Betel nut brand faked a Bentley collab — Bentley: no authorization, no association

Hecheng Tianxia is a betel nut brand under Kouweiwang Group, whose 2024 production value was 81亿元 across nine bases in Hunan and Hainan. Betel nut is a Group 1 carcinogen, and China stopped issuing food production licences for it in 2020.

In May 2025 the brand staged a launch under Canton Tower themed 'Moment of Success, Walking with Kings': actors dressed as an ancient Chinese emperor and a British queen stood beside a 'Hecheng Tianxia × Bentley co-branded gift box' of betel nuts. Its own WeChat post called the box 'the top gifting choice of Bentley owners this year'.

On 26 June 2025 Bentley China published a statement: the products and activities had no connection with Bentley or its authorized dealers, received no authorization of any form, and the logo use was not permitted. Bentley reserved the right to take legal measures.

The cost was the pitch itself: a fake luxury association, dismantled in one public sentence, which confirmed the brand as a carcinogen product reaching for a luxury gloss it could not buy.

The denial dismantled the fake luxury image: a borrowed logo lives on silence, and one public sentence exposed the 'success gifting' pitch as fiction.

The luxury image was borrowed, not built — a fake co-brand lives on the other brand's silence, and the moment Bentley spoke, the whole 'success gifting' pitch was exposed as fiction.

A Group 1 carcinogen product selling itself as a high-end gift was a contradiction no collab could survive; the denial gave the public permission to name what the launch really was.

There was no fallback: no licensed partnership, no contract, no response ready — the brand had only the denial to answer, and its own KOL copy became the evidence against it.

Borrowing a luxury logo is a liability, not a shortcut: a fake collaboration survives only until the real brand denies it. For a carcinogen, the luxury gift fiction was one denial from collapse.

Bentley's statement was carried by major outlets within a day, and the brand never publicly answered it. The episode hardened the public association between Hecheng Tianxia and a carcinogen chasing borrowed luxury, and handed the growing anti-betel-nut movement a fresh, mocking example. For Kouweiwang Group — 81亿元 in 2024 production value — the denial tore the 'high-end gifting' fiction off the co-branded gift box, and the industry's unresolved status problem remained: betel nut has had no food production licence since 2020, yet kept selling in stores next to food.