As with a nascent Lego or Disney, he says, Funko’s real value is in its intellectual property—for instance the simplified features and big pupil-less eyes of most Pop! figures—which can be adapted to movies, TV shows, games, clothing, accessories, housewares, etc., ad infinitum. According to Su, Funko “is a content play.”Funko was born in a garage in Snohomish, Washington, in 1998.
One of his early customers was Brian Mariotti, a former Washington restaurant and nightclub manager who as a high school kid had amassed a collection of Pez dispensers large enough to partially fund the down payment on his first house. By the early 2000s, the relentlessly energetic and positive Mariotti was trying to reinvent himself as an online marketer when he and his wife visited Universal Studios and a Flintstones bobblehead caught his eye.
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