If you've been watching K-pop character merch evolve over the last few years, you know the rhythm by now. BBNEXDO built a town. SKZOO built a zoo. SHOOKY and friends have a whole carnival. Now PPULBATU, the five-strong character IP belonging to TOMORROW X TOGETHER, has gone and planted an orchard.

The new theme is called Hey! APPUL, and from 26 May through 7 June 2026, it's living in physical form at a Seongsu pop-up co-hosted with 29CM's 29 SWEET HOUSE. Apple trees at the door, dessert collaborators inside, sculptural figures of all five characters scattered through what feels like a storybook woodland market. It's the kind of build you stand in for ten minutes before you've taken a single photograph, just adjusting to the volume of detail.

What we want to talk about today isn't the photo zone (the HYBE MERCH X account has those covered better than any words could). It's the nine-item merch line that opened at the same time. For MOA outside Seoul, this is the era. So we've taken the whole drop apart and put it back together as a field guide — starting with who these five characters actually are.

Meet the PPULBATU Five

Five characters, five members — and a co-design process that's the real story.

PPULBATU launched on 1 August 2024 as TOMORROW X TOGETHER's first official character IP. The name fuses ppul (horn, the symbol that's run through TXT's lore since "Crown") with the band's name itself — and it's also read as PLUS X TOGETHER, meaning the joy multiplied by being together. Five characters, one for each member, each carrying that member's actual personality, habits, and pet obsessions into cartoon form. Here's the cast:

Here's the part most fans miss: these weren't characters designed by an agency and handed to the members at a reveal event. PPULBATU came together through a series of creative workshops with BIGHIT MUSIC's BX2 department. As Weverse Magazine's BEHIND SHORTS feature laid out in detail, designer Kim Yeeun from BX2 and Lee Irene from the BX Lab built the project around the members' own rough sketches, personality notes, and naming choices. CHOI YONG MEONG's love of justice. HHM NYA RING's bangs-over-eyes habit. DA-GO-NYANG's squirrel-cat name pun. None of those came from a creative brief — they came from the members themselves, in a room with sketchbooks.

Why Hey! APPUL Is the Era That Matters

PPULBATU's first proper world — and the moment it stops being merch and starts being a brand.

Here's what makes Hey! APPUL different from a normal merch refresh. The original 2024 launch gave the characters their faces, names, and personalities — but they lived in white-background space, posed for product photography. Hey! APPUL gives them a setting. An apple orchard. A forest market. A dessert-coded daily life with menus they'd actually order from. The characters now inhabit a place, which is a leap in IP development that most K-pop character drops never get to make. The horn motif that started PPULBATU's name lineage runs straight through this too — "Crown" was about horns growing out of the head as a coming-of-age symbol; the apple-orchard era softens that into pastoral, harvest, abundance. It's an aesthetic move that fits the band's evolving storytelling, not a random themed re-skin.

The 29 SWEET HOUSE x 29CM collaboration is the part Korean media has been talking about, and it's worth understanding why. 29CM doesn't normally do K-pop merch — they're a curated lifestyle commerce platform whose audience is design-conscious adults shopping for objects, not photocards. 29 SWEET HOUSE is their F&B-led concept retail format, the one usually reserved for indie patisseries and emerging cookware labels. Putting PPULBATU inside that format is a positioning move: it tells the market that the IP is being addressed to a wider, older, more lifestyle-shaped buyer than the standard fandom merch lane. Cottagecore, dessert culture, design-first gifting. It's a signal about who HYBE thinks the next ten years of PPULBATU collector looks like.

And the merch reflects this thinking object by object. The Cup at £50 wouldn't make sense as a quick character drop — it's a piece you put on a desk shelf for years. The Stress Ball wouldn't appear in a one-off pop-up; it's a daily-use object engineered for genuine repeat handling. The Mini Keyring lives on the bag, the Carabiner on the belt loop, the String Pouch in your everyday carry. None of these are framed as souvenirs of an event. They're framed as parts of a life you'd build around the characters. That's the shift. Hey! APPUL is the moment PPULBATU stops being a TXT character set and starts being a brand with its own world.

