t happening for a whole year.”
So to keep busy, make a little extra money and thin out their personal toy collection — in part to make room for new treasures, Kitty said — they launched an eBay store.
“Those toys sold and continued to sell,” she said. “And so Nate and I had a real conversation, and I was like, ‘Hey, this is actually doing fairly well. Should we make this like a legit business and turn it into an online store? We both love this stuff. We’ve been collecting it for 10 years. We know what we’re talking about. We know what people want to see. We know the trends because we follow them.’”
After doing some research, the duo launched their Bubble Wrapp online retail operation in early 2021, Kitty said, even getting some products directly from designers with whom they already had connections.
“The first night that we were officially open as Bubble Wrapp, we sold out of everything,” she said. “So that is, I feel, the universe telling you, ‘Hey, this is something I think you should focus on.’”
“Sometimes it’s not necessarily your passion or your dream or the thing you thought you were going to do,” she added. “But I/we have always had a passion for this. I’ve had all of these different careers in my life, and I’ve sort of just listened to the universe when it’s like time to move on to something new.”
‘We just kept getting pulled back to Kansas City’
The Bubble Wrapp online store continued to grow, Kitty said, especially as the COVID-19 pandemic led to more online shopping and the couple started streaming on Pop Shop Live.
“We had our first show on Halloween and we streamed for almost eight hours,” Kitty said. “We made great money that night. I don’t think we would ever be able to top that now, but it was time and place. Things like that really helped propel us forward and get us to an expedited point with which we could open a brick and mortar.”
The success of the online store also coincided with Kitty and Nate moving to Kansas City, a place they loved spending time in when they were stationed at Fort Riley, she said. Looking for a more affordable place to live and a home with less of a personal black cloud, they moved from Massachusetts in September 2021.
“We both felt like we needed that fresh start somewhere else,” Kitty said. “We just kept getting pulled back to Kansas City. And we also had some friends that were still here from back in the day. So that was also a bit of a comforting idea because, like I said, we knew no one in Massachusetts and that was really difficult.”
In October 2022 — about a year after moving to Kansas City and with the online store booming — the couple made the leap to their first brick-and-mortar space in midtown, less than half a mile from their current, much larger location.
“The community is great,” Kitty said. “There is a very strong art community here in Kansas City. Honestly, it can stand up to anywhere that we’ve lived, including California, where we’re from. That strong art community has propelled us forward and kept us going as a business here in Kansas City through everything (including the KC Streetcar expansion).”
At the end of 2025, Bubble Wrapp found out the lease for its Westport Road location would not be renewed, forcing the couple to find a new location. In April, they opened the doors to the store on Main Street, which is six times larger than the original shop and allows them to host more events.
“While the news was overwhelming at the time, it ultimately pushed us toward the larger space we’re currently in and had been dreaming about one day growing into,” Kitty said.
“We did well for those first couple weeks, and then the World Cup started,” she added. “The most detrimental thing to our business in the almost four years that we have been a brick and mortar has been the World Cup.”
With many of their regular customers being college students, Kitty said, many of them told her they were extending their summer breaks to avoid the traffic from the global event.
“There were days where I’m like, ‘Is anyone coming in?’” she added. “And we’d never experienced that.”
Creative gathering place
Once the World Cup and the thousands of soccer fans left town and the students came back for the fall semester, business picked back up, Kitty said. Now she’s working on filling up the new, larger space, she said, expanding with more stationary, prints, washi tape and Bubble Wrapp merch.
The store is also busy with events. Since opening the new location, Bubble Wrapp has played host to multiple blind box trading nights, junk journal events and artist pop-ups.
Supporting local artists is one of the couple’s top priorities, Kitty said.
“They just bring their stuff, and everything that they make in sales, they keep,” she said. “I don’t charge them anything to be here. We are both very committed to not just preaching but practicing.”
Amid the busy fall events season, the shop in November plans to host Zine Con — the Midwest’s DIY publishing festival — and the newest Artist Alley event “melomall” in December, in collaboration with a Bubble Wrapp collector and popular local artist, slowcurse.
“Watching the shop evolve into a creative gathering place has been one of the most rewarding parts of this journey,” Kitty said.
This story was first published by Startland News, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective. It was produced in partnership with KCSourceLink at the UMKC Innovation Center. KCUR is licensed to the University of Missouri Board of Curators and is an editorially independent community service of the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
