Chayan Yuese's '捡篓子' mug, slang for picking up women, backfired into two apologies

In February 2021, Chayan Yuese (茶颜悦色), the Changsha milk-tea brand famous for its literary packaging, released a line of Changsha-dialect themed '贵胄杯' mugs. One mug carried the dialect phrase '捡篓子' (jian lou zi), a Changsha slang expression whose second, common reading is 'picking up a lucky catch' — in context, a man getting lucky with a woman. Users read the copy as insulting women, and the brand's local-flavor pride quickly became a national controversy.

On the evening of 19 February the brand apologized on Weibo for the first time: it said it had thought of itself as a '长沙老口子' (veteran of Changsha) and tried to make '捡篓子' special, but ended up coining a highly improper sentence that even Changsha locals rejected — and it had been put into product design and production without careful thought. Early the next morning it apologized a second time, admitting that the brand had long 'mistakenly treated being cheeky and skating on two-gender innuendo as creative inspiration' (把抖机灵、打两性关系擦边球当作创意灵感).

State media joined the criticism: a People's Daily Online commentary said 'brand marketing must also grasp the boundaries of humor' and that marketing creativity must not cross the bottom line — it must respect laws and public morals. Marketing observers summed it up as 'didn't pick up a lucky catch, picked up a hornet's nest' (没捡篓子反而捅篓子). No regulator fine was reported, but the episode became a textbook case of a local dialect joke that only the in-group could laugh at.