Mei Jian's New Year ads joked a daughter wasn't worthy — then came down

Mei Jian is the plum-wine brand that Jiangxiaobai spent four years building into a billion-yuan business, sold largely to young women. For the 2025 New Year it put promotional posters in supermarkets with copy written as jokes between relatives — including a line from a mother to her son-in-law saying her daughter 'isn't really worthy of you', and one wishing a female friend that her money in the new year would be 'as spendable as a man's'.

The lines landed exactly as badly as they read. Shoppers photographed the posters, the phrases climbed China's trending lists, and the criticism settled on a simple point: a brand whose buyers are mostly young women had put self-deprecating, gendered jokes into their own supermarkets. By 13 January 2025 Mei Jian had issued an official apology, attributing the copy to loopholes in internal review and a serious deviation in expression.

The brand said it would remove all of the controversial New Year materials; by the next day the advertisements had disappeared from shelves, though the bottles themselves remained. The cost was not a fine but a positioning wound: four years of brand-building aimed at women, answered in one promotional cycle by copy that talked about them as the punchline.

The posters went viral for the wrong lines, forcing a nationwide pull and apology within two days; the cost was a positioning wound, not a fine.

The copy was written for a relative's dinner table and placed in a supermarket — humour that survives a family gathering does not survive being printed at scale.

A brand sold mainly to women carrying jokes at women's expense is not an edge case the review process can miss; it is the one case it exists to catch.

'Internal review loopholes' is the apology's standard diagnosis; the real failure is a room in which nobody asked who the customer was before approving the joke.

Read every customer-facing line aloud as your most important customer would hear it — if the joke needs the audience to be the butt of it, the audience will supply a different ending.