Mexican who researched this for a thesis. Basically the grey market sees what is trending with kids and they rush to get someone to sculpt figures for them, then they usually get some chinks to make the molds and start printing and they get the cheapest paint possible the chinks offer (hence why the sculpts are usually high quality and the paint is horrible). They do this because it's cheaper.
When every part is done in Mexico the figures in general are way better quality with better paint jobs and it doesn't really affect the price, it's just the grey market jews wanting more money by having it made by china.
After they have the product, they distribute it through the informal market which is not that regulated by the Mexican government, especially not when it's toys and small upcoming brands (like FNAF was etc) they try to avoid bigger IPs but sometimes they get away with it (DBZ/Simpsons shit), but those are riskier bets, the less copyright influence the brand has the more likely they can distribute to more places without an issue.
Since they don't deal with licensing or other bureaucratic crap the can churn these out rather quickly & capitalize on whatever fad is happening at the moment. They've also realized there's a foreign market now and are actively scalping those foreign markets while keeping costs lows for their mexibros who are still their main market and know they can't pay as much. Either way they still make tons of profit.
This informal industry of toys has been growing a lot in the 10 years so some have actually formed legit companies and are now selling Mexican figures in real stores with their own original IP, sadly the ones that have ventured to be legit have not done as well in retail.
>>10766624>the mexican equivalent of walmart btw it's not even a flea market type of deal the mexican equivalent of walmart is fucking walmar
if you found it on mercadolibre then of course, it's the mexican ebay, you can find bootleg stuff there all the time.
