With big eyes, an oversized head and a permanent cow lick, a little orange toy called the Tao Doll is the unlikely king of the Taobao campus in the Chinese city of Hangzhou.

There, the mascot of Alibaba Group’s Taobao online shopping websites, Tao Dolls are everywhere. The colorful plastic miniatures sit on employees’ desks, while life-sized versions, including a gold one created as homage to the Oscar awards, loom over the 41-acre headquarters site like sentient, slightly creepy, guardians. There is a Tao Doll store in the reception area of one of the buildings and plans are underway to open a Tao doll museum on the campus.

Born three years ago as the marketing brainchild of Ma Longwei, one of Alibaba Group’s 18 founders, the pint-sized Tao Doll is an odd mix of savvy marketing and popular collectible—as if a New York Yankees bobblehead married Google’s green Android mascot and had a baby.

The doll has spawned legions of online fans, a clamor for limited editions and collaborations with some of the world’s biggest brands, including Nokia, Mercedes Benz, Intel and the National Basketball Association. With hundreds of versions since its launch in 2010, the Tao Doll is has been molded into the visages of NBA superstars, morphed into martial arts heros and transformed into works of art by famous and budding Chinese artists.

Ricky Qi, 31, is the leader of a small design team of self-professed geeks, whose mission it is to propagate the philosophy of the Tao Doll and create cool incarnations for marketing and business development.

“Taobao has over eight million sellers,” said Qi. “We hope the Tao Doll can provide our sellers with a communicative channel to their buyers and help differentiate the experience of selling on Taobao from other e-commerce platforms.”

Qi said his team has overseen about 300 co-branding efforts with Taobao Marketplace and Tmall.com sellers each year. These projects occur in conjunction with a promotion on Tmall.com or Juhuasuan, Alibaba’s group-buying platform, or when a brand like Nokia is launching a new smartphone. Together with Qi’s team, the brand owners will design a Tao Doll to give away to buyers who participate in the promotion.

“Taobao users really love receiving the doll,” Qi said. “It helps the branding of the Taobao platforms and is very meaningful to the seller.”

The mash-up with high-profile brands is a far cry the humble beginnings of the Tao Doll, which wasn’t even the original mascot for Taobao companies. That honor fell on the Tao Ant. When Jack Ma founded Taobao in 2003, he championed the work ethic of ant colonies and created an insectoid mascot that would symbolize the company’s team-oriented work culture.

“For those of us who have worked at Alibaba for a long time, we have a deep bond with the Tao Ant,” said Qi. “It has a very special meaning for us because it represents how ants can move an elephant. Back then eBay was like an elephant and we, as ants, had to overcome them.”

In the early 2000s, eBay was a first mover in China’s nascent e-commerce industry. However, high seller fees and the lack of localization created an opening for Taobao to eventually dominate the market. eBay pulled out of the China consumer-to-consumer business in 2006.

Watch an Alizila News video on Tao Dolls:

Despite the best efforts of the team to make the weird-looking Tao Ant mascot widespread and loved, it was set aside in 2010 when the Taobao platforms reached behemoth status and needed something cute and hip to relate to its young user base.

Enter the Tao Doll. “Those people born in the 90s and in the 2000s will soon become our core audience and our consumers,” Qi said. “There’s a Chinese saying, that the new will always push away the old, so we need to keep changing in order not to become irrelevant. We have to keep introducing new, youthful and interactive elements to our designs in order to relate to our youthful users.”

When Steve Madden, a famous American shoe brand, launched its Taobao Mall store earlier this year, the brand worked with Qi’s team to create an afro-sporting Tao Doll, complete with pink heart-shaped glasses to embody the brand’s playfulness. The doll was given away to customers who bought shoes from Steve Madden’s Tmall.com store.

Similarly, when Nokia launched its new line of Lumia phones in April this year, Qi’s team went to work designing colorful Tao Dolls printed with the design of a Lumia-style tiled homescreen. Qi said one of the purposes of the dolls was to allow brands to connect emotionally with customers. This wasn’t lost on Nokia marketers, who emblazoned the Chinese characters for “Dear, I love you” on the Lumia Tao Doll where its left eyeball should be.

This trend of co-branding mascots with brands is seen elsewhere in the technology world. In September, to commemorate the launch of its latest Android operating system update, code-named KitKat, Google teamed up with Nestle to roll out Nestle’s chocolate wafer bars with the image of the Android mascot on them.

The Tao Doll is also on hand to remedy public relations snafus. When an attempt to sell German hairy crabs through Juhuasuan fell through recently, Qi’s team worked through the night to design a special “hairy crab” Tao Doll that would be part of an apology package sent to thousands Chinese customers who were due refunds.

The design team, whose average age hovers in the mid-twenties, has a sense of humor when it comes to churning out their tiny works of art. Last year, when Beijing pollution levels consistently hit hazardous levels, the team did a “heal the world” Tao Doll wearing what looks like an orange HazMat suit.

Qi and his team take slightly more than a month to sketch up a design, sometimes holding public design competitions. The designs are then given to a toy factory in Guangdong for manufacturing. The final product is sold on Taobao or passed to brand partners to give away as gifts.

“The Tao Doll is a very hot commodity now,” Qi said. “This one had only 1,000 made and retailed for slightly more than 900 RMB,” he said, pointing to a 30cm “ape” Tao Doll created by international figurine designer Winson Ma.

“We had some specially numbered and auctioned them off. The final sale price for one of them came to RMB 15,000. Our fans came to bid on them. They really love them.”