Hey! APPUL Market, Seongsu

The pop-up runs 26 May – 7 June 2026 at 7 Yeonmujang 11-gil, Seongdong-gu, Seoul — Seongsu's beloved dessert-and-design corridor, where every other building is currently a pastry pop-up or a flagship coffee bar. The neighbourhood fit is on purpose. Hey! APPUL Market shares its concept and dessert pairings with 29 SWEET HOUSE, the 29CM lifestyle brand that specialises in F&B-led retail experiences. So the apple isn't just a graphic motif — it's an actual menu, with apple-themed desserts plated by guest brands on-site.

What you encounter on entry: a large apple-tree photo zone, sculptural set-pieces of each PPULBATU character in their Hey! APPUL form, illustrated walls that move with you through the space, and the merch counter at the back. The pop-up doubles as a 29CM Limited Order pickup point — meaning visitors in Korea can buy the MD on-site, while the rest of the line is being shipped via Weverse Shop to fans abroad.

For everyone outside Seoul (which is most of MOA): SOOJIB has pre-orders open until 6 August 2026 on the full Hey! APPUL MD line, with worldwide shipping. The field guide below is for you.

The Apple Forest Field Guide

Nine items, grouped by how you'll actually use them.

Carry-it: The Keyrings

The keyring-class items are where any character-IP drop lives or dies, because they're what people clip to bags within minutes of unboxing. Hey! APPUL has three keyring tiers. The Plush Keyring (Apple Ver.) at £36 is the flagship — each character rendered as a soft toy actually sitting inside or holding a stylised apple, sized to dangle without feeling heavy on a backpack.

The Keycap Keyring at £22 takes a different angle: each character's face moulded into a mechanical-keyboard-style keycap, designed for keyboard collectors and minimalist-leaning fans. It's the most quietly clever piece in the line — subtle enough to clip onto a work laptop bag without announcing itself as fandom merch, but instantly recognisable to anyone in the know.

The Mini Keyring at £13 is the entry-level — the same character heads but in a flat, lightweight format, perfect for stacking multiple members on one bag. All three come in five character versions: CHOI YONG MEONG, HWANG CHOON, BAMGEUT, DA-GO-NYANG, HHM NYA RING. The maths if you're a completionist: full set of Plush Keyrings = £180. Full set of Mini Keyrings = £65.

Live-with-it: For the Desk

The Cup at £50 is the line's premium piece — a ceramic mug with each character illustrated as the centrepiece, finished to a quality you'd expect from a standalone lifestyle brand rather than a band's character drop. The kind of thing you put on a desk shelf and have visitors ask about. Five character versions.

The Memo Pad at £10 is one of two single-version items in the line (not per-character) — the all-five group format that K-pop merch lines reserve for the "everyone together" SKU. It's also the cheapest entry point into the world; a good test piece if you're trying out PPULBATU for the first time.

The 3D Sticker at £15 is the other single-version item — a dimensional resin-style decal showing the full Hey! APPUL world in one frame. It's the closest thing in the line to a souvenir of the whole pop-up universe; goes on laptop lids, water bottles, the back of phone cases. If you collect from each era but don't need duplicates per member, the Memo Pad and 3D Sticker are your low-friction entry to the Hey! APPUL world.

Pocket-it: On the Move

The Stress Ball at £28 is the surprise of the line — an apple-sized squeeze toy moulded with the character's face, which photographs as cute and feels in the hand like a genuinely well-made desk fidget. Korean media picked it out as one of the standouts, and we get why: it's not the typical character-IP throwaway gimmick, it's a usable object you'd reach for during a deadline week. Five versions.

The String Pouch at £37 is the practical workhorse — drawstring closure, lightweight, screen-printed with each character in Hey! APPUL style. Sized for a small kit (lip balm, hair clip, photocards, a portable charger), which makes it bag-in-a-bag territory for concert and tour days. Five versions.

The Carabiner at £17 anchors the gear-coded sub-line — built around the character illustration but functional in the actual carabiner sense (clip to a belt loop, a backpack zip, a water bottle handle). For MOA who like their member merch to live on their everyday carry. Five versions.

Pre-order at SOOJIB

Open until 6 August 2026. Worldwide shipping for MOA.

Plush Keyring (Apple Ver.) 5 versions £36.00	Cup 5 versions £50.00	String Pouch 5 versions £37.00
Stress Ball 5 versions £28.00	Keycap Keyring 5 versions £22.00	Carabiner 5 versions £17.00