One Photo Sold 4,000 Products in 24 Hours
TWICE member Tzuyu wore a $39.95 bra at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. Within 24 hours, it sold out
TWICE member Tzuyu wore a $39.95 bra at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. Within 24 hours, it sold out across the United States, China, and Japan. Over 1,000 units gone in the first day. Then it restocked and sold 4,000 more in another 24 hours before selling out again. The internet dubbed it “the Tzuyu bra.” Victoria’s Secret hadn’t paid her a cent.
This is celebrity marketing at its most powerful and most elusive. Tzuyu wasn’t an ambassador. She hadn’t signed an endorsement deal. She simply wore Victoria’s Secret products during her group’s performance at the fashion show. One photo of her on that runway generated more sales velocity than most paid celebrity campaigns achieve with millions in budget.
The question every marketer wants answered is how to replicate organic celebrity marketing when you can’t control whether it happens at all.
When Celebrity Marketing Becomes a Movement
The Wear Everywhere Push-Up Bra in Heather Burgundy existed before Tzuyu wore it. Victoria’s Secret sold it for years at the same $39.95 price point. It was a standard product in their lineup, popular enough to remain in stock but not remarkable enough to generate buzz. Then TWICE performed at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in October wearing coordinated black and pink lingerie sets.
Within hours of the show airing on Prime Video, online searches for “Tzuyu bra” and “Victoria’s Secret Tzuyu look” began trending across social media platforms. Fans flooded Victoria’s Secret’s website looking for the exact bra. The US site showed over 1,000 units purchased in the first 24 hours. International sites in China and Japan sold out completely. TikTok creator SEBIN posted a video documenting their purchase that received 5.6 million views and over 1.1 million likes within 24 hours. When Victoria’s Secret restocked, demand surged again. Over 4,000 additional units sold in another 24-hour period before inventory depleted a second time.
The Pattern Brands Can’t Manufacture
This phenomenon isn’t unique to Tzuyu. It represents a fundamental shift in how celebrity marketing actually works in 2025. The most powerful endorsements aren’t paid anymore. They’re the moments when celebrities appear to choose products organically, and their audiences rush to follow.
Consider what happened when Bella Hadid started wearing Adidas Sambas around New York City in 2022. The sneakers, originally designed in 1949 for indoor football, had been languishing as an uncool dad shoe through the 2000s. Then Hadid was photographed wearing them during Milan Fashion Week. She paired them with plaid pencil skirts, oversized football jerseys, and tailored trousers. Within months, they became 2022’s “it shoe” and sold out worldwide. The trend carried so strongly into 2024 that Adidas struggled to keep them in stock. When the brand finally restocked, major retailers reported they were gone within hours. Fashion publications declared them harder to find than luxury sneakers selling for triple the price.
The remarkable part? Hadid wasn’t being paid to wear them. She simply liked the shoes. That authenticity created something money couldn’t buy. When Adidas eventually made her an official ambassador for their SL72 relaunch in 2024, the relationship had already proven its value through organic celebrity marketing that generated millions in free publicity.
Or look at Hailey Bieber’s Rhode skincare brand. Before the official June 2022 launch, Bieber spent over a year sharing her skincare routines on TikTok and Instagram. Her first video about her “glazed donut skin” in April 2021 gathered over 9 million views. She wasn’t selling anything yet. She was just showing what she used. When Rhode finally launched, all Peptide Lip Treatment shades sold out within three days, with 440,000 people joining the waitlist. The brand’s Barrier Butter product became so sought-after that it repeatedly sold out, with fans posting videos showing themselves stockpiling it during rare restocks. In May 2025, e.l.f. Beauty acquired Rhode for $1 billion, just three years after launch.
Why Authenticity Outperforms Everything
The difference between these moments and traditional celebrity marketing lies entirely in perceived authenticity. When audiences see Tzuyu wearing a bra during her performance, they don’t wonder if she was compensated. They assume stylists chose it because it looked good. The absence of commercial transaction removes the layer of scepticism that consumers have learned to apply to all advertising.
Modern audiences have become sophisticated at detecting commercial intent. They know when a celebrity is being paid to hold a product. They recognise the staged nature of sponsored content with its careful lighting, perfect angles, and mandated captions. But when a celebrity appears to choose something for a performance, a personal appearance, or their daily life, that choice carries weight.
This explains why user-generated content around organic celebrity marketing moments becomes exponentially more valuable than the initial visibility. Brands don’t just get the celebrity wearing something. They get thousands of pieces of content from fans recreating looks, reviewing products, and discussing purchases. Each unboxing video, try-on post, and discussion thread extends the marketing reach without additional investment from the brand.
TWICE’s fanbase demonstrated this perfectly. They didn’t just buy the Tzuyu bra. They created content about it, generating millions of additional impressions Victoria’s Secret didn’t pay for. The same pattern repeated with Hadid’s Sambas and Bieber’s Rhode products. Dedicated fan communities turn organic celebrity marketing moments into movements.
The Control Problem
The fundamental challenge with organic celebrity marketing is that brands can’t manufacture it. Victoria’s Secret chose to feature TWICE at their fashion show. They styled the members in specific products. But they couldn’t predict that Tzuyu’s particular outfit would capture attention so dramatically or that fans would rush to purchase that exact bra in those exact colourways.
Strategic product placement attempts to increase the odds. Brands send products to celebrities hoping they’ll wear them. They provide styling options for events and performances. They create relationships that might lead to unpaid visibility. But none of these tactics guarantee results. Even when brands succeed in getting celebrities to wear their products, they can’t control whether audiences will care enough to drive demand.
Bella Hadid wore countless brands during fashion weeks before Sambas went viral. Hailey Bieber promoted other beauty products in her early content that never generated the same fervour as Rhode. The difference between a product appearing in celebrity content and that product becoming a viral sensation often comes down to factors brands can’t control: timing, cultural moment, how the celebrity styled it, what else was happening in popular culture that week.
Even when organic celebrity marketing succeeds, brands face a delicate balance. They must capitalise on momentum without making it feel commercial. Victoria’s Secret restocked the Tzuyu bra multiple times and acknowledged the phenomenon through a TikTok post saying “That viral Bra you saw Tzuyu wearing on the runway is officially back in stock. Get it before it’s going once, going TWICE, gone.” The wordplay on the group’s name showed they recognised the cultural moment. But they were responding to it, not creating it. Leaning too heavily into the commercial opportunity risks destroying the authenticity that made it work.
What This Means for Brands
From a planning perspective, organic celebrity marketing is impossible to budget for. Traditional campaigns offer predictable costs and measurable deliverables. Organic moments offer superior results but can’t be mandated. Finance teams struggle to allocate resources towards strategies that might not produce any outcome at all.
Yet when organic celebrity marketing does happen, the return on investment makes every planned campaign look inefficient. The Tzuyu phenomenon cost Victoria’s Secret nothing beyond what they were already spending to produce their fashion show. No celebrity fee, no content production budget, no media placement costs. Thousands of units sold, millions of social media impressions, sustained demand across multiple restocks.
The rise of organic celebrity marketing reflects a broader shift in how consumers respond to promotional content. Younger audiences particularly have developed finely tuned detection systems for paid promotion. They scroll past obvious advertisements. They distrust celebrity endorsements that feel transactional. But they remain highly influenced by what celebrities actually wear, use, and choose when those choices appear genuine.
This creates a paradox for brands. The most effective form of celebrity marketing is the form they can’t buy directly. They can create conditions that might lead to organic moments through strategic partnerships, product seeding, and relationship building. But they can’t force celebrities to make their products go viral through authentic usage.
The brands winning at organic celebrity marketing understand this limitation. They focus on creating products worth talking about, building relationships with celebrities and their teams, and being prepared to respond quickly when organic moments do occur. They accept that most attempts won’t work, but when they do, the results justify every failed effort.
Victoria’s Secret’s response to the Tzuyu moment exemplifies this approach. They recognised what was happening in real time, restocked quickly to meet demand, acknowledged the phenomenon on social media, and let the fan-driven momentum continue without trying to control it. They capitalised on the moment without killing it.
The future of celebrity marketing isn’t about paying more celebrities to post more content. It’s about creating the conditions where organic moments can happen, being ready to respond when they do, and understanding that authenticity can’t be purchased directly. In a world where audiences distrust paid promotion, the most valuable endorsements are the ones celebrities give without being asked.
Sources
- Harper’s Bazaar
- Footwear News
- Women’s Wear Daily
- Fast Company
- Northeastern University News
- Cosmetics Business
