In the nearly two decades of running Amiko Kawaii Goods in Japantown, Stephanie Wong had never seen sales quite like it.
Hordes of people — largely young women in their late teens and early twenties — started snapping up Sonny Angel toys from the Japantown toy and collectible shop.
For the uninitiated, Sonny Angels are precious, plasticine baby figurines, a Precious Moments collectible for the terminally online Gen Z set. Its manufacturer, the Japanese brand Dreams, describes him as a “little angel boy who likes wearing all sorts of headgear.”
“We just can’t keep them on the shelf,” Wong, who co-owns and manages the store, said with a chuckle. “It was really weird going from not being able to sell any to selling out.
Amiko has sold these toys on and off since it opened in 2005, Wong said. But it was never a major mover, largely overshadowed by the cheerful Sanrio-branded Hello Kitty and Keroppi plushies and goth-cute Tokidoki swag that have historically sold well at the shop.
“People were just like, ‘Oh, what are these? Naked babies?’” Wong recalled.
Now, Amiko regularly sells out of its Sonny stock in a couple weeks, if not a few days. Customers have flocked in from as far out as Sacramento to get their hands on these elusive baby dolls, Wong added.
Amiko isn’t alone. In the past year, stores across San Francisco have been struck by the cult-like popularity of Sonny Angels. An entire underground economy of hobbyist collectors and traders in San Francisco and the broader Bay Area has emerged with its rise.
The craze seems set to get even bigger this year as they become an object of fascination among Gen Z’s It celebrities—that is, if the bubble doesn’t burst.
Last February, after repeated Sonny Angel sightings on TikTok, Tracy Nguyen took the 5 Muni bus from her then-apartment by Civic Center to Kinokuniya, the longtime Japantown bookstore. There, she snagged one of her first Sonny Angels (and still her favorite): a sweet, coffee cup-holding cherub with cat ears and angel wings.
Nguyen, 23, was immediately smitten. “I was like, ‘that is, literally, so cute,” she said. And rightly so: The smiling cherubs are adorable, whimsical, and a bit off-kilter, usually wearing nothing but an animal- or fruit-shaped cap and a mischievous smirk. These “cute and angelic” dolls, the Sonny Angels website assures, “will make you smile.”
Each angel boy is individually packaged in a mystery box. Classic sets feature dolls with assorted fruits, vegetables, baked goods, and animals on their heads — which change with every new series. Holiday-themed lines and other limited-release drops draw even more zeal. (A cherry blossom-themed Sonny Angel is coming, timed with the annual Japantown festival in April, Wong hinted.) Every purchase of a new box opens up the possibility that you could unbox your new favorite babe.
“The next day, I went to go buy more,” Nguyen said. But Kinokuniya had run out entirely, as if everyone had the same idea — or was exposed to the same videos online. Not for nothing, around 74,000 posts on TikTok have the #sonnyangel hashtag, with a steady stream of people unboxing and showing off their collections.
“It was like, I could feel it starting,” she said. “There was a switch that flipped.”
There were stretches of 2023 where every other call made to Kinokuniya was to ask about Sonny Angels, said Satoshi Ida, the deputy store manager at the longtime Japanese bookstore.
“We have other things so we’re kind of overwhelmed that this particular item, Sonny Angels, are becoming so popular,” Ida said, with a tinge of weariness in his voice. “We’re not annoyed, but we have other products.”
The chaos, he explained, was exacerbated by sporadic shipments from their supplier. Wong, at Amiko, described a similar challenge of maintaining steady stock. A spokesperson for Woot Bear on Haight Street, another popular Sonny vendor, declined to speak with Gazetteer about its sales, but assured in an email that “that the consensus is the same with Kinokuniya and Amiko.”
“Everybody will just come around the same time … and they just all come in, get their Sonny Angel fix and then it's all gone and they’ll wait for the next wave,” Wong said.
As the Sonny Angels boom continues, an ad-hoc community of enthusiasts has sprouted. People start with Sonny Angels, in part, because of their fascination with the product, but they stick around for the greater network of young people also obsessed with these cherubs.
Lauren McCarty, 26, has collected Sonny Angels since 2015 — she has nearly a couple hundred at this point — and hosts meetups across the Bay Area and Northern California. She hosted a Sonny Angel meet-up with Nguyen at Buena Vista Park last June, which she drew in around 80 enthusiasts to trade, share, and bask in their shared adoration of Sonny Angels, she says.
These meet-ups, said 24-year-old Daly City collector Janessa Cayabyab, tend to follow a familiar, friendly pattern. “You get to walk around, look at everyone's trades,” she said. “People have stuff for sale, whether it's stickers, stuff that they crochet.” The meets tend to end with a group of people flocking to the nearest supplier to grab a few more Sonny Angels.
Many of the attendees at these meet-ups are young, recently-graduated women looking for something to do. McCarty hosts meet-ups around Northern California once a month or so, while a local Discord chat founded by Nguyen — where a lot of these meet-ups are coordinated — boasts upwards of 1,200 members.
“I just feel like it's so hard nowadays when you're working or in post-grad it's really hard to make friends,” admitted Nguyen, who has since moved to San Jose. “It’s really rare to find so many people willing to host events and for people to actually come and just be engaged — literally going up to each other and talking, even if it's just a trade.”
Angel Marie Letele developed an obsession with Sonny Angels, she says, just two weeks after graduating from the University of the Pacific last year. And within less than a year, she’s subsumed herself in the Sonny Angels lifestyle, driving as far up as Sacramento for meet-ups and serving as a moderator on the Bay Area Discord server. The 22-year-old's collection, which is gathered beside her bed in her South San Francisco home, is about 150 strong.
“It's kind of my work-life balance,” Letele, who’s starting a doctorate program in audiology in the fall, says. “If I didn't, I would literally go nuts. I needed to find something to balance out post-grad life.”
For its most fervent collectors, whether livestreaming their hauls on Instagram or trading Sonny Angels at a meet, the company’s mantra rings true: “He is always by your side to make you smile.”
As it stands now, Sonny Angels sit at the periphery of the mainstream.
More celebrities, like Bella Hadid and Hanni of K-pop girl group NewJeans, have come out as avowed collectors. Gen Z fashion idols — like model Jake Fleming, longtime beauty guru Bretman Rock, and YouTuber-turned-podcaster Enya Umanzor — have also taken to collecting.
Some fans on Reddit are increasingly disenchanted with the hype machine of it all, taking some retailers to task for inflating the cost of the toys. Online sellers looking to make a quick buck will re-sell rare or in-demand Sonny Angels with gargantuan mark-ups. The limited-edition figurine that Nguyen purchased last February for around $10, for instance, now goes for nearly $120 on eBay. Knockoffs abound. Market forces prevail.
There are some indicators that the hype bubble could burst, like Beanie Babies before them. Kinokuniya has lifted its limit on how many Sonny Angels a customer can cop at a time due to cooled-off demand at the store, Ida said. Letele said that she’s observed “a little bit of a downward trend” herself in terms of the online hype machine.
The bigger, existential challenge, it seems, is one that befalls any grassroots phenomenon that inches toward the mainstream: An anxiety that the once tight-knit network of collectors and friends could lose its scrappy charm and go corporate.
“I know people who have gotten into Sonnys because of the money aspect, and it’s kind of sad,” Letele said. “They have been a little toxic in the community. But the more mainstream something gets, that’s something that’s gonna happen.”
That’s perhaps why McCarty is adamant that her meetups remain community-focused—even as they get more formalized with event flyers and RSVP lists. “I want the meetups to be as casual as possible and not have it feel too business-oriented,” she said.
But even with these growing pains, there’s still not much interest in gatekeeping who can and can’t be a part of the community — in geography and even age.
Cayabyab, a self-professed hater of “gatekeeper culture,” neatly sums up the ethos of the Bay Area scene: “If I find joy in it, why wouldn't I want to share it?”
Collectors drive in from the Central Valley and as far north as Redding who want to be a part of the broader Bay Area scene, and are embraced with open arms. At the meetups, younger kids will come with their parents.
One young collector came with her grandmother — also a Sonny Angel collector in her own right — to a meet-up in Sacramento, Letele recalled. The child had been eyeing a Sonny that Letele had up for trade; at the end of the meet, Letele just gave it to her, no exchange necessary.
“That's why I attend these meets,” she explained. “I don't want to go and put a price point on it.”
