Dreams Inc.

Who owns Dreams Inc.?
Dreams Inc. is a privately held Japanese company founded and led by Toru Soeya, who serves as President and CEO. It is not owned by any larger corporation and remains founder-controlled.

Is Dreams Inc. publicly traded?
No. Dreams Inc. is a private company registered in Tokyo. Its shares do not trade on any stock exchange.

When was Dreams Inc. founded?
Toru Soeya founded Dreams Inc. on May 30, 1996, in Tokyo, Japan, after four years at Bandai.

Who founded Dreams Inc.?
Toru Soeya, born in 1959, founded the company after careers in publishing, toy sales, and Bandai. He is also the creator of Sonny Angel, whose name derives from his own nickname, Sonny.

What does Dreams Inc. make?
The company designs and wholesales collectible figures and lifestyle goods, led by the Sonny Angel and Smiski blind box lines, plus Cable Bite cable protectors, Funbaruzu plush, and other original products sold in more than 30 countries.

What is Dreams Inc.'s market position?
It is a small but influential player in the global designer toy and blind box market, competing with much larger companies like Pop Mart. Its Sonny Angel line pioneered the blind box collectible format years before the current global boom.

Toru Soeya founded Dreams Inc. in Tokyo on May 30, 1996. Born in 1959, Soeya had worked in publishing and toy sales before joining Bandai in 1992. Four years later he left to start his own company, but with a different intent than a conventional toy manufacturer: his goal was to make products that ease mental fatigue rather than products that compete for attention.

The company's first product set the tone. The Rubber Duck Light, a soft glowing bath duck released in 1996, sold 500,000 units in Japan in its first year and later entered the design collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It remains one of Soeya's favorite products and proof of concept for his design philosophy.

The defining product arrived in 2004. On May 15 of that year, Dreams released Sonny Angel, initially as an 18-centimeter doll inspired by the classic Kewpie character. Designed to comfort working women in their twenties during a period of economic uncertainty in Japan, the figure was conceived as a healing doll rather than a child's toy. When the company later shrank Sonny Angel into a 7-centimeter mini figure sold in blind box packaging, the format clicked: each series contained 12 designs plus rare secret figures, and collecting took off, first in Japan and then across Asia, Europe, and North America.

Smiski launched in 2015, extending the same emotional logic in a different direction: small glow-in-the-dark creatures posed in everyday situations, designed to be more gender-neutral than Sonny Angel. Through the late 2010s and 2020s, both lines grew into global collector phenomena, amplified by TikTok and Instagram, with more than 1,300 Sonny Angel variants produced to date and products sold in 33 countries.

The mid-2020s brought milestones: Sonny Angel's 20th anniversary in 2024, Smiski's 10th anniversary in 2025, and the opening of SONIANDSMI, the company's first joint flagship store in Shibuya, Tokyo. Revenue for the fiscal year ended February 2025 reached approximately 2.5 billion yen, reflecting sustained international demand for blind box collectibles.

As a small private manufacturer, Dreams Inc. does not publish a formal sustainability report. Its public posture emphasizes product safety and quality control, noting that its products are designed and overseen in Japan and manufactured by long-term partner factories. The company describes maintaining direct relationships with its contract manufacturers rather than sourcing through intermediaries